In Conversation: Abby Rhine of Life’s Question
She grew up in a family that wandered the country only to grow into a band with no home base. But with Life's Question finally on the cusp of arrival, Abby Rhine finds herself more grounded than ever.
Bands that skew closer to the harder side of hardcore aren’t typically hailed for their depth—and that’s a function of the form as much as anything. Historically, nuance is largely sacrificed for the kind of monosyllabic blunt force that makes a band like Hatebreed or Killing Time feel so urgent and relatable. Which is why, upon hearing “When I Meet God” by Life’s Question for the first time, I was kind of struck by its stark existentialism: I can’t remember the last time I ever wanted to hurl my body off a stage after a little harsh philosophical prodding.
Abby Rhine, guitarist and co-vocalist for Life’s Question, has played a significant role in the band’s evolution over the last few years, adding a melodic and sometimes ethereal timbre to an otherwise coarse musical palette. When we first sat down to speak, I came in with a truly start-from-scratch standing in terms of prior personal knowledge that I may have had about her or the band, but that allowed for a more personal exchange to flow—and Abby’s willingness to share and critique her experiences as a home-schooled pastor’s kid, as a guitarist in a culture that doesn’t socialize young girls to become musicians, as a member of a nomadic band, and eventually as a woman in our community was as forthcoming as it gets. “Even though hardcore is still another space that is pretty male-dominated,” she says, “it’s also a space where if you have friendships and real relationships with people, you can really be known.”
I rarely ever use the exact same question twice, but I was kind of shocked by how little information there is about you or Life’s Question in the world. So I decided to bring back a question from my interview with Crystal Pak from Initiate. I started by telling her a story about how when I first got into hardcore in the ‘80s, it was largely because I was looking for a surrogate family. Essentially, I was coming from a history of abuse, and I needed a place to feel some sort of love and belonging. But as I started meeting people in the scene, and as I started understanding the culture a little bit, I realized that almost everyone had a story like mine. So the joke became that whenever I met new people in the scene, I would ask them, “What fucked you up to be here?” And almost everyone had an answer. So I think that’s a good place to start.
ABBY: [Laughs] I mean, I’ve had an interesting life. I grew up really kind of different. I grew up in the midwest with three brothers and a sister. We were all home-schooled, and my dad was a pastor. That’s the context of my childhood. I was actually just trying to explain this to someone yesterday: You might expect that my family was really conservative and religious because my dad is a pastor, but really, I wouldn’t have described my family as religious or conservative. We were more like hippies. And maybe even hippies with a gypsy lifestyle. We moved around a lot and we treated life like it was school. So I don’t really have a normal reference for when other people talk about how they grew up. I always feel like I’m on the outskirts, like I can’t relate. Even when it comes to television shows or music that they liked, I never know what they’re talking about. And it’s weird because I grew up having a lot of community and a lot of social stuff happening in my life. I had friends, I played sports, I did stuff. I just wasn’t in school and my family went to church.
Luckily, I would say my parents were pretty open-minded—even though that’s really not what you would expect from religion in America. We kind of did our own thing. My parents always wanted to support me and my siblings’ expression and freedom to make our own choices and stuff like that. I mean, I was getting tattoos when I was fifteen years old.
Wait. With your parents’ knowledge?
ABBY: Yes! I did a lot [laughs]. Like, I never had a curfew growing up. I think there was just a lot of trust there. Looking back on my life, I actually avoided a lot of trauma that you might expect I would be exposed to. There was just kind of a lack of boundaries throughout my childhood. But I was always interested in playing music and being in a band. My mom played guitar a little bit, like chords and strumming, so I started playing guitar, too—but for me it was about being in a band. It actually took me a while to come around hardcore because I played in rock and emo bands for a long time.
Being homeschooled and existing in a sort of insular family culture, at what point did you feel like there was a bubble that you needed to pop to get out of there?
ABBY: Man, there’s always a bubble. Honestly, there are bubbles that still need to be popped. But luckily, my family always emphasized people and relationships. I don’t want to say we were always open, but like, for one thing, I got to go on tour for the first time when I was seventeen. I actually moved away from home when I was seventeen, too. So if there’s kind of an official bubble that popped, it was when I moved away and when I started going on tour and playing shows. Because when the baseline of your childhood is being taught to form relationships with people, and then you go on the road and you’re exposed to all sorts of different people, the more people that you meet, the more the bubble just keeps on popping, honestly.
That’s a really interesting way to frame your growing up, because I was raised Pentecostal, and in my family, relationships were not something you developed. If anything, my family had a real fear about the outside world. But it seems to me that, even though you were being homeschooled, your parents were still trying to integrate you into the outside world.
ABBY: They were. But I also think my parents were naive at times. They had so much trust in us kids, and I also think they had a lot of trust in the world. I don’t have a lot of trust in the world. Like, me and my sister have talked about how we’ve learned to be a little more street-smart. And we look back and wonder: Why did our parents let us do all these things? Like, that’s insane. I mean, luckily they taught us to be smart, I guess. And luckily we had good discernment, because we made it out fine.
I think there’s also something great about how your mom played guitar, because obviously, we live in a culture where women aren’t necessarily socialized to play music. There were always instruments in my house growing up, but also my parents had three boys. So I’ve actually always wondered: What if they had three girls? Would they have had those instruments in the house?
ABBY: Right!
Where did your inspiration to play really start to develop?
ABBY: Growing up in the church, we would play music—which I never particularly liked, but it taught me how to play with other people. It taught me how to play with a drummer and a bass player. And how to play with other people like it’s not a big deal. And then there was this music festival called Cornerstone. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of it.
Oh, I know it [laughs].
ABBY: OK, yeah. My dad was friends with the guy that put that festival on actually. So I grew up going to that, even though I don’t remember a lot about it. But I do remember the last two years that we went, me and my brother and some friends put together a little band to play a Generator Stage. Cornerstone, for me, was about Generator Stages, because you had these main stages where all the “real bands” were scheduled to play. But then you had all these other stages that you signed up to play. So I was exposed to that idea from a young age: People playing in bands, it was just something you could do. We had an outlet to see that it was possible.
But I think about this all the time, because like you said, girls are not socialized to play instruments for whatever reason. And it’s weird because if any girl just spent a summer taking guitar lessons, she’d be able to pick up a guitar for the rest of her life. So I’m lucky enough to have had parents that treated my older brother and me the same because we had the same interests. We both played guitar. We both skated a little bit. We kind of did everything together.
Can you think of a moment of resistance or discouragement that you felt when you first started putting yourself out there as a guitarist?
ABBY: For sure. I mean, I didn’t really have a plan except for playing in bands, and I think that has a lot to do with going back to my parents’ naivete. They were like, “Yeah, go play music! Don’t even think about a five- or ten-year plan. You don’t have to go to college or get a job. Just play music!” So I was kind of riding that wave. But in general, there’s always discouragement because I’m not playing shows with a lot of women. I’m playing shows with a lot of men. I’ve experienced things like feeling like I was only valued as a musician because someone was interested in me, and trying to navigate that. The first band that I was really in, one of the dudes in the band had a crush on me, and it is honestly the most annoying thing ever that that would be a part of my story. Or people have said things like, “Oh, you’re getting these opportunities because you’re a girl” or “Your band is popular because you’re a girl”—which is funny because I don’t think that’s the case for Life’s Question at all. I think there are a lot of people who don’t even know there’s a girl in Life’s Question, which is hilarious.
Honestly, on this past tour that we just did with Koyo, Anxious, and One Step Closer, I had some old memories that got brought up because we played some areas that I hadn’t played in a long time. Like, we played in Birmingham [Alabama]. The last time I played there, I was with a different band, and while I was playing, a guy ran up on stage and groped me and kissed me. That was a super long time ago—I was eighteen—but no one did anything about it. It was just this quick assault that was happening in public and in a public space. That stuff does happen, unfortunately. Honestly, part of the reason I got into hardcore is because I felt like if I were around my friends in hardcore [when that happened], someone would have done something. People in hardcore tend to be not so afraid to confront people. So even though hardcore is still another space that is pretty male-dominated, it’s also a space where if you have friendships and real relationships with people, you can really be known and you can really be protected.
Earlier when you mentioned that you don’t get to play shows with a lot of other women, it reminded me of this one time that I got a phone call from my friend Autry [Fulbright], who plays in OFF! and used to play in […And You Will Know Us by the] Trail of Dead. I picked up the phone and he was like, “Hey, do you got a second?” And I said, “Sure, what’s up?” And he goes, “I just really need to talk to another person of color who plays in a band” [laughs]. And it was funny, and we laughed, but we also knew that there is something very real to that. Because there are certain conversations that we sometimes need to have with each other, where we can share our experiences and maybe even allow ourselves to feel different from our bandmates. I’m curious how you feel your experience as a woman in Life’s Question might differ from your bandmates.
ABBY: I’m still trying to figure that out, and I probably always will because it’s a really hard thing to explain. Like, a lot of times it’s just, “Oh. I’m the only one like me that’s here doing this.” Or maybe there’s one other woman, and then it becomes, “Just because we’re both women, does that mean we’re supposed to connect?” I mean, sure, why not? But that’s not always the case. Whether it’s realized or not, I think the way my experience differs is in the realization that there’s no camaraderie with one of main identities—and I do identify strongly as a female. Even just being the person to say out loud the thing that no one else is noticing, like, “I’m the only female on the festival”—that’s not even an observation that registers on a lot of people’s radar. And I think sometimes when I say something like that people might think it comes across in a way that I don’t want it to, like snappy or bitter or judging towards the scene. But I’m just saying out loud what is happening.
I just have to say here that over the last four decades of hardcore, a lot of people have had to make similar statements out loud—and I’ve made similar statements out loud—and I truly believe that the reason we have the scene we have now is because people did that. Like, we are at a place where it’s actually shocking to me how many people of color and women and queer people there are who are not just going to shows, but also becoming active and visible members of the scene right now. That was like a dream to me 30 years ago. But I get what you’re saying, too: Sometimes it feels like people resent you for saying it at the time, like you’re “killing the buzz.”
ABBY: I feel like people are defensive about it because they think, “Well, no one is doing this on purpose.” But to me, that’s kind of the problem. At least if people were doing this on purpose, it would be unashamed. They could be like, “Yeah, I booked no women on this fest!” [laughs]. But even if you didn’t do it on purpose, it’s like, OK. You still did that. So maybe you should take inventory of why that happened. I don’t want things to be like a checklist of virtue signaling or a checkmark on a diversity box; I don’t want hardcore to reach progress by doing that. But sometimes it feels like someone has to do that for themselves because they are missing it. Like, you could choose to put this in writing or not, but LDB [Fest] this year had no women on the line-up. I mean, that fest is awesome. I totally support that fest. I hear nothing but good things about that fest. But it’s also just true that there were no women on the fest and that’s just weird. It’s an example of how a lot of people didn’t realize that. But it’s just true.
I think that’s the point though. It’s about acknowledging that this is a thing that happened, and that maybe we should be more conscious of the fact that maybe our biases got the best of us this year.
ABBY: It doesn’t have to be malicious, but it can still be something that’s flawed or maybe we just missed the mark for whatever reason.
And for me, hardcore is about getting better. It’s always been about, like, how can we be better than the outside world that we’re supposedly rebelling from? That’s an important question.
ABBY: I think sometimes in alternative subcultures like hardcore, we almost pat ourselves on the back for being so different and countercultural, but just because we’re different doesn’t mean we’re doing everything right all the time. We still have to try.
OK, let’s get back to the band for a second. I listened to a podcast where Josh [Haynes, singer] said that Life’s Question played its first show in 2014 and that kind of blew my mind.
ABBY: I was not in the band at that time. I came around because Ridge [Rhine, guitarist] and I are married, and we were both not playing music for the first year of our marriage. Life’s Question put out an EP that was just on Bandcamp, and I brought it up to Ridge, like, “This is actually the type of music that I want to play, so why don’t we just put members to it and actually make this a band that plays shows?”—because we both had come from a world of going on tour and we missed it. And I wanted to play hardcore. But Michael Smith [from Hangman and Pain of Truth] was instrumental in getting Life’s Question off its feet. He booked us on Long Island, and we went on tour with Hangman, and that really got us going for real.
It just feels like you’ve been on this very slow crawl. If the first show was 2014, it would be four years until the two EPs came out in 2018, and then another four years until the first album came out in 2022. Was that intentional?
ABBY: No! It was unintentional. We’ve just always been kind of hairbrained, scrambling to do things. That’s why there’s not a lot of information out there about Life’s Question. Because we’ve all been doing other things while trying to the band at the same time. We’re also really spread out. Three of us are in Philly, but Nick [Barker, drummer] is in Ohio, and then between our two bass players who go back and forth, one of them is in New Jersey and one is in Minnesota. Trying to get us to do anything PR-related, like even just getting photos taken, we are so bad at that. We’re trying to get better at that, and with Flatspot’s help, I think we are.
My understanding is that Josh and Ridge also moved around a lot as kids, and in fact, the band has kind of moved around a lot as well—like from Minnesota to Chicago to Philly. So here’s my thinking about this: Historically, hardcore has always been a very regional cultural thing, right? I always think about how Fugazi opened every show by walking up and saying, “Hello, we’re Fugazi from Washington, D.C.”—and that was supposed to tell you something about who they are. You’ve never really had that kind of regional identity as a band, so I’m wondering if you can think of a moment when you may have felt disadvantaged to be a band without a real hometown.
ABBY: Purely the fact that our history is confusing is not a good thing [laughs]. I think people like to attach themselves to a region—like New York hardcore, or this band is “from Long Island.” There’s a feeling of ownership there when a region is attached to a band. So it’s probably not a good thing to be scattered [the way we are] because it’s confusing. A lot of people think we’re from Chicago, but while Josh and Ridge both lived in Chicago, we’re definitely not from Chicago. Although we did put Chicago on the EP cover, and that’s confusing, so that’s our own fault [laughs]. But more than that, I think there would be a stronger sense of unity [in the band] if we were all in one area. I love everyone in Life’s Question, and it would be awesome to just hang out, but we don’t even get to do that on a normal life basis.
Let’s forget about the band for a second because when I think about that period of my life when I was moving around a lot, I remember saying things like, “I live in Chicago, but I’m not from Chicago”—and that actually made me feel really untethered. It was kind of unsettling. How has that kind of movement affected you?
ABBY: Actually, my brother was just in town and we were talking about how we had maybe four Christmases in a row where we were in four different places. It’s just exhausting. I envy the person that grew up in the house that their parents still live in because it feels like there might be less memories bombarding them. I feel like we lived in so many different places and so many different houses that there are too many memories in my head. Things feel chaotic. I don’t know how to sort out what my childhood was because it’s not just one thing.
Obviously I am simplifying the idea of growing up in the house that your parents still live in because everyone’s got their life events, but honestly, I think I’ve been searching for a place that feels like home for a very, very long time. And I actually do feel that way about Philly. I believe I’m going to stay in Philly, which is a really good feeling. I moved here in 2020, during peak pandemic, and I did not think that was going to be the case. We thought we’d just live here for a little bit, but now I love it. I’m starting to build a life here. I’m apprenticing at a tattoo shop, so I’m learning to tattoo here. It just feels like I’m finally putting roots down that I honestly never got a chance to do when I was a kid. It just feels so good to not have this internal panic of, like, “Where am I going to go next?”
It’s funny because that sense of instability has followed you around for so long, and yet, I feel like playing in bands is the most unstable job in the world—and somehow we picked it [laughs]. I suppose this would be a good time to talk about how, in being married to a member of your band, you have this anchor of stability that most of us in band life don’t get. And at the same time, there must be other challenges that come with that.
ABBY: For sure. I like that you prefaced that by showing the positive—that I have an anchor. Because honestly, I feel like whenever anyone who doesn’t know us decides to ask me about what it’s like to be on tour with my partner, they’re like, “Eww, how is that?” [laughs]. But Ridge and I love each other. We’re best friends. And it’s actually just awesome.
But we’ve had to grow and understand the dynamic of having me and Ridge in the band. Like, if the band is disagreeing about something and Ridge and I feel the same way about a decision—which is not always the case—but I think we try to be cautious of making our other band members feel like we are some type of unit that’s gonna bulldoze somebody else’s opinion. I don’t want it to feel that way. I think we’ve probably done that in the past, so I try to be more cautious about that now and more mature in handling these decisions. But I love being in a band with Ridge and I honestly wouldn’t have it any other way.
Is your decision to start tattooing even just a little bit of, “I love you, Ridge, but I need my own thing”?
ABBY: In reality, yes, but on an emotional level it actually feels like doing my own thing has an element of grieving the fact that Ridge and I aren’t doing every little thing together. Even with him doing Pain of Truth—this past year has felt like a different type of year for the two of us. We do have a ton of the same interests, and that’s how we got to know each other in the first place, by doing those things together. So this year, there have been lessons from doing things apart from each other and knowing that’s a good thing. It might even be the best thing for us. With me doing my apprenticeship, it’s probably the biggest thing I’ve ever stepped out and done on my own. I’m kind of shedding my security blanket a little bit and choosing to believe in myself because it all rides on me.
In keeping in tune with that, I also feel like your role in the band seems to be growing to some extent—or at least it feels that way in the music. I know you had a screaming part on [2018’s] “Another Neighborhood Disaster,” but was there a point where you said, “What if I actually just sang a part instead of screamed it?”
ABBY: The idea of me singing felt normal because I had singing parts in my old band. We always knew this was an option. “Cracks in the Floor of Heaven,” that was an early-on song, and we loved how it came out. We kind of felt like my singing part was a bit of a moment and we wanted to create more moments like that. I think the full-length [2022’s World Full Of…] was more of a Ridge and Nick project for the most part; it was just how the album was written. They had the time, so they really took the lead there. But with this EP, we tried to go back to being more collaborative, and I think we all wanted me to sing more. I think Life’s Question as a whole, we just want to get weird with it and be creative and just be able to express ourselves.
I want to work backwards a little bit. The pastor’s kid and Christian background that you come from… Josh and Ridge also share different versions of that, right?
ABBY: Yes.
In that podcast, Josh talks about being kicked out of a Christian college for drinking a margarita [laughs]. But that sort of shared experience is rare, and it kind of gives a little backstory to what I feel like are some of the themes on the new EP. There’s a lot of recurring religious imagery—prayer and eternity and God and the meaning of life. It feels like an existentialist’s record in a lot of ways. I’m curious how much of it reflects where you are personally.
ABBY: It’s kind of a difficult question to answer. I feel like Ridge, Josh, and all did grow up similarly and are in kind of similar spots right now. But I think that when you really get into beliefs—or at least the way I was trained to approach it as a kid—you start getting into specifics, and now I feel like we don’t care so much about specifics. It’s more so about the existential stuff, like you said, and I think everyone can relate with that. What Josh, Ridge, and I share in common is believing in something beyond yourself, but I don’t think that really dictates any specific beliefs. I think it’s more so that maybe we’re trying to find meaning or purpose in a fucked-up world. Because not everyone in Life’s Question believes in God or a higher power. I don’t know exactly what everyone believes. I also don’t think we all know 100 percent what even ourselves believe sometimes.
I appreciate you saying that because there is also a sense of uncertainty in the lyrics that I think is really refreshing. So many hardcore bands tend to sing about things with the conviction that they are 100 percent right, you would think certainty is a hardcore value [laughs]. But this record feels more along the lines of that Cro-Mags lyric: “Gotta be some meaning to the purpose of life.” There are a lot of questions, but not a ton of answers.
ABBY: For sure. We are just wondering about the world instead of firmly planting any beliefs—like, “There is no God” or “There is no higher power.” I guess we don’t have that conviction. We are more mystery-oriented. We are open to ideas.
One last thing, then. In however many years that I’ve been doing this, I tend to notice that people often talk about hardcore in the language of a conversion experience; they consider it their identity and their purpose. But I’m more curious about the things we care about that have nothing to do with hardcore and what they say about you. Can you think of something like that in your life?
ABBY: Wow. It’s hard to think of something that has nothing to do with hardcore. Like, I’m a huge book-reader and I was super into school. I loved college. I studied psychology and counseling. There’s that.
Did you feel like that was something you wanted to pursue?
ABBY: I literally just did it for myself. I was lucky enough to get a good scholarship, so it wasn’t like I felt like I was paying so much that I had to use [my degree]. But I don’t know. I don’t think I was searching for anything specific; I wasn’t trying to figure out how I was fucked up or why I was fucked up. But what I love about psychology is that it lays out the experiences of a person, it lays out the reasoning behind experience, and it actually studies the internal chaos of humans—and I just feel better about things when I can get information about them.
I don’t know. This still sounds like a case of “Physician, heal thyself” [laughs].
ABBY: Some people might think I was trying to heal something, but I really can’t think of anything specific. I plan to go back and finish my Masters degree, though. Maybe I’ll find out the answer to that then.
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“the more people that you meet, the more the bubble just keeps on popping”
Fucking yes.
It’s so interesting how Abby talks about how growing up in a stationary living situation would carry fewer memories than the experience she had. Coming from a pretty stable living situation, I would think the opposite - that the place of stability would carry all the memories while the transience would carry fewer. Pretty cool check on perspectives.
Great read. Had the pleasure of meeting Abby when her old band and my band at the time toured together. Hard to believe that was ten years ago 😅