In Conversation: Popeye Vogelsang of Calling Hours
He's best known as the singer for Farside, but 28 years after our original interview, Popeye has found the resolve to ask for your ear again—even if he's too modest to see it that way.
On one level, this could be seen as a “reunion interview.” Popeye originally appeared in Anti-Matter in 1995 and his band, Farside, contributed a song to the Anti-Matter compilation album a year later. I am hesitant to call it that—at least, purely—because Popeye’s excellent new band, Calling Hours, just released their debut for Revelation last week, making the much-loved singer a very present concern.
Since that interview, so much has changed: After leaving a solitary life in Los Angeles for the married life in Scranton, Pennsylvania, Popeye was forced to deal with a loss in voiceover work—the career path he established after Farside ended—and the near immediate onset of a pandemic. Calling Hours came out of that sense of uncertainty and displacement, and it challenged Popeye to re-enter the public life he even seemed to struggle with the first time we spoke. As he approaches this new era, I was hoping to understand his seemingly lifelong push/pull between humility and audacity—if even only for the selfish reason that I missed his music, and I want him to keep making more.
Before we move into the present, we should probably catch up from our last interview in 1995. Back then, you took me to some sort of vista; it was like we were on a rock overlooking a building where you said you worked in the children’s department [laughs].
POPEYE: Oh yeah! I used to go there once in a while… God, it was so long ago but I’m getting little tidbits of memories. I think you said, “Is there some special place you like to go?” and I was like, “Yeah, I know a spot.” It was somewhere in Costa Mesa, with the beach somewhere off in the distance. I remember that now. What we discussed, I couldn’t tell you, but I do remember what my quote was for the Anti-Matter comp.
I don’t even remember what I used for the comp.
POPEYE: It had something to do with alcohol—you know, with me not even being straight-edge. But I wasn’t drinking at the time, and I said something to the effect of, “I could get in front of a crowd of 10,000 people and just yell, ‘Budweiser!’ and everyone would go crazy” [laughs]. It was just sort of a commentary on how much society seems to revolve around alcohol consumption.
OK, yeah. That part of the interview was so interesting to me because you were very animated about… I don’t want to say “straight-edge,” because you made it clear that you’d been smoking a pack [of cigarettes] a day since you were 18. But for some reason it really took a turn into this very passionate argument against alcohol. And I love that because it was basically the gloriously confusing bluster of youth. Does that feel like a contradiction now?
POPEYE: I wouldn’t say “contradiction.” But it was something I felt strongly about, having been a non-drinker and just seeing how much damage it can do if you’re not in control of it. We were just seeing a lot of people really go off the deep end or seeing people who were Captain Straight-Edge one minute and then they suddenly reject it all and turn into a complete mess. So a lot of it was just wanting to be staunch, and feeling like, “If you want to drink, that’s your business. But I’m not into it and I think it’s a sad commentary on society how much alcohol is a part of everything.” I’ve also always thought that part of what made the hardcore scene so special was that alcohol wasn’t necessary here. But I think that [passion] comes down to me being an over-idealistic twenty-something with the answers and solutions to all of society’s ills.
Your first band was Borderline. Was that a straight-edge band?
POPEYE: No. We were a hardcore band, but I was still smoking cigarettes and one of the other guys would drink occasionally. I’m pretty sure Dennis [Remsing, later of Outspoken] was the only one who could claim to be full-blown straight-edge. Borderline was the first band where I got to make a record and play shows, but like a lot of bands, we just kind of fell apart. I was still in Borderline when I joined Farside, and then not long after that we fizzled out.
When I think back to that first interview, one of the things I remember most was that you described that spot that you took me to as a place where you could escape. But when I asked you what you wanted to escape from, you went on this very antisocial rant about how you “just don’t want to be around people” [laughs]. Has that attitude softened at all in the last three decades?
POPEYE: I mean, I consider myself a social person. But I think everybody has those moments where you don’t want to be around anybody, where you don’t want to talk to anybody. Sometimes I just want to be a ghost for a little while—whether it’s for an hour or for a week. I still have plenty of moments like that. But I think it’s kind of like what we were talking about earlier: Being in your twenties, life can often be a little more frustrating and confusing. You’re not sure which path you're going to go on, and oftentimes, people can just plain suck. So that doesn’t surprise me that I would say something like that. I don’t know if my attitude has changed so much. I still like my alone time. That doesn’t mean I want to be isolated all the time, but I’ll admit there are plenty of times where I just want to be completely nonexistent when it comes to the world that we live in.
I was rewatching some of that Farside studio movie that Evan Jacobs did, when you were in the studio recording The Monroe Doctrine, and there’s a part where you say, “Part of what I love about making music is that it’s my escape from everything else.” You were really into escape back then.
POPEYE: Well, yeah. When you’re working full-time and going to school full-time and trying to navigate through the automatic drama that comes with being in your twenties, I just felt so incredibly grateful that I had music as a way to escape and express myself and get things out into the ether and get them off my chest. And I can reflect on it and recognize that. That’s why, lyrically, pretty much everything I wrote was about interpersonal stuff, and the really great thing about it was that as soon as the song was written and done, I was able to move on with whatever the issue was that was weighing me down beforehand. It’s almost instantaneous. It’s really kind of incredible.
OK, but when we spoke in 1995, you talked about your dad leaving when you were twelve, and you were really generous and gracious about it. You even said, “I still love him very much.” But then a year later you released a song that says, “I won’t forgive a man who shows no scrap of guilt in how he lives and shows no need to be forgiven.” So what was that about?
POPEYE: [Laughs] Yeah, well, after that interview I did with you I obviously learned some things about him that I was not told about. And it completely, completely changed how I saw him and had a huge effect on our relationship. We never mended that fence after that. It’s funny how in the course of one evening, a conversation I had with my older sister, where she basically said, “Oh, you didn’t know this? I guess you’re not a kid anymore. So here’s some dirt about Dad”—that just made my head spin. It was stuff that I was not prepared for, and it changed our relationship.
I’ve made my peace with it. And again, writing that song was a form of therapy for me. It helped me be able to make my peace with it. I don’t have a relationship with my dad anymore, nor does he have one with my brother or my sister. At that point, he’d been gone for so long, and he wasn’t really a part of our lives, so it was kind of like, We don’t really need you anyway. He didn’t really do anything for us. It was pretty easy to let go of that relationship.
There’s another lyric in that song that says, “I felt no pain until I remembered we both shared the same name,” and I was thinking about the interview we did, and how we talked about the different names you inhabit—like Mike, Michael, or Popeye. As someone who legally changed my name for family reasons, I’m wondering now if allowing the Popeye name to stick was a way for you to deal with that.
POPEYE: No, I don’t think I’ve ever thought of that. It’s never crossed my mind. I mean, it’s not like I chose this nickname. It was just kind of given to me.
True. But you did choose to accept the name at some point. Like, when we met, you said, “Hi, I’m Popeye.” You could have easily just said, “Hi, I’m Mike,” but you didn’t.
POPEYE: It was when the first Farside 7-inch came out. I never got to see the proofs before it was released, and when I grabbed one, it said “Popeye.” So I was like, “OK, I guess I’m Popeye” [laughs]. But on a conscious level, no, I don’t think I ever tried to use it as an alias or as part of a bigger issue regarding my father, mostly because we only share our last name.
With a name like Popeye, though, there’s not that much to live up to. If my name was, like, Crusher or Bruiser or Psycho, then it would be like, “Man, I can’t be a normal guy.” But Popeye is innocuous. In the hardcore scene, that’s just who I am. In normal social settings or in a work situation, I certainly don’t introduce myself as Popeye. My mom doesn’t call me Popeye or anything.
What does your wife call you?
POPEYE: Michael. I’m pretty sure that when I met her I didn’t introduce myself as Popeye, even though it was definitely in a hardcore scene situation. There’s nothing sexy about the name Popeye [laughs]. So I guess I’m able to jump in and out, depending on the situation, with which name I want to lead with. But I don’t feel like I take on different personas by any means.
I wanted to ask you something about the beginning of Farside, because the lore has it that you, quote, “begged” to be in the band. Up until that point you were playing guitar in Borderline. Not singing. And I think it’s interesting because even though Farside was Rob Haworth’s new band, it’s not like this band sounded like [Rob’s old band] Hard Stance. So did you know what you were signing up for? Because musically, you would actually technically have to sing for this band [laughs].
POPEYE: I don’t know that I’d ever heard a note of their music. I don’t even remember how he described what the band sounded like. I was just like, “I’m in. I want to do it. Give me a shot.” He came back a couple of days later with a practice tape that had five songs on it. That was the first I’d heard of them. I was singing along to the tape in my car and hoping to God that I was going to make the cut when I showed up to the next practice. In all fairness, I did not know what I was getting myself into. I just thought, “What the heck. You’re nineteen years old. Even though you’re working and going to school, you have the headspace and you have the time to do this. So give it a shot.”
Which is interesting to me because this story really betrays that thing that you’ve talked about a lot over the years about “keeping your expectations low”—because you don’t want to be disappointed, right? Like, you kind of elbowed your way into Farside. That’s audacity. That’s confidence. That’s not keeping your expectations moderate.
POPEYE: Yeah, that attitude has not really changed for me [laughs]. But you’re right. You definitely have to have some confidence in what you do. If you really take a step back and look at it, just showing up to a rehearsal with a new song and playing it for the other guys, and then thinking, “OK, does anybody like this?”—that takes some guts to put yourself out there. And then going beyond that, having to get up on stage and perform live in front of people can be a nerve-wracking experience. So you have to have a lot of audacity to write and perform and record music. But for me at least, I never wanted to feel like an arrogant jerk about it. I think that’s a big part of why, in the back of my mind, I’d always be thinking, “All right. This is cool. But don’t get your hopes up too high.” Because there are going to be times where it’s not that cool. I try to be prepared for that. Be prepared for let-downs and disappointment. Not everything is going to work out the way you want it to. At the same time, having the guts to give something a shot is very, very important.
I feel like I want to press into you about this, because I think there was a point in my life where I had the same kind of attitude about it. But now, in retrospect, I realize there was an element of fear attached to that. I was afraid that if I said what I really wanted to happen out loud into the world, and it didn’t happen, that I would be extra crushed.
POPEYE: Sure. That makes so much sense to me. I can totally, totally relate to that. It’s almost like that under-promise, over-perform thing. And it still happens. When I showed up to the Calling Hours demo sessions, the band hadn’t heard a note of the vocals; they hadn’t heard the lyrics. I was just in a room with my bandmates and with Brian McTernan, and it’s like, “All right. I gotta jump on the microphone and come in hot and just belt out this song”—and then stand there for a second to see what everyone’s reaction is going to be. So I suppose it’s kind of a personal approach.
OK, but I pulled something else you once said that fits in here. You said, “There were a lot of opportunities that I passed on during the Farside era, and even though I don’t regret the decisions I made at the time, I now realize the universe probably wouldn’t have collapsed if I had simply said ‘fuck it’ and taken more of those chances.” So I see those things as related because I feel like if you keep your expectations moderate, it might also create a little bit of a ceiling that you don’t want to punch through.
POPEYE: Yeah, that’s possible. In my mind, during Farside, I never entertained any thoughts of us becoming a full-time band or becoming huge. I enjoyed the degree of popularity that we had, but I think that if we would have signed to a major label or gone on more of these tours, the possibility of us setting ourselves up for more failures would have been much greater than if we just said, “Why don’t we stay in this smaller pond?” And like you were saying, if you say something out to the world, like, “This is what we’re going to do,” and then it doesn’t happen, it just makes the failure all the more huge.
Do you feel like you were risk-averse?
POPEYE: I don’t think so, but in certain situations, maybe, yes. I was always concerned about my real job and paying bills and my interpersonal relationships. Like, those are things that you’re risking to take bigger chances as an artist. So in some ways, I was definitely averse to certain risks, but at the same time, you’re taking plenty of risks when you get up on stage or release a record or go on tour. I wasn’t risk-averse across the board, but I definitely created a ceiling for myself just so I could be in a safer place.
I remember having conversations about my band with Gary Gersh [the then-president of Capitol Records], where I told him exactly that: “We’re not going to sell a million records. We’re not going to be on the radio. Why do you want to sign us?” But maybe now, in retrospect, I look back and I’m asking myself, “Why were you betting against yourself? Because you don’t decide if you sell a million records, you don’t decide what’s on the radio. How have you already made these decisions that you’re not even in charge of?” [laughs]
POPEYE: And hindsight being 20/20, I think part of it was also not wanting to feel like I was selling out or buying into corporate music or whatever. But yeah, looking back, no one would have really cared [laughs]. Although at the time, so many bands were getting signed and then would get dropped really quickly and it wasn’t the easiest thing to be like, “Well, we’ll just go back to our old scene”—because for a lot of people there was this feeling of, nobody likes you anymore.
To be fair, Farside’s most famous ex-guitar player [Zack de la Rocha] did OK [laughs].
POPEYE: Yes, he did. He did just fine!
What was it like to be on the outside of that?
POPEYE: Everyone was really happy for Zack. [Rage Against the Machine] was a different animal though because they weren’t really a hardcore band; the other guys were not affiliated with the hardcore or punk scene at all. So when that band started, it was just this cool, really innovative band. Most people were like, “Zack’s a super talented guy, and good for him!” It’s not like he was new school when it came to hip-hop either. He’d always been a fan. So it was exciting to watch that trajectory from the outside.
Before Calling Hours happened, did you ever feel like you’d be in a band again?
POPEYE: I don’t know. I’ve never been one to put a band together, so if someone reaches out to me, that’s how it has to happen for me. To be honest, most of the time I don’t think of myself as a musician. Like, I’m not walking around all day thinking, “Hi. I’m Popeye Vogelsang, musician.” I’m more focused on my daily life and work and the normal kind of stuff that you do. But then every once in a while, something will pop up and it’s like, “Oh right. That’s another thing you do.” With Calling Hours, that’s pretty much what happened. Those guys have all known each other forever and they’ve been in multiple different musical projects together. They had all these songs they were writing, and we were chatting, and I said, “Oh, you need a singer? Well, I guess I’m not doing anything. Maybe I could try out!” But it’s not like I was reaching out to anybody looking for a project to do.
I talked to Garrett [Rothman, bassist for Calling Hours] about the band and he told me this story about how you had this concern when you came into the band of, “Are you guys going to accept me?” And they said, “What do you mean? Of course we’re going to accept you!” But you were like, “You guys already have your own thing…” So when I put that up against the Farside story—where you literally just walked in and said, “I’m your guy, fuck everyone, I’m the singer of this band”—it doesn’t really add up. Where did that come from?
POPEYE: I wonder about it too. It might have a lot to do with just getting older. I think when you’re 19 or 20 years old and you fall flat on your face, it’s like, “Big deal, so does everybody!” But it’s different now. It’s like, can you even do this anymore? Or, having such a large gap in having not written lyrics or vocals for anything in such a long time, it’s like, are you even good at this anymore? So yeah, there were certainly these moments of self-doubt.
Luckily, the other guys in the band and Brian McTernan and everyone at Revelation have been super into what we’re doing, so it didn’t take too long before I was like, “OK, I got this and I can fucking crush this.” But at first, I did feel like I was a little bit of an interloper because I barely knew the guys. Two of the guys in Farside were people I had known for many years, so I felt comfortable just walking in and giving it a shot. Whereas the guys in Calling Hours, we literally barely knew each other [laughs]. Plus at that point, you know, I was really just riding on my reputation as “Popeye from Farside,” and knowing they were fans, basically. So now I had something to live up to. I didn’t have anything to live up to in Farside. But now I have to meet this bar that I didn’t have before.
There’s a part in the Farside studio movie where Evan asks you if this is what you want to do for the rest of your life, and you were very clearly like, “No.” You sort of expect someone that age to say, “Well, I don’t know about the rest of my life, but right now I can afford to take some chances and see where this goes.” But you were like, “No. I want a job!” [laughs]. I’ve never heard that before.
POPEYE: Yeah, I can see how that might be kind of a deflating thing for someone to say [laughs]. It wasn’t because I didn’t love Farside, but at that particular point in the late ‘90s, we were all done with school and we had “real” jobs and we were hunkering into career paths and potential marriages and adulting. Being able to have had the opportunity to do everything we did, and being able to reflect on all of it, we can say that we all went through several different life stages over the course of the ten or eleven years that Farside was together. From literally just being out of high school to going to college or going to Europe for the first time or even touring in America for the first time. We were trying to manage all this stuff at once and we all experienced it as friends and bandmates; we went through so much. And one of the things I’m eternally grateful for is that we still all like each other and we make it a point to try to stay in touch with one another. But it just seemed, at that time, that this wasn’t a life I wanted. I don’t want to go on tour six months out of the year. I like being at home. I have other interests I’d like to pursue.
Maybe it was me misinterpreting Evan’s question a little bit—like, “Do you want to be recording and playing shows and going on tour for the rest of your life as your full-time job?” Hell no! But if the question was, “Do you just want to have an opportunity to have a creative outlet and play music once in a while?” Yes. I would love to fool myself into thinking I could do this when I’m in my eighties or nineties. It would be fucking awesome if I could be playing music as an octogenarian. But I also wonder if it had something to do with how, in the scope of musical genres, hardcore is pretty young. You know, it’s not like hardcore had been around forever. So maybe I couldn’t possibly think that we would be doing this kind of stuff in the future. I think all of us were going into uncharted territory.
And now it’s 2023, and you have a Calling Hours record out on Revelation [laughs]. I’d like to think that you’re able to hear some of these young Popeye ideas and think, “Oh, just hush, little baby.”
POPEYE: I mean, you grow and you change and you mature and you have different life experiences that will hopefully change you for the better. I’m sure that I would roll my eyes at most of everything that I said [back then]—either in a personal conversation or in an interview—and be like, “Oh my God, you have no idea what’s in store for you, man” [laughs]. I had no idea what I’d be doing at this stage of my life or if I was ever going to do music again. But I’m thrilled that I’m part of this gang, this band. We really like what we’re doing. We really like each other as people, which is phenomenal. And it’s absurd to think that Revelation is still chugging along and that Jordan [Cooper] has been running a successful business since 1987!
Honestly, when people have asked me over the years why I think Texas is the Reason has remained in the public consciousness, I usually say that 50 percent of the reason is that our label still exists [laughs]. But I really believe that’s true!
POPEYE: Very possibly! It’s not a very common tale. But I wonder if it’s a generational thing, where there’s more and more younger people who are getting into hardcore [on one side], and then you have the older generations who have a disposable income, so they can afford to buy the fifteenth repressing of an album that’s on a colored vinyl that’s never existed before. I don’t know what Jordan’s secret is. He’d probably be the first one to tell you, “I don’t really know what I’m doing. I just wanted to put out the Warzone 7-inch.”
You know, it’s funny though. One of the things I used to think about—even before anyone I knew started having kids—we’d have these conversations where we would ponder this future of like, “What is the offspring of hardcore people going to be like?”
I mean, in New York, we know. There are bands that are literally made up of the offspring of hardcore people.
POPEYE: It’s crazy because everybody in our age group—their kids are old enough to be doing that kind of stuff. But when they were little kids, I would pick their parents’ brains, like, “Do you make them listen to hardcore? Can they listen to whatever they want?”
How crazy is it that Toby [Morse]’s son [Max] plays drums for H2O now? And he’s a killer drummer!
POPEYE: And [Gameface singer] Jeff Caudill’s daughter is just killing it. She’s going on tour and doing all this stuff. It’s like, fucking hell, man. I wasn’t that accomplished when I was her age. Another friend of mine sent me a message about how his seventeen-year-old son is into hardcore, and how he told him to pick a CD and put it on, and without prompting, he pulled out Farside’s Rigged. That’s just amazing. Because I don’t see Farside as being a timeless band by any means…
God, there you go again.
POPEYE: [Laughs] Yeah… I’m just always very hesitant to rest on my laurels and hang my hat on something that I’ve done. Because I don’t see being a musician as a series of accomplishments. I think it’s an expression, or doing something simply because you love it. Like, getting back to keeping the expectations low, I think I look at it as being more realistic.
OK, I had one last thing. Back in our original conversation, you very much put forth the idea that Farside was a major and formative part of your life. But you recently told me that you were, quote, “totally cool with Farside just drifting away into obscurity.” How do you reconcile those two ideas?
POPEYE: Well, as far as life experiences go, being in that band was how I got to do so many amazing things and how I made so many friends and got to do stuff that the vast majority of people do not get to do, considering how many people are on this planet. How many people actually get to create something out of literally thin air, something intangible, have somebody pay to record those songs and put them into the public, and then people actually buy it? There is not a single day that goes by when I remember something or when I get a random text message from an old friend or whatever that I don’t pause and think, Wow. None of this would have happened if you hadn’t joined that band, if you hadn’t put in the work. Farside is always going to be something near and dear to my heart—my time with that band, our time together. And it’s not like we had a tumultuous ending. We just kind of reached the end of the road. So my attitude is that I just want to leave it where we left it. I feel like if we tried to reheat that old thing, it probably wouldn’t taste very good… That’s the dumbest analogy [laughs].
But that’s more of a reunion question, which is not what I’m getting at. I mean more that when you talk about Farside “drifting away into obscurity,” I interpret that to mean that people might forget it.
POPEYE: As important as it was to me, I don’t want to feel like it defined me. It’s always going to be a huge part of who I am. But I don’t feel I have to lean on it to feed my ego. I want to feel like I love it, but I don’t need it. I want what I’m doing now to stand on its own. This is what I’m putting my attention into.
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I know this is early on, but you mentioned a compilation album that anti-matter put out in it's original form: have you considered doing that in it's current form?
In my humble opinion, Texas is the Reason are pioneers of post-hardcore and their album "Do You Know Who You Are?" remains relevant today because their music continues to influence numerous genres of music, from hardcore to emo, and has stood the test of time.