In Conversation: Brendan Garrone of Incendiary
After 16 years in a band, the Incendiary frontman has evolved from hardcore shows at a mall to insight meditation on a train. But the distance from there to here isn't as far as you'd suspect.
I’m pretty sure I made the first contact. I randomly came across Brendan Garrone’s Instagram several years ago and decided to say hello because Incendiary had been the first hardcore band in a long while to give me that “first time at a show” feeling. They reminded me of bands I loved, like Snapcase, and even bands I’d played in, like 108. But it wasn’t quite exactly the music or the lyrics that took me there. It was the spirit—a difficult to grasp and even harder to execute balance of sharp insight and violent rhythm. Most of the hardcore I’ve truly loved over the years can be described in a similar way.
We’ve kept in touch over the years, mostly by text, and I’ve always enjoyed our casual chats about music, dogs, and making sense of the world. But with the release of Change The Way You Think About Pain, Incendiary’s first album in six years, there were too many things I wanted to talk about with Brendan—and they required more than a text would allow. So for the first time in a long time, we took our conversation into the real world.
One of the things I think is the most amazing thing about you is that you bought your first hardcore shirt at a Hot Topic and you went to your first hardcore show at a mall, and that is just so fucking suburban [laughs].
BRENDAN: Insane. I know.
What do you think was unique about that suburban Long Island identity of hardcore that you gravitated towards—especially versus shows in New York City?
BRENDAN: Yeah, that’s an excellent question because I guess the one thing I should admit is that I didn’t feel any pull to the city whatsoever. Through happenstance, I discovered “real” New York hardcore fairly early on from someone my sister dated, and learned about Madball and Cro-Mags and all that, but I didn’t grow up taking the Long Island Railroad into the city to see shows. That was not part of my upbringing at all. I had everything right there, really close to me, and it was all that I needed. I never felt like I lived in a place where it was like, “Yeah, if you don't drive to X city, there are no shows.” Long Island wasn't like that. By that time—we're talking ‘98 on—is when I started becoming active. It was there, everything at my fingertips. I was satisfied.
I’m just assuming that you’re like most of us, in that we got into hardcore and then hardcore became our identity. But was there an identity that you can point to before that?
BRENDAN: I think I was always and still kind of am, like, a jack of all trades and master of none. I was always interested in a lot of different things. I was interested in energy and what was going to trigger a reaction in me. Like, BMX—that was my entire life. That's what I felt like I was put on this earth to do. I was always really bad at it and I loved it [laughs]. I spent every waking moment of my life doing it. My entire childhood was spent in the woods, digging trails. I loved that and I loved music and I loved skateboarding. And then I would learn about bands looking at Ride BMX magazine and Thrasher. The music was fast and I wanted to play fast. All of that get-up-and-go energy, I had that from an early age.
Was that a thrill-seeking energy?
BRENDAN: I have no idea. I was always extremely competitive—like, all the time—but I wasn't necessarily blessed with any kind of major athletic skill. I did athletics, but I was more competitive with friends and competitive in every single thing I did. I used to get super mad at losing. Like, one time I was on the tennis team in middle school and I lost a game, so I smashed my racket and walked off the court. My mom was at the game—I think this was in sixth or seventh grade—and she just got so mad at me that she said she’d never come to watch me again [laughs]. That's a perfect example of me growing up.
By the way, what mall had a show?
BRENDAN: Smith Haven Mall in Lake Grove. Subterfuge played there. It was so random. It was a store called Scream, but I think they had like seven Es in the Scream. So the store was like, “Screeeeeeeam” [laughs]. I remember Subterfuge playing, and they were a three-piece, and it was the coolest thing I've ever seen in my entire life.
I remember how, in the ‘90s, one of the things we would talk about amongst ourselves in the scene—especially as the Hot Topics started to open up and Warped Tour started getting bigger—was: What is the next generation that grows up in this world going to be like? So what I love seeing is that you were literally a part of that generation that was buying shirts at Hot Topic or seeing a band at the mall—and look how fucking great you did!
BRENDAN: I feel like people always forget the level of ignorance that accompanies childhood. There was just no sense of these things. You were just walking around in a dark room with your hands up. Like, we had a cool punk record store called None of the Above one town over, and I bought the Indecision/Shai Hulud split there. I had maybe heard of Indecision. I saw them on a flyer or something. But I’d never heard them before. I’d buy records and I'd never even heard the band; I'd buy records because the album looked cool.
Let’s switch gears. You have, in the past, mentioned having a figuratively “OCD-type” nature. And when I see you around, you remind me of myself a little in that… Well, your hair is nice, you look good, you're buttoned up [laughs]. You know, you put some attention to detail into things. So my question really is: Are you also like me in the sense that this is an issue of control that you're trying to manage?
BRENDAN: It is unquestionably from control. Unquestionably. I’m a total control freak, which can be hard to deal with sometimes. I've had to learn to let go of certain things and to trust people around me in whatever part of my life that may be referring to. Where do I think it comes from? I don't know. I have a drive and an internal engine that runs fast—not all the time, but most times—and I think that drive can be a good thing and a bad thing. It's a good thing when I can be motivated and accomplish what I set out to do in various aspects of my life, or it could be a bad thing because I can get burnt out and obsessively focused on something. And part of that is trying to have order with everything. Like, for me, I should have been a lawyer because I'm just the most argumentative person, and I have the drive to do that. I'm the kind of person that's like, “I think this is true,” and I will calmly and happily sit with you for five hours until you agree with me [laughs]. That's just in my nature.
Whenever I feel like I'm getting unhealthily controlling, I try to ask myself: What is my fear of not having control right now? What is the worst-case scenario?
BRENDAN: It’s probably a fear of failure—whatever that is. I’ve been trying to think of it as being related to stopping and smelling the proverbial roses a little bit more though. I fear that I am rushing through life, and that I increasingly approach life as like a checklist or a to-do list. But I don't know what is a level below that. I don't know if I’ve ever thought enough about what happens if the box doesn't get checked.
Well, let’s apply this to something practical. You've said in the past that no one liked Incendiary for the first five years. Putting that fear of failure into consideration, did you continue the band almost out of spite?
BRENDAN: No, no, I didn’t! I didn’t do it out of spite because, again, I have to go back to ignorance. We were having a blast! I guess I care a little bit more about playing bad shows now, but not that much! We didn’t care. I remember our first little tour. We drove from Jersey in a snowstorm to North Carolina. And, you know, maybe two people came or something—like, maybe there was a bartender—but we had so much fun. The driving factor for me early on, and kind of still now, is that I just wanted to be in the mix. I didn't have the upbringing in hardcore that a lot of other people had, where it was like, “Man, me and my buds started, I dropped out of high school, we had this band, and now we're older, and look at this! Guys, we were 18 when we did that!” That was not Incendiary! That's what I wanted to be. I wasn’t in a cool band in high school. I wasn’t in a cool band when I was 20 and 19. I was in a cool band when I was 28.
I mean, that lines up with the way that you sometimes present both yourself and the band as basically ambition-less. You've said, “There's no end game. We're just sort of doing this because we like to play.” But right now I’m trying to square that away with what you’re also saying about how there’s this part of you where you're like, “I'm fucking competitive, let’s fucking go.” How does that get left at the door for Incendiary?
BRENDAN: It isn't easy. And it’s not necessarily that it gets left at the door… This is a very good question [laughs]. It’s that we’ve made the choice in our heads and in our lives to not be a career band. And that does a lot of things when you make that decision. One of the things that it does is it puts a hard steel ceiling on the top of your band. And there have been ceilings in aluminum, to keep up with the analogy, that we've managed to break through—but the steel will get hit. When you make that decision, it can also be very liberating. We do not run the band like a band that’s just YOLO-ing along, hanging out, doing whatever. We run the band very strictly. Ultimately, I increasingly look around at the way that music has been and it’s not something that I feel like I would excel in based on the way that I am. I am not interested in what it takes to be in a band in 2023. I’m not interested in being able to pay my rent based on whether or not a Spotify employee decides to put me on the Titans of Metalcore playlist. I don’t wanna do vlogs. I don’t wanna worry about what to post. I don’t care.
Sure but, to be fair, there are levels of those things, right? There are definitely people who are living online and have become living promotional tools for whatever business that they're trying to build—respect, I see your hustle [laughs].
BRENDAN: Totally.
But, like, I’d say I’m somewhere in the middle, right? I keep my presence out there because opportunities happen when you’re present. And so I’m like, OK. I'm gonna be present enough. That's sort of my vibe, “present enough.” And then there’s you. You’ve talked about how you don’t want to do these things and you want to keep your Instagram private and you don’t give a shit. So that sort of resistance—it’s very binary, right? You’re sort of like, fuck it all. What is driving you into that?
BRENDAN: I mean, it’s not that I don't have an ego or anything like that. And it’s not that I don't want to be good and succeed. I’m still competitive; I still want to play good shows. I guess the concept of music being a career—and this is going to sound overly earnest, but it's the truth—that was just never something that came across my radar. I wasn't really exposed to the idea of a professional musician. That never felt realistic to me.
Maybe I’m scared. Like, maybe I was scared to say, “I'm gonna have this thing that we built and we love, and all of the sudden now, I have to worry about paying my electric bill from it?” That’s scary and off-putting and that’s not really what I signed up for. I signed up to be a part of the community. I think people underestimate the left-hand turn that it takes and what has to go on the proverbial table to now be like, “All right. We gotta make this work. There's no turning back.” I don't really want to make it work. I want to keep being smart and stuff like that, but I don't want to have to make decisions based on money. We make very, very, very few—if any—decisions based on money. And I can tell you, it's very nice! I don't necessarily want to have to do things that I don't find engaging and exciting because I feel like I have to, because at the end of the day—and again, this might be a shortcoming—but it’s like, we're just Incendiary. I don't have to do that.
I don't necessarily think that that’s a shortcoming at all. But bizarrely, what comes back into my head is this conversation of control—where you have this very tightly wound model of a band. Like, “This is exactly what I'm willing to do. I'm not willing to do anything more. I'm not giving you the fucking password to my Instagram [laughs]. I'm going to be able to micro-control every single aspect of this experience for me.” And I'm not saying that's bad…
BRENDAN: No, I know.
…but is it connected?
BRENDAN: I think it might be. I think the social media thing is somewhat different because I, like you, spent a large part of my life without social media. And I think, honestly, this could just be more of a generational thing where I don't know that 5,000 people need to see [pictures of] me and my dad. It’s weird. I don't live my life online like that. I like it from the perspective of being able to communicate with people, but I guess I don't feel the need to be out there enough to become “Brendan from Incendiary”—where that's my persona—because that’s not the only thing about me. I do a lot of other things. And to be even more honest with you, I kind of think the whole thing is a little bit of a scam, and I kind of think a lot of the music industry is ridiculous and a straight-up Ponzi scheme, and I question the value of a lot of things that bands are tasked to do nowadays. I feel like I’m all set. I’m happy doing what we do now. That’s probably as clear as I could be.
So here’s where I’d say that’s a good thing. I remember how in the ‘90s, most of our bands at that time were like yours, in the sense that it had never occurred to us that we could make a living playing music.
BRENDAN: That sentence encapsulates us. Exactly.
That was something most of us felt. But when the labels came, and when bands started blowing up and the scale started changing—and specifically when we started realizing that we actually might be able to make a living playing music—I think that actually created a shift in our psyches where we did become a persona, whether we realized it or not. When Texas broke up, I actually moved to Chicago because I couldn’t handle going everywhere and having people still call me “Norm from Texas is the Reason.” It was like, “No. I'm not, we're broken up, I'm other things!” When I moved to Chicago, a lot of it was just wanting to be Norman again, and everyone let me be Norman there.
BRENDAN: This just struck me as something really important. So we’re talking about these bands, and a lot of them kind of burnt out, right? And maybe it’s from that thing you see that a lot of bands do when they quote, “Go for it.” They hit the road. They're playing 250 shows a year and they’ve gotten around, but they don't last that long because it's a taxing lifestyle and it’s really difficult. I don't have to tell you these things. The point is, we haven't really done that, but we've gotten to have all these experiences and we've been a band for 16 years. You can't say it with any certainty, but man, I don’t think we would still be a band if we were touring full-time this whole time. There’s no chance. Would it have been cooler if we had “went for it” after our second album or something, and toured hard for three years and did cool tours, but then broke up? Or is it actually better that we’ve built this longevity and have been able to put out our fourth LP probably in large part because we haven't “gone for it” and played 250 shows a year? I don't know which one’s better, but I kind of feel like it’s the latter. I don't know if it’s that much cooler if we would have just fizzled out. Maybe it is.
Well, I’m your alternate history then. Because that was basically Texas is the Reason.
BRENDAN: That’s kind of what I’m saying! And both of those things are OK. But it’s hard for me not to take the other side sometimes and look at it and be like, “I still get to do this!” We would have burnt out. It’s something that I feel like has become more apparent to me as we’ve gotten older.
All right. I’m just going to say this now because it’s interesting to me: I think a lot of your lyrics are vaguely cloaked a lot of the time—which gives me this feeling that you don’t like to be vulnerable. Or do you? Is there a secret in the sauce that I’m missing? Like, is there a lyric you can think of where you thought, “Fuck, I can’t sing this out loud”?
BRENDAN: I think there have been certain songs that I’ve been hesitant to put out and put pen to paper on, yeah. I think once I started to be a little bit more mature and not write about girlfriends or whatever, there have been some songs that are vulnerable for me and a little bit different than the classic hardcore song, and I am proud that I’ve done so. And whether or not people know what they’re about is one thing, but I know that it’s out there, and I know what it’s about. I think I've tried to push the envelope a little bit on being confident enough to put that out there.
Do you want to tell me one?
BRENDAN: Sure, yeah. Let me think… There's a song on Thousand Mile Stare called “Hanging From the Family Tree.” I think part of that song is basically that I’m still trying to be a good person and trying to remember all of the things that one learns growing up, but then, you know, life happens. And it can make you colder and it can make you angrier and it can make you bitter. And that song is basically about how I’m still trying to fucking be a good person, even in the face of a lot of things in my life being difficult—whether people know about it or not. I’m just constantly reminding myself of things that were taught to me as a young person. So it’s like, how can I continue to bring that with me into adulthood, when real life punches you in the face and you learn that the world is a lot colder and more apathetic than you think growing up?
So there's an element of maybe feeling like you are fucking up.
BRENDAN: Yeah. I guess a lot of the way that I write lyrics is that I’m writing at myself. They're not “self-help,” but a lot of the time I'm directing it at me. It’s like, “Take your own advice, man. Think about what you’re saying and apply it to yourself.” A lot of the songs are me telling myself what I need to do.
One of the big themes of this album is that I’ve really struggled with not being able to control—getting back to that—what people in my life that I care about do. You can’t control what other people do, including watching them make the same mistakes over and over and over, or not being able to get past certain things that are so clearly limiting them in their lives. Coming to the realization that you can't change somebody unless they're willing to change themselves—that is very difficult for me to live with. I struggle with that. And a lot of the lyrics on this last record are about that: Reminding myself that I can’t change certain people from doing certain things, even though I really, really want to.
So this is where Incendiary really makes me think about the mid-’90s bands that became what they now call “emo.” I’ve always talked about how, in the ‘80s, when I first got into hardcore, the songs were all very, “Fuck you, fuck Reagan, fuck the church.” You know, “Fuck everyone.” But in the ‘90s, it was like, people started saying, “Well, fuck me. I’m a piece of shit and I’m gonna sing about that [laughs].” I think that’s akin to what you’re saying when you talk about singing at yourself. Listening to this record, I really feel like there is a lot of contemplation there, about who you are and how you relate to the world around you. And I don’t know that it comes with a bow on it. It feels very open-ended to me. It feels very in the middle of the search.
BRENDAN: Yeah. I think that's probably fair. It’s probably analogous to the reality of my life. I started off with lyrics more like what you were saying. I wasn't influenced by ‘80s music, but there were a lot of socio-politically conscious bands in the ‘90s and that, to me, was kind of like what you [were supposed to] do. But over time, when you're sitting down to put pen to paper, it’s increasingly common that you’re going to write about things that are in relationship to yourself. I’ve always tried to make sure that I’m being representative of where I am in the world and what our band is. It has to be authentic to what we’re trying to say and to what I’m about.
I think there is artistic license, and I don’t think things have to be direct. I think things can be amorphous. I think things can be hard to understand. I like that. And I like that more as I get older. But to answer your question a little bit more directly, there is a component there of my journey—of learning about myself, and learning how to deal with certain things that we talked about early in our conversation—and of my experiences with meditation and mindfulness and how that has changed the way that I approach certain things in my life, and how I've realized that I have to have those things in my life if I'm going to continue to be a reasonable and productive member of society. So all that has been incorporated into my lyrics because it is a big part of the last couple years of my life.
I don't know if you know anything about my relationship with Zen Buddhism at all.
BRENDAN: I think so. I know we talked about it before. You're pretty active, right?
I am. I’ve been studying with a teacher for several years. So what’s interesting to me is that a lot of the things you’re saying—I don’t even know if you’re conscious of it or not—but like, talking about the ambiguity of lyrics or ambiguity in life, those things are pretty central to a practice in Zen that we call “not-knowing.” Which is, at its core, about how our desire to know really flies in the face of the constancy and reality of impermanence. It’s a desire to hold on to something that cannot last. So yeah, not-knowing is probably the number-one Zen teaching that I can’t say I’ve fully embraced yet because “knowing” is so central to control. Is that something you’re conscious of in your own practice or is that something you’ve haven’t really touched?
BRENDAN: No, I have. I’ve listened to a lot of lectures from Joseph Goldstein about how everything changes constantly, about impermanence, and so as someone who is trying to create order, the idea that everything is driving towards disorder and entropy is something that I am working to accept. That and the idea of acceptance in general—acceptance of the way things are, rather than “the way things ought to be.”
That makes me think about this time I was meditating at the Zen Center on 23rd Street in Manhattan. 23rd Street is, like, a really loud street. And when it’s warm enough, they just leave the windows open. So we’re sitting there, and while I was meditating I heard someone get out of a cab—or at least that’s what I thought. I heard them yell something, flustered, and then I heard the door shut and the cab take off and my mind just created this entire narrative for that three-second exchange. Anyway, afterwards, the teacher maybe read the room because he made this comment like, “Sometimes, people ask why we have a Zen Center on 23rd Street. It’s so loud! But maybe meditating under imperfect circumstances is the perfect circumstance.” And then he was like, “Maybe you heard a cab drive away. And maybe you created this entire story to go with that.” And I'm just sitting there, so embarrassed because I knew that's exactly what I did.
BRENDAN: You're like, “Wow, I've been spotted.” That's amazing [laughs].
But it made me realize that this entire sequence of events—however long it took for me to construct that story and how I constructed that story because I needed to know—none of that is reality. That's not what happened out there. I just made it up.
BRENDAN: Yeah.
And so I think that's a lot of what we're doing. We don't actually know each other’s lives. We don’t actually know what’s happening in the world. We’re literally making shit up and we're getting enraged about it.
BRENDAN: I can intimately relate to what you are talking about and I really love that story. This is a part of it. Like, it doesn't have to be perfect. You don't have to be sitting on a cloud on a mountaintop. A lot of people who bail on mindfulness—or any of the [Buddhist] schools—they get frustrated because of one of two things: Either they’re waiting to have some kind of epiphany, right? They’re waiting for that nirvana moment that doesn't come. Or two, they’re like, “I just can't clear my head. Every time I sit down I think of what I have to cook for dinner or what happened at work the day before.” And I think the hack for me was learning that the process of having a thought, acknowledging that it’s a thought, and letting it go and coming back to the breath or a mantra or whatever—that is meditation, that act. If you listen to very accomplished meditators and teachers, they all have the same quote-unquote “problem” too. But no, no, no. That is meditation. The experience of noticing and letting go and coming back—even if you have to do it one time, 10 times, 50 times, 100 times…
…and you will.
BRENDAN: And you will! But once you let go of that and be easier on yourself, it’s such a liberating concept to understand. No pun intended [laughs]. I mean, I meditate on the train. It’s loud as shit and it doesn't bother me whatsoever. I don't care because I just know that this is how things are.
OK, one last thing. You're about to become a dad.
BRENDAN: Yes.
For a lot of people, that period of time between getting the word that you're going to be a father to the moment when you are first holding your child—that is probably the most intense period of not-knowing you're ever going to have [laughs]. So what are some of the things that you’re most anxious about not knowing?
BRENDAN: It’s interesting being the individual not carrying the child, because when you’re not carrying the child, you have to go through these mental exercises of trying to put yourself in these situations where you can’t possibly know what it’s like. And you can try really hard to get into that headspace, but you realize you’re not gonna be able to, because you just don’t have that experience. You don’t have that connectivity and you can’t fake it. So in these nine months, I’ve tried a little bit to just trust my future self that I'll be cool. Because right now, I can't [see it].
I guess the second thing is that I’m older, and I feel more at peace with things because I’ve lived a lot of life. I personally would not want to have kids at 22 or 23 years old. But with this situation that I’m in now, it’s not as scary because I feel much more comfortable in my place in life and my circumstances. I think the scary thing is that, you know, you get set in your ways and I think people become a little bit selfish when we get older and you’re not providing for anybody—because you can be. And so I think it’s probably natural for me to be a little bit worried. It’s like, “OK. I am now going to be putting someone before myself in 100% of circumstances, all the time.” That’s something that I will get over and come to terms with.
There are also a lot of unknowns in this world. I think me and my wife have both struggled with thinking about bringing a child into this world. But ultimately, I think that as life continues, it’s a personal decision that we decided we wanted to experience and have for the rest of our lives. I have so many thoughts about this it’s not even funny, but I think I’m ready. I’m ready for a new way of learning about things. I feel like this is probably going to be the world's biggest learning experience. I’m optimistic.
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You are probably thinking to yourself who is this guy John and why does he feel the need to comment on everything I write? I think the reason is because reading about hardcore/ punk and listening to hardcore has taught me more about the world than the expensive liberal arts college I graduated from. My mother once said to me, “how do you remember all this bands names? (And I don’t think she meant it as a compliment) but I digress I think what one of the messed up things about society is if something is not a big hit immediately when it comes out it is a failure. When I read that incendiary was around for about six years before they got big it reminded me of a documentary I saw about Hollywood called: “the monster that ate Hollywood.” it was about the impact jaws had on the movie industry. Even through respected film makers like Quentin Tarantino called jaws “the best movie ever made” he is probably right.but jaws impact on the way we think about art was horrible. Before jaws movies would be in theaters for months before it gathered a following. (Just look at the warren Beaty movie “Bonnie and Clyde”
But I have only one criticism when the member of incendiary said, “I’m a jack of all trades but a master of none(actually I don’t want to be pedantic but the full phrase is “ “A jack of all trades is a master of none, but oftentimes better than a master of one.” From some reason it reminded of that shelter song “all I know is that I know so little but I do know I know so well.” I wish most people thought like that. Recently I went to a lecture at the museum of mathematics and it was a lecture given by math professor who teaches at C.M. And the lecture was about chatgpt i don’t want to point out the obvious he knew his math but because of his cockiness that was master one skill he thought he was a master of other skills. This math professor started making this crazy statements that chatgpt was was eventually going to replace all doctors. I asked my father who is a physician with four specialties what do you think about what this math professor said. His reply was is that this guy is obviously a crackpot and knows nothing about the healthcare system. If kids really believed that chatgpt would replace doctors why do kids in 2023 still apply to medical school if they thought they will be replaced by chatgpt in five years . After the creation of chatgpt medical school is still extremely competitive to get into and costs at least $250,000 all the lucky kids who get in are willing to pay. Well enough with my ranting.