In Conversation: Jeremy Bolm of Touché Amoré
On Touché Amoré's new album, Jeremy Bolm explores the pernicious dread of modern living through a deeply personal lens. The hardest part, he says, is knowing that's not the same thing as "fixing" it.
I don’t remember meeting Jeremy Bolm for the first time. He’s just one of those people in hardcore who seems to have always been there, someone who leaves evidence of his active presence and participation everywhere he goes. Since 2007, he’s been the singer of Touché Amoré, but over the years, he’s also been a writer and publisher, owner-evangelist of Secret Voice Records, and host of the long-running First Ever Podcast, among many other things. But in order to be the person he is, Jeremy needs to put himself out there. A lot. And sometimes, this kind of life can create psychological friction—stress, anxiety, low-level dread. I can attest to this from personal experience.
Touché Amoré’s upcoming sixth album, Spiral in a Straight Line, due out next week, began as an acknowledgment of the unconscious arising of these feelings during the writing process. It’s about that very modern moment that we’re in, with all of our self-consciousness and self-diagnoses, and all of the things that make us feel overexposed and underappreciated. Hardcore kids are not immune to it. At the same time, Jeremy tells me, this is not a bare confessional. “This may be a shock to hear,” he insists, “but I have a hard time being completely open with people. I’ll be open enough with people, and I’ll say things that are probably ‘too deep’ for some people about what I’m going through, but I do keep a lot. I keep a lot away.”
The readers can’t see this, obviously, but I wore this shirt today in your honor. It says, “Leonard Cohen Was Right” [laughs]. So I wanted to start there because while I’ve heard you talk about Leonard Cohen as something of a touchstone for you—in your life and in your work—I’ve never really heard you expand on that. What do you think it is about him that so deeply resonates with you?
JEREMY: There are things that appear in the actual work itself—the writing, his lyricism, the way he can make something feel so dark and so heavy and so sad and so honest, while also having these tinges of sexuality to them. Things that, especially in the kind of music we make, I don’t even know that I could comfortably write about. But there are also things about his life that are very inspiring to me. I think the fact that he didn’t put out an album until he was in his thirties is always going to be one of those things that reminds you it’s never too late to have a new chapter in your life. I mean, sure, he was obviously a published author and he was sort of successful in that way, but even that aspect is really nice to know.
Also, as someone who does not have what one would describe as “a nice singing voice,” you know, he just has a very unique singing voice and he doesn’t have a lot of range, and that's something I can certainly relate to [laughs]. There are just all these little things about him. Sometimes I’ll throw on an old interview with him and [admire] the way he is so generous; he is so old school and polite. It feels like there are always new things for me to appreciate about him. I was lucky enough to see him live before he passed away, and it’s funny because it was the same weekend that I got to see Morrissey for the first time live…
That’s quite a pair.
JEREMY: Yeah. I saw Morrissey on a Friday at Hollywood High School, and then I drove up to Oakland to see Leonard. Morrissey played for maybe 80 minutes; Leonard played for three and a half hours. The humility and the generosity between the two of them was like night and day! It really made me go, “Yeah, I’m Team Leonard for life.” Whereas Morrissey, as we know, likes to be praised and toot his own horn and let the crowd tear his shirt off and worship the ground he walks on, any time one of Leonard’s band or backup singers would do a solo, the spotlight would go on that person—and Leonard would always say their name afterwards so the audience could applaud. Even if the same person got three solos, he would still do it every single time. It was very much like he was saying, “This show is not for me, even if I’m billed on top. We’re doing this together.”
What year was this?
JEREMY: 2012 or 2013.
OK, so this is post-Dead Horse. I ask because it feels like kind of a weird coincidence that you saw them both for the first time in the same week, and then, when you went in to re-record Dead Horse for its tenth anniversary, you replaced that lyric you wrote about Morrissey in “And Now It’s Happening In Mine” with a lyric about Leonard Cohen.
JEREMY: Yeah. That was a move from once Morrissey officially started talking out of his neck. I was like, “I don’t actually want to learn a thing from this man” [laughs]. He wrote some good songs at a whole different time in his life. I think he’s totally incapable of it now.
At what point did you make the decision to change that lyric?
JEREMY: I probably changed it live about six or seven years before we re-recorded it. There are a lot of lyrics that I just eventually do differently. I’m a big fan of that stuff, even if it’s something subtle. Like, I remember the first time I saw Glassjaw live, I want to say it was in 2000 with Deftones at the Palladium in Hollywood. And at the end of a song, Daryl starts singing Vision of Disorder lyrics on stage: “Don’t talk to me about your love, don’t talk to me about your love.” And I’m in the audience like, I don’t think anyone knows what he’s doing! It felt like a moment for me. It was like, That’s for me. Anytime you do something like that—where someone in the audience who knows every word and is expecting you to say that word, but then you do something slightly different—I’m a big fan of that.
When I interviewed Tim Kasher last month, I remember asking him if there were ever any things that he wished he could rewrite—things where he might correct his former self. So the Morrissey-Cohen switch really stood out to me because that’s not just a creative flourish; there’s a semantic difference there. Are there other songs you would change if given the chance?
JEREMY: I always try to go into most things at least trying my best to be as honest as possible about whatever it is that I’m going through in those moments—and I haven’t often written about specific people or anything like that because I always knew from being in bands before that feelings change. So I don’t want to write a song about a specific instance to where, if that gets resolved, I now have to sing that song for the rest of my life and it just loses meaning every time that I do it. I never wanted that.
There’s something that you said in an interview once that I’m thinking about right now. You said, “Failure would be doing things we’re not comfortable with and regretting them later.” And then you said, “We’ve had those moments in our career here and there where we’ve maybe done a thing, taking a chance on something and it feeling wrong, and then it actually being wrong where you’re like, ‘Wow, that wasn’t worth it.’” Can you remember what it was that you might have been thinking about when you said that?
JEREMY: I can think of two things. One was when we were on tour with AFI, and a shoe company—forgive me for not remembering which one—was like, “Hey. We’ll give you X amount of money to fly to Hamburg to play a super small show that will be free for your audience on this day.” We were like, “Yo! We’ll get paid, free flights, free accommodations, and play a show in Hamburg, and then rejoin the tour”—because there happened to be a week off on the AFI tour where they were doing festivals and we were going to be stuck in the middle of nowhere. It felt so serendipitous, so we were like, “Let’s do it!” But then we got there and it became very apparent that this was not advertised. Nobody knew that we were even doing it. They were supposed to be giving away tickets at a record store that did not advertise that they had the tickets.
At this point, we were doing pretty well in Germany. So for us, we thought this show would be a home run, a super small show in a town that we do well in, and it would be really rowdy because it was on a boat. But we got there, and we had the horseshoe when we played; people weren’t even up front. We were playing mostly to staff members and maybe twelve people that were there because they knew who our band was. It was one of the most humiliating experiences, so that was one where it felt like we didn’t really think this one through [laughs]. I can’t blame us for taking that chance, but it made us realize we had to think a little deeper about this stuff.
The other one would have been playing the Made In America festival in Philly, which is Jay-Z’s festival. The headliners were Rihanna and Coldplay. We played a stage that was basically there to perform to the people on the walkway leading to the main stage. So no one, at any point, really stopped to watch us. They were all passing by on their way to watch DJ Khaled [laughs].
Do you look back in retrospect and appreciate being humiliated like that?
JEREMY: Yes! We all need a big slice of humble pie every now and again. It’s so important. So would I change those experiences? Fuck no. Those are the stories that we all laugh about now. It’s all a part of growth, and I think growth is important. And it just informs you more going down the line whenever something comes across your table—especially at this point where all of us, I think, are so grateful for any opportunity. Because there is no shortage of bands. And there is no shortage of fucking ways for companies to try to take advantage of whatever you have going on in that moment to amplify whatever product they’re trying to sell. That’s always going to be a thing. You learn as you go along.
One of things about you that I love is that your personal history in hardcore is one that feels almost compulsive in terms of participation: Bands, fanzines, your label, your podcast. The first thing I ever heard about you was that you actually ran a Thursday fan-site very early on. So maybe this is where the generation gap between us is a little bit wider, but I remember not being able to understand the impetus for making a fan-site like that. I was always curious. Like, what did you get out of doing that?
JEREMY: It’s a great question. So first, they didn’t have a website at the time. They owned Thursday dot-com or dot-net or whatever, I forget what it was, but I’m pretty sure it was just a main page that said “Coming Soon” on it—and [Full Collapse], by that point, had been out for a very long time. I found access to them because somewhere their contact was posted as “thursdaydove” at aol.com. So, you know, I threw that motherfucker in my AOL buddy list just waiting for it to come online [laughs]. And eventually it did! So I IM’d that name, and I’m pretty sure it was Steve [Pedulla] who ran it. I was like, “Hey, I’m a huge fan of your band.” And his response was, “How did someone in California hear our band?” So I told him I knew how to make a bad, pretty janky website and that I’d love to do it for you guys.
It was exciting. It was this band that I just discovered and fell in love with, and now I have some sort of limited access to them, and they’re being nice to me and allowing me to do this thing for them. And then getting to meet them for the first time, when they played the Glass House [in Pomona, California]… It was such a humiliating night for me because I had some form of laryngitis or something—my voice is always going to be an issue for me—but I was hardly able to speak. I was like, “Hi, I’m Jeremy, who does your website,” and they all lit up and gave me a huge hug. Geoff [Rickly] demanded that I take every shirt they had at the merch table. I think about that now in reality: They were first of four on this tour, so to give every single shirt to a near-stranger, that was a really nice thing to do! From then on, they always made sure I was taken care of if they were coming to town.
It’s really interesting to think about, because it feels like there are so many layers of accessibility to bands these days. Even with Anti-Matter, in the first iteration of the zine, I would just show up to a show and be like, “Hey, do you want to do an interview?” And we would just sit on the sidewalk and talk. There wasn’t a publicist or a manager. There was no red tape between us. I realize that still exists on some scale, but I can’t remember the last time I did that. And knowing what I know now about playing in a touring band, I don’t think I can just presuppose that I can go to a show and expect that you’d have an hour and a half to hang out with me.
JEREMY: No, I know what you mean. There was a magazine out here called Status that me, Ray Harkins, and Joey Cahill all used to write for. It was mostly album reviews, but the first time I ever did an interview, I talked to Jake Bannon [from Converge] for Status. I forget how it was set up, but it was at The Troubadour, and I found him, and he was nice. He came outside and we sat on a curb. I still have the tapes somewhere; I’ve never listened to them. I’m scared to listen to them! I was so nervous. He claims he remembers that night, but I don’t know [laughs].
In terms of accessibility, you and I have these front-facing projects where we are essentially directly connected to the people who support our work—through Substack or Patreon. But that also requires constantly generating new work. And there have been times in the last year where I’ve had a little voice in my head wondering if I am putting too much of myself out there. Like, is there a point where I run out of things to say? A point where I’ve shared too much? A point where this doesn’t work? I’m wondering if that voice ever enters your head.
JEREMY: Yes, 100 percent. Especially when I’m writing a new record where I get that feeling that’s like, What can I say that I haven’t said already? It’s the same sort of thing. I am hard on myself because I’ve been in a band this long and I’m still writing these kinds of songs. Is there going to be a listener that’s going to be like, “Bro, how have you not fixed this yet?!” [laughs]. You know what I’m saying? There’s this thing where I imagine the voice of the listener being like, “You’re still complaining.” But I know that person doesn’t exist. I know that we are all going through these sorts of things.
I used to be a lot more forthcoming on social media in general, but I’ve dialed it back a lot in the last year to where I might have something ready to post on [Instagram] Stories or whatever—even if it’s just a silly thought or something that has some snark to it or maybe something I think is funny—and I’ll end up not posting it because it’s just not worth it. I know that in an hour I’m going to be like, Why did I post that? Or I’ll think, How about I just not have any of these feelings and not do anything at all and just go about my day? I don’t know if that’s self-preservation or if that’s self-preservation-slash-anxiety, but I’ve just gotten to the point where I think I’d rather not do it at all. Especially on Twitter, which is just a fucking walking cesspool. 99 percent of the time, the only thing I ever post on Twitter is just: “New episode. New episode. New episode.” I just can’t give myself to it because it doesn’t make me feel good anymore. And maybe that’s a positive. Maybe it’s better for me to be more present to what’s around me.
Did the response to Stage Four, in particular, ever make you feel like you put too much out there? That’s maybe one of the most personal records I’ve ever heard.
JEREMY: [Pauses] Um… No. Because even when I listen back to it, I know that I got out what I needed to get out of it. So for that, I can’t really be too harsh on myself for getting too vulnerable. I forget if we’ve ever talked about it, but the one memory that sticks out to me the most is playing [Stage Four] for Pat Kindlon before we put it out. He’s sitting shotgun as I’m driving around playing it for him, and he turns the volume down and says, “Who is this for?” He was like, “You’re going to alienate your audience with this. No 20-year-old wants to think about their parent dying. Your audience is not going to connect with this.” I just said, “Hey, you’re probably right but I couldn’t write about anything else.” And you know, he was wrong because that was our most popular record, so fuck you, Pat Kindlon! [laughs] But it was a very Pat thing to do, and I knew it, because that’s his sense of humor and I adore him for it.
But yeah, that record for me… I didn’t go to grief counseling. I should probably still just go to grief counseling. Coming up next month will be exactly ten years since [my mom] passed away, which is crazy. There’s still a lot of stuff I haven’t resolved. I always like to think that writing is going to resolve something for me, or that performing is going to resolve it for me, but there’s always something new to feel about it. Like, we’re going to literally play Fest on the same weekend, which is where we played when my mom died.
Oh damn.
JEREMY: But I wanted this to happen! I made our agent set this up and book it because I want to own that. I want to do this. And I think it’ll feel good for me to kind of reclaim this thing ten years later. Or at least that’s what I’m telling myself. When I told Pierce [Jordan] from Soul Glo that I was doing that, his response was, “Are you trying to hurt yourself? What are you doing?” [laughs] But what do you think? Do you think this is crazy for me to do? Or do you think it makes sense?
I think that, ten years later, it has the potential to be healthy. As long as you’re not looking for “closure.” I don’t think closure is a thing. But using different strategies as a way to work through your feelings about something—that’s a thing. And this feels like a strategy to work on something.
JEREMY: Totally.
I want to go back to something you said earlier about never having been to grief counseling. It’s my understanding that you’ve never actually been to therapy ever. And I’ve also heard you say that if you went to therapy, you might not have anything to sing about [laughs]. You don’t really believe that, do you?
JEREMY: That’s my cop-out excuse. Because I’ve talked to so many friends that have been therapy-pilled about this, where they’re like, “You’re never fixed. You just have a new way of framing it and it gives you a deeper understanding of it.” And I’m like, “Yeah, OK, sure” [laughs]. But I know it would benefit me in many, many, many ways.
It’s funny, there was actually one or two times where I put in some effort to do something about it. I was telling my primary doctor about how I just can’t sleep, ever. I was telling him about anxiety and sort of waking up with consistent dread every single day—which is pretty much the entire point of this record that we’re about to put out. And he was basically like, “That’s just old age.” I was like, “Um, something tells me you’re not a good doctor” [laughs]. But he was who I could afford on my… what I call “the Rust Plan.” It’s not quite Bronze. I have the Rust Plan, where even if I wanted to find a therapist, there’s no fucking way in hell it’s going to be covered. And as someone who is out here living by myself for the first time in my life, paying three times the rent I used to, having to now also work a part-time job, I can’t afford it nor do I have time for it. So there’s also that aspect. Thank God I have a notebook and a band, I guess? I don’t think my problems are going to get resolved anytime soon.
I mean, that’s actually valid. And I think practical and financial access are things we don’t talk about enough when we have these conversations about mental health.
JEREMY: Yeah. I mean, I know I’m going to do [therapy] at some point, and I know I’ll be better for it. At the same time, and this may be a shock to hear, but I have a hard time being completely open with people. I’ll be open enough with people, and I’ll say things that are probably “too deep” for some people about what I’m going through, but I do keep a lot. I keep a lot away. So the idea of being with a therapist who I don’t know personally in any capacity and then starting to reveal my deepest thoughts… I think that I would freak out. That also makes me a little anxious.
That’s probably a good segue to get into making the new record, for which you returned to Ross Robinson to produce. You’ve called working with Ross “the closest thing to therapy that you’ve ever had.” I’ve heard a lot about his psychological techniques, and I know most of them seem really focused on the singer—like, for instance, the practice of making you go through your lyrics out loud, line by line, explaining them, and then asking your band how it makes them feel. Was that a what-the-fuck moment for you?
JEREMY: This is probably not the most sexy answer for this, but I had known going into it that this is just what was going to happen. I was prepared for it. I had talked to bands that worked with him, and I knew all the lore about Ross Robinson. All of it. So I went in knowing that I had to be open in these sorts of ways, and knowing that most [of the albums he’s produced] feature the singers of the bands crying—but I am someone who is incapable of crying. Unless I’m fucking watching a Pixar movie, then maybe I’ll get a tear down my face. Otherwise, I can’t think of the last time I cried. Probably not since I was a child. Even when my mom passed, I had tears falling out of my face, but I didn’t have that release of a hard cry. It doesn’t happen for me. I would fucking love it, too, because I know it would feel so good.
But working with Ross. The vulnerability in that moment is really extreme, not only because I am doing this in front of a stranger—being Ross Robinson—but because I know my band. These are the guys that are my family, and the guys in my band have never questioned anything I’ve ever written before because that’s just my job, and they give me the space to do what I’m going to do. So for all of the sudden to have to be this open with them about stuff… I mean, we’re from Los Angeles. We don’t say how we ever really feel about anything. I never know how they really feel about things and they never know how I really feel about things. I was anxious to see how they would respond. So to come to find out that all of us were extremely supportive of one another, that was nice.
I think that those sessions with Ross, what they did for me therapy-wise, was that they made me feel really supported. Everyone, especially Ross, would constantly remind me: “We all have your back. The point of all this is that we have your back and we want to make the best foundation possible for you to do what you need to do on top of it. So everybody in this room is going to be playing their best. Every note of music that’s going to come out is in support of your emotions and feelings.” That’s what was so important to Ross in doing those things.
When we spoke in December, you made a comment about how Stage Four was the easiest record you ever wrote because there was so much material to draw from. But then you said, “When you’re starting from scratch and having to be like, what am I singing about today? That’s hard.” So what was the first topic or motif you remember clicking with when you started working on Spiral?
JEREMY: That idea of that dread and anxiety I was describing, which I think is a pretty universal feeling that just about every one of us goes through at some point in our lives. Like, most of us do the same routine where you wake up and you look at your phone and you’re like, “Welp, now my day is off to a bad start!” I remember hearing an interview with Ben Gibbard, or maybe Jenny Lewis, about how they sleep with their phone in the other room when they go to bed. God bless them for that. But also, I think it was Ben Gibbard who talked about how even in the morning, when he wakes up, he exercises and drinks coffee and has a meal, and then, maybe two hours after he’s awake, he’ll go check his phone. I can only imagine how much better your day starts that way. Like, oh my God, what a dream.
The first song we wrote for this record is a song called “Altitude,” and in that song I say, “I spiral in a straight line, like some clever reaction / I didn’t know how to feel, was I impressed that it happened?”—which is me taking the piss out of myself. There’s this idea that all of us are going through this tornado of emotions most days, where we feel out of control and then we still have to go out and do a job, or show up for people that we love, or show up for people that we care about, or show up for people that we’re taking care of, or whatever it is. Whatever our life duty is, we still have to do it, even when things aren’t so good up here [in your head]. That’s the straight line aspect: It’s about having to move forward. So when I say I’m taking the piss out of myself, I say that because it’s like saying, “Wow, even when you’re going through all this, you still think you need to be clever about it” [laughs].
Before we wrap this up I wanted to talk about one more thing. For people who don’t know, you and your ex-partner have spent years adopting very senior rescue dogs. You’d spend however much time the dog had left, and then the dog would pass and you would rescue another one. And I remember the first time you told me about this, just thinking to myself that I could never handle that. Like, I still hard cry about my dog who passed three years ago. This practice would devastate me. But you keep doing it. I know you’re still co-parenting dogs with your ex. What does this say about who you are?
JEREMY: Well… as we know, senior dogs are not the first pick of the litter when you’re at a shelter. In general, it’s not a good situation for them. It’s even terribly heartbreaking that they’ve ended up there, and more often than not, it’s because of a circumstance that is really sad. You can only imagine how scary it is for them, and—especially if it’s a kill shelter—no one is going to take these dogs. Also, a lot of them have health issues, which has been really hard to navigate because my partner and I were not ever the kind of people who were very financially stable. So we’ve taken financial risks with this stuff.
But you know, it’s nice to have a pet that’s lived some form of life. It’s really nice to know that whatever life this dog had before, you’re going to give them in these last few years the best life they could have possibly had. Our dog Lemon, who we currently share, like, it’s very clear that this dog had puppies and was just ditched. She had been through the system twice, which is crazy to think about. She had been taken to a shelter by two different owners over time. I cannot imagine giving this dog up! She is the nicest dog in the entire world.
I don’t know if I’m getting to the core of an answer here, but ultimately, my ex and I, we have both lost people in our lives. And maybe, in some way, without even fully realizing it, we kind of just know that if we were able to get through that, we could probably get through this. Not that it makes it any easier—every time we’ve ever had to put a pet down, it was awful—but you sign yourself up for that when you get any pet. You know that day is going to come eventually. So ultimately, we just want to do as much as we can for these dogs and cats because we know we’ll be able to get there together. We know we can just be there for them. Whether we’re fully conscious of it or not, we just want to make sure this dog feels as much love as possible at the end. What that says about me, I don’t know.
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Being a TA fan I was so looking forward to this interview and it absolutely didn't let me down. For someone who claims he isn't totally open, Jeremy sure shares such personal stuff here. It's why I love his writing so much. It's so personal and so incredibly relatable. I also believe your skills as an interviewer Norman aided his openness because so many people who do your interviews remark on how much they are sharing and that it's not normal for them to do so. You obviously not only ask great questions but must make them feel safe and comfortable. It absolutely makes all your interviews must reads.
I must also thank Jeremy for his comments on not being able to full on cry. I also tear up quite a lot in my life for many reasons but just never seem to be able to have a full on cry. My mother died of cancer in essentially the same scenario as Jeremy's mom and I do never fully cried. I've always felt broken or that there is something wrong with me. I fell less so after this interview so thank you both.
So good. I had the great experience of meeting Jeremy in the early stages of his hc existence and we (band at the time) knew he and TA were on to great things. His perspective and honestly has always been something to admire and I’m glad many many people agree. Also gotta love the LA boi in him.