In Conversation: Ian Shelton of Militarie Gun

In life and in lyric, Ian Shelton is working on a version of self that balances truth and compassion. Making the process public, he explains, is a punk value.

Ian Shelton of Militarie Gun, live at Launchpad. Albuquerque, NM. September 12, 2023. Photo by Oscar Rodriguez.

Since forming in the cursed year of 2020, Militarie Gun have almost seamlessly moved into the position of being one of hardcore’s best and sometimes challenging bands. At the helm is Ian Shelton, who with this week’s release of Life Under The Sun—a collection of somber reinterpretations of songs from their breakthrough album, Life Under The Gun—officially expands his range from principal songwriter and singer for Regional Justice Center, the much-loved powerviolence band, to unmitigated post-hardcore balladeer. Evolution has always been a part of his approach.

Transparency has also been a major part of Ian’s approach, so coming into this conversation, I only knew that I wanted to find out more about how that willful (and more often than not difficult) way of being works both for and against him. His commitment to truth—and finding an ethical way to tell your own story without selling anyone out—is, at its core, a conflict that many of us share in this era of digital storytelling. Ian’s willingness to figure things out in real time is only one of the reasons we love him.

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You started writing for Militarie Gun in March of 2020, so I wanted to talk to you about where your head was at the time. I feel like calling your first 7-inch My Life is Over is somewhat telling.

IAN: [Laughs] Well, I’m very prone to being manic. I had kind of burned my life down in the months previous and then the world shut down, so it was a very weird thing. And then, with that, I’m a very melodramatic person. I feel every emotion to the fullest extent for about fifteen minutes at a time, to where I’ll be like, I am so mad. Everything is so fucked—and then I can be happy fifteen minutes later. So a huge part of it was just embracing those incredibly dramatic feelings and not censoring them. Knowing that if I feel them, then someone else probably does. Why try to cover it up? I think [covering it up] is an instinct of “cool guy” culture, but hardcore and punk really taught me: Don’t cover up what you mean. Don’t abstract your real emotion. So the goal was to be as bluntly uncovered as possible—to the point of purposeful stupidity in a lot of places, because I love ridiculously blunt things. That’s why it says, “My life is over and it’s over for you fucking clowns” on the record cover. It was really what I was feeling at the time: My life ended, but now what?

I often say that the emergence of every wave of “emo” in punk came from a reaction to what you could call “hardcore detachment.” Or even what was going on outside of hardcore. Like the third wave of emo came up at a time when the coolest band on the planet was the Strokes—whose entire thing was that “we don’t give a shit about anything.” Emo was like, “We give a shit about everything and we feel it.”

IAN: That’s why it always gets labeled as post-punk or post-hardcore—because hardcore is kind of putting up emotional walls and largely covering it up with masculinity, historically. When Fugazi came out, it was like, “Oh shit, this is different”… But to me, that’s just hardcore. People want to call it post-hardcore, but to me, I view all of this under one umbrella. I also really enjoy making people mad by calling ourselves a hardcore band. We just played a hardcore festival over the weekend and apparently a lot of people were complaining online about how soft we were [laughs].

I’m interested in this comment you once made where you talked about, quote, “playing in a large amount of hardcore and youth crew bands” before Militarie Gun. Using the term “youth crew” is just very specific. Were you straight-edge then?

IAN: Yeah, I was straight-edge. Straight-edge used to be something very, very important to me because I grew up in a household of addiction, and I think that I would have really gone in that direction had I not had that tool of rebellion at the ready at that time. I was always put in the category of “at-risk youth,” so I was put into therapy and drug programs at school, and in fifth grade a school counselor taught me about Ian MacKaye and straight-edge. I didn’t care about it at the time, but I was aware of it because that counselor was like, “There’s this movement of youth that is founded on the concept of being anti-drugs and alcohol.” But I already hated drugs and alcohol because it was already fucking my life up and I didn’t even do it.

So yeah, I always played in hardcore bands in Seattle. But the huge thing was that I was very vulnerable in high school, and I very much wanted to be a frontman and put myself out there. I just got shit on so fucking much—I was told so many times that what I made was terrible and that my lyrics sucked—that I retreated inwards and just became a drummer for people’s bands. It was easier that way because I could still engage creatively, but I was not having to put myself out there.

Did you resent that?

IAN: No, because no one made me do it. It was just me, slowly self-censoring who I was. But then eventually I did so many bands where I felt like my entire life was invested in them and they would eventually be ruined by the singers. I was like, “Well, we can’t go on without the fucking singer!” [laughs]. So that’s when I started doing everything on my own.

As far as youth crew hardcore goes, the React! Records straight-edge crew was very big in the Northwest. React! started in the Northwest and I lived in a house where it used to be run out of. I was just very ingrained in that community.

Militarie Gun, live at Sound and Fury Festival. Los Angeles, CA. July 30, 2022. Photo by Kiabad Meza.

You’ve talked a lot about your story growing up in a home with addiction, and you’ve been very candid about it—which is something I appreciate because I’ve done that with my own story, growing up with childhood abuse. At the same time, as someone who sits on both sides of these interviews, there’s often a part of me that feels like asking these questions only really works when there is a sense of commiseration. I feel like I’ve read interviews with you, or listened to podcasts, where it felt like people tried to talk to you about this stuff or use details about your life as a signifier for depth or vulnerability—but without putting their own skin in the game.

IAN: Yes. Welcome to music press [laughs].

Obviously, I know you’re an open person, and I am as well, but have you ever felt a feeling of, “I don’t feel good talking about this with you”?

IAN: There was one interview where it was straight up me and the interviewer kind of arguing for an hour. That one felt terrible because they were basically implying that my traumas were made up for the press. Like, they asked me what the album was about, and then at the end of that block they were like, “Is that what it’s really about? Or did you just come up with that at the end for press?” I was like, “What is this combative bullshit?”

So I understand what you’re saying, but at the same time, there’s a little bit of a burden in the opposite direction, which makes the other person not sharing feel alright [to me]. I’m not always ready to hear what someone has to say about their own trauma, and specifically, with an interviewer or something like that, I’m not there to know them in a lot of ways. So if I’m choosing to put myself out there in this specific way and be asked about it, then that’s the job, you know? I will say, though, with Regional Justice Center, that’s where it starts to feel really bad because people basically go, “Hey, tell us that story about why this exists again,” and that’s when it feels really insulting and terrible. It’s like, you just want me to do my interview that I’ve done for everyone else with you. That doesn’t feel good.

I think I feel a little bit sensitive when I’m being interviewed sometimes, to where I have to ask myself, am I putting this story out there with a true purpose right now at this specific moment? Or am I telling the story because I feel like the person who’s asking me is somehow titillated by it? If that makes sense.

IAN: It does make sense. And sometimes it’s a little bit of A and a little bit of B. When it comes to making art, you put your trauma out there in hopes that someone finds it interesting. Because unfortunately, I grew up thinking that that is what makes us interesting. All the books I read, all the movies I watched, and all the records I listened to were from people with fucked-up backgrounds. And I was from a fucked-up background. So at the end of the day, you turn that process of reinterpretation into something that benefits you.

But then you get to a certain point, and I’m trying to get to that now, where I’m like, How do I not? How do I actually deal with something and not mine it creatively? Especially when it’s all you’ve ever known. Like, the first goal I ever had was to write a memoir. I was probably thirteen years old thinking I should write a memoir because I had already seen so much crazy shit at that point. Obviously, a thirteen year old shouldn’t write a memoir [laughs]. But I was already reprocessing. I was already using that tool, the idea that contextualizing it and making it art was the only way that I could think to cope with it. So now, in my thirties, how do I do that without making a song about it? I don’t know.

You once said that your mom gave you that tool of looking at these terrible things as “a source of creativity and identity.” So first of all, I absolutely believe that my entire sense of creativity was born from imagining a world outside of the one that I was living in as a kid…

IAN: Right.

…But I struggle with the idea of incorporating that experience into my “identity,” or sense of self. So I’m sort of curious what you meant by that.

IAN: I think an identity not built on trauma, but one that can endure trauma, is one worth looking at. I guess I grew up kind of looking up to that idea. Growing up around [Alcoholics Anonymous] meetings, people just talk about how flawed they are and everything they’ve endured and survived, and so I always gravitated towards the identity and personality that comes with enduring.

Where do you feel like you’re at in your life in terms of being… well, I’m not going to say “well-adjusted,” because someone just asked me how I was so well-adjusted in an interview the other day and I was like, “I’m not!” [laughs]. But you know what I mean. Maybe “functioning.”

IAN: Well a big part of the fabric of Regional Justice Center is the question of: Why am I “well-adjusted” enough to be traveling the world when my brother is locked up? So I wouldn’t say “well-adjusted” either. As far as “functioning”… This is going to sound dramatic, but I don’t think anyone that is close to me looks at me and thinks that I’m functioning [laughs]. I assume that everyone thinks I’m running. Like today I’m doing two interviews, into an acoustic practice, into a studio session. The entirety of my life is going studio to studio to practice space. If I’m home, I cannot sit still for two seconds. So I think people think I’m productive, but I don’t know if “functioning” is the correct word because then I’m melting down every handful of days from doing too much. I’ll be like, what’s happening? Why do I feel like shit all the time? I feel so stressed out! It’s because I’m booked every moment of my life because I need to be busy mentally.

Do you think you’re running?

IAN: I can’t tell. There isn’t a specific thing that’s standing behind me that I’m trying to get away from. It’s more that I just don’t like what happens in the moment where nothing is happening. There’s a fear of this moment slipping through my fingers creatively. It’s a very specific kind of thought, and I’ll tell you it: I think a lot of musicians make two great records. And I partially believe that, for a brief period, we’re allowed into this cosmic pool of where the good ideas are. And then I think you eventually get kicked out and you’re done. I think I’m being allowed access to the pool right now, into the stream or whatever you want to call it. So I want to go there as often as I can to extract as much as I can. Maybe I’m running towards that, knowing that eventually I think it will dissipate or not be as easy or whatever. I’m trying to attend the party as often as I can, while I can.

Militarie Gun, live at the House of Blues. Anaheim, CA. December 16, 2022. Photo by Michael Dubin.

You expressed in a moment of candor that sometimes you wish you could put the genie back in the bottle when it comes to talking about your childhood specifically, and I have to believe that sentiment came from somewhere. When do you feel like you’ve said too much?

IAN: Often [laughs]. A huge part of it is that I put all this out there about my brother, and that affects his life. I feel like I’ve been very measured about what I’ve said about my mother in public, but at the same time, if you pay attention to some of the things I’ve said in the past, you know that this is a person who’s done some shit. And so, in a sense, it’s like snitching. But people make their decisions and you’re like, “You made that decision, not me. It’s not on me to keep your secret.” At the same time, it can feel a lot like betraying trust, even though nobody’s ever come at me with that. But I have my own guilt about it.

Have you ever read Joan Didion?

IAN: No.

One of the most famous things she ever wrote was: “There is one last thing to remember. Writers are always selling somebody out.”

IAN: Yeah [laughs].

So that lives in the back of my mind while I write about my life because I realize that, obviously, my life involves other people—and to some extent, I have to be thoughtful about that. But then to another extent, I feel like I also have a responsibility to be truthful. So it’s creating a balance.

IAN: That’s kind of the balance of Alcoholics Anonymous almost—where it’s anonymous, but truthful. My mother taught me not to lie. She hated that she was told to lie about what was going on in her house. And instead of passing that along to me, she said, “Don’t lie.” There’s a story about one time when my mom got a call from my school. We had a D.A.R.E. officer come into the school when I was in second grade, and they talked about the dangers of drugs and alcohol, and they talked about rehab, and I raised my hand and went, “That’s where my mom is right now!” I just offered that out. It was truthful. My mother was in rehab for the month of February in my second-grade year. So they called her and told her: “Hey, Ian is in class talking about how you’re in rehab.” She was like, “That’s fine.”

I mean, that’s pretty amazing. I feel like my family lived in a shroud of secrecy. Like, everything was a fucking secret. Obviously, the abuse was a secret. But then on top of that, as I got older and realized I was queer, that became the new secret. No one ever told me something like that. That was a hard truth I had to learn.

IAN: It’s not typical. I could be down a completely different path if I felt like all these things were a secret. And at the same time, we were a fucking freak show. We weren’t able to hide. We have this song “Let Me Be Normal.” The first line is, “I’m sick of being the freak / I’m sick of fighting on the front lawn”—because literally that was our experience. We were a white trash family, there were fights on the lawn, my mom would go to my friend’s house and drag his mom out by the hair. We were a fucking sideshow.

I do think one of the standout songs on both Life Under The Gun and the new EP is the “Never Fucked Up” twins, and I think part of that is because I’m not sure I realized how few songs there are that deal with forgiveness in the very palpable way that I feel this song does. I just feel like if we give up on believing that people are capable of change, that’s the darkest life to live.

IAN: Yeah.

How much of that song is about your experience with other people in the past and how much of that is actually you thinking about yourself and the ways you might need to be forgiven?

IAN: I mean, I feel like I need to be forgiven in a thousand-which ways, but I just wanted to put it into a first-person perspective. I think a lot of people have talked about the culture surrounding mistakes, but rarely is anyone saying, “Hey, I’ve made mistakes.” There’s so much finger-pointing and rarely is there an inward glance. And it’s because we’re afraid of this other concept, which is that your mistakes become your identity and you can never come back from that. Again, it all points back to growing up around addiction. But you know, it’s like, I’ve never been taught that you are your mistakes. So I didn’t want to critique the culture surrounding it; I wanted to just talk from the first-person perspective about this idea of making a mistake and having it be your entire life.

OK, there is no appropriate time to bring this up, but I just wanted to say that I am obsessed with the NOFX cover on the new EP [laughs]. I’m not a huge NOFX fan, but I know the song. When I heard your version though, certain things just stood out more—especially that sort of Beatles-esque progression of chords in the chorus—and I went back to the original and was kind of shocked to discover it was all there too. It was like, how did I miss Fat Mike’s Beatles moment? It was all a bit unexpected.

IAN: It’s just been a song I’ve been obsessed with for so long, and I think it shaped a huge part of the melancholy in my own songwriting. If you look at the way the song starts, it kind of has a similar tradition to what Militarie Gun does, which is starting with the most ridiculous thing you can say—that’s what the first line of a song should be, really. “Don’t pick up the phone when you’re on drugs.” Or, “Whoops, I O.D.’d.” It’s kind of saying something bold right away to make people go on their heels. But yeah, that song has just always felt so special to me for some reason. Even when I was straight-edge. I’m excited to help the song achieve a new audience, too. There are probably a lot of people who have written NOFX off, who would never ever be willing to turn on a song that’s the thirteenth song on an album from the mid-2000s.

Militarie Gun, live at Underbelly. Jacksonville, FL. September 21, 2023. Photo by Oscar Rodriguez.

Let’s talk about lyrics that stand out, then. I’d say that two of your most famous lines are, “This punk shit needs to pay, man / Can’t survive, I need a wage, man” and “I want money / I want love.” These are not lyrics you’d hear on a Warzone album [laughs]. Obviously, I know you’re taking some creative license here, but I also feel like you’ve been pretty frank about the commercial element of being in a band. I’m curious why you think more bands don’t talk about this stuff.

IAN: I don’t know. To me, I was just speaking to how I felt at the time, and I’ve always been closer to feeling in line with the way hip-hop views class mobility versus the way punk does. In punk there’s this whole notion of pretending to be poor. I was poor during the pandemic, but before that I wasn’t poor. And I specifically want to look and act as though I’m no longer poor because I’m not doing a fucking fake class play for someone else. I know what I came from and I don’t need to. I don’t want to be there anymore. There’s a lot of disingenuous bullshit within hardcore and punk that makes it so that people are literally afraid of the concept of talking about money, you know?

For me, what I’ve felt basically my entire life is that creativity is the only way for me. It’s the only thing I can do. I was a truck driver for two years. I’ve worked in screenprinting shops. I was a house painter. I busted my ass fresh out of high school and during high school. And I would quit the job to go on tour. For a long time I was telling people, “Oh, I’m going to do a couple more tours and then I’m going back to school. I’ll become a teacher or something.” And I kept registering for school but I just couldn’t bring myself to go. I’d end up on tour for a two-week West Coast tour or whatever with some youth crew band. And then eventually, I was like, “All right. I’m going to stop making music. I’m going to work on being a filmmaker.” I moved to L.A. to do that. But at the end of the day, what gnaws at me is music. There’s nothing else for me besides trying to find a way to make this pay me because I can’t and I won’t do anything else.

There’s something you said in the Brooklyn Vegan podcast that I loved. You asked, “Why is being obscure a good thing? Doesn’t that mean you’re connected with less people?” I wanted to know more about how you perceive those connections through music. Like, what kinds of connections actually nourish you?

IAN: I mean, really, just putting it out there nourishes me. You don’t want to sound self-congratulatory or something, but people DM us and walk up to us at the shows and say things like, “You’re the reason I’m alive right now”—which is an insane concept. It should not be the case. I always just wish that there was more in someone’s life than our music that could stand between them losing their mortal tether to the world. But people say those things and they talk about how much it means, and that means a lot. It’s a very weird part of the experience, but it happens a lot. And when I was a kid, I needed this shit. I needed someone to say these things. So I want to be the thing that someone needs to hear. That’s basically my creative goal, lyrically—talking from perspectives that I don’t think are talked about in hardcore or pop music or anything else. I want to talk about what I feel like I needed to hear or what I want to hear. The fact that it’s being reciprocated means that I do feel somewhat connected to the cultural nerve that is not being spoken for.

And sometimes you just have to go on faith that you’re making those connections because you don’t always get the DMs. You don’t always get that. That’s just a fraction of the people who are listening to you.

IAN: Exactly. [That’s partly why] we made these soft versions of these songs. Because I wanted to tap into the desperation of the lyrics, and not make it “pop,” because the whole goal [of the first album] had been to make these really unfun things fun. For this, it was like, how can we lean into the misery of the lyrics so that someone can be in the feeling of it without counterbalancing it with something else? Just give it in its truest form lyrically.

Do you feel like doing it that way exposed a side of the band that you maybe want to explore more?

IAN: Definitely. I’ve always wanted to sing in multiple voices—whether or not that has a home as Militarie Gun or solo or whatever. I don’t know. And at the same time, I also want to build up to do records under my own name at some point, just to say even more things that I wouldn’t say when I was representing a band. I just view everything as steps. Regional Justice Center was me stepping out into being a frontperson and putting myself out there lyrically at a time that I was very afraid to do that. And then Militarie Gun was me stepping out into a melodic space and trying to learn new skills and express myself differently. At a certain point, I’m sure I’ll decide that it’s time to express myself in an even more different way.

OK, I’m going to ask something a little more whimsical. First of all, do you watch Law & Order? [laughs]

IAN: I do not!

OK. There’s a famous sound associated with Law & Order that’s supposed to mimic the sound of a gavel.

IAN: Dunk-dunk!

Yes, exactly! And there’s always been this back and forth about how you write that. Is it “Dun-Dun?” Is it “Doink-Doink?” There are a few arguments. So first of all, for the record: How do you write “ooh-ooh” or “oof-oof?”

IAN: How do I spell it? O-O-H, O-O-H. Ooh-ooh [laughs]. To me it’s just traditional. I mean, you can look at RJC and it’s in there too. It’s all the way back to the Stooges. There’s one on Let It Be. Fuck, I forget which song it is, but Paul sings it. I think that my thing was using it in the way of a hip-hop trademark, where you know who’s about to start a verse because you hear a tag. That was the goal of making it, because I’ve always wanted to do a lot of features.

I’m not so curious about the first time you did it, but I am very curious about the second time you did it, because you had to have thought, “If I do this twice, it’s a thing.” What made you pull the trigger? Do you remember the second time?

IAN: It’s funny to look at the way that the timeline of this goes, but it’s “Ain’t No Flowers,” and then “Can’t Get None,” then “Do It Faster,” and then “Pressure Cooker.” Those were the first four ooh-oohs.

Take me to the second one. Do you have any memory of it?

IAN: Yes, because there’s actually a ton of it on that one—the most of any song. I had just watched Beastie Boys Story and I was very inspired by that. So I just went to it, more or less, to try to make a Beastie Boys song with “Can’t Get None.” And it just started with “Ooh-ooh-ooh.” I was just using it as a rhythmic element in the song. It was just one of those things that felt right. So I asked this guy who I did the demo with for “Do It Faster” what he thought and he was like, “Yeah, it was weird because you did it on this bare part of the song. But it feels kind of cool and energetic.” He says that I said to him, “I’m thinking this is going to be my trademark” [laughs].

I think I bring it up because people talk about how your lyrics can be grave, but you get a sense from this sound that also reminds you that there’s fun here. That you’re enjoying yourself.

IAN: It’s a very weird moment currently because at the shows we’ll have literally everyone doing it. It’s funny, but it’s also very “bro.” And I don’t like it being bro. But you know, I guess it’s also my assumption that it’s all men doing it, and maybe that’s not true. But it seems like a very male thing to do [laughs]. So yeah, we have this trademark and people know us by it and want to engage with it, but also we’re more than that, and we can acknowledge it and move on, you know? Like, this is not the entirety of what this project is.

I’ll close by asking this. You’ve talked a little bit about how the title track to Life Under The Gun is sort of asking, “Can I move on with my life?” Do you currently feel like there’s something specific that’s holding you back?

IAN: No. I feel like I’ve actually done a good job of taking the thesis of the song and applying it to my life. I’ve always lived in opposition to something else. And I’ve been trying to live a little bit less spitefully in that way. Like, OK. Here’s one of my huge hangups: I’ve always felt very uncomfortable posting partners on social media because of previous partners that exist in the world. It’s this incredibly specific hangup where I don’t like the idea of shoving that in the face of someone who I respect. And that has kind of bled into my personal life, almost feeling as if portraying my happiness—especially with a girlfriend or whatever else—is somehow in opposition to someone else. But I’m just living my life. And my happiness is not in opposition to anyone else’s. Therefore, I [should be able to] post my life and my happiness without feeling bad about it. I’ve just always typically felt this tinge of badness surrounding it, and I feel like I’ve been getting better at that. So that was the goal of writing that song—not the part about social media, but just living my happiness without feeling like it has to be in opposition. Which is a huge part of moving on. I’m trying to live the happiness of my life in public and I don’t want to be afraid of hurting other people’s feelings.

What does the life that you think you want in the future look like?

IAN: I always think in the moments of being busy that I want calm. And then when I'm calm, I want busy. So I guess I just want to live a balanced life. I want to figure out how to balance this restlessness that I can’t get away from, the one that keeps me running at mach five to the next session. It’s hard because the world is such a whirlwind for us right now. I have so little time at home, ever, and the restlessness gets to me because there’s this ticking clock. The ticking clock is the problem. So I guess I would like to disarm the ticking clock and find a way to do things at my own pace in a way that isn’t just running around with my hair on fire. I want to be able to enjoy this.

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