A Chat with Sunny Daze & the Weathermen

I had the honor of sitting down with members of Sunny Daze & the Weathermen, the Pittsburgh-based group whose album Sunny Daze for President I previously reviewed. Joining me (over Zoom) for a chat in a roadside diner was Max Begler (lead vocals/guitar), Jason Kuehnle (keyboards), Nate Ritz (guitar/vocals), and Dan Watts (drums/vocals). Unfortunately, they are not actual weathermen, but that does not take away from the group’s talent, charisma, or their plans to run for political office (and subsequently destroy it).

What is “flower punk?”

BEGLER: When I was, like, 20 or 21, I had listened to Frank Zappa’s We’re Only in It for the Money, and one of the songs is called “Flower Punk.” I started thinking about it in context of when that album was made, when punk wasn’t really a thing, or didn’t mean what it means today. I kinda fall into that range. I’m not a punk, and I’m not a hippie, but I do have punk elements to things that I write and enjoy. The 60s have had a big influence on me, musically and literary. When we started working on stuff, I wanted to call the band the Flower Punks, but everyone that was in the group so far said, “No, that’s a bad name. We’re not doing that.” We call ourselves Flower Punks, though.

Your list of musical influences could go on for miles. Could you condense it for an interview question?

WATTS: For me, it’s a lot of garage and psychedelic bands like the OCs, King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard, Ty Segall, those kinds of heavy-hitter garage bands. Dance-punk-type bands like LCD Soundsystem and the Rapture influence my drum style. Powerful and loud, but dialed-in.

BEGLER: I feel like I have three major influences, as far as my playing style goes.

1. Lou Reed. The Velvet Underground is a huge one. The very percussive nature of his playing, and how he has a lot of muting and noisemaking.

2. Johnny Kidd & the Pirates, who do “Please Don’t Touch” and “Shakin’ All Over.” I found one of those two songs back in 2020 and really got into Mick Green, the band’s guitar player. His style and technique are super similar to Lou Reed.

3. 50s/60s garage rock, rockabilly, surf, psychedelic, fuzz, that sort of thing.

RITZ: For me, playing guitar in the band, I’m looking at guys like Jimi Hendrix, John Scofield, or even Joe Walsh, where they’re blending all elements of blues and jazz and rock ‘n’ roll into something that’s their own. For mixing, I’m looking at what the band is showing me and expanding my horizons.

KUEHNLE: I come from a funk-jazz background. I’d say, for this band is just these guys. This style is new to me, and they’re directing me to try out new sounds and listen to new groups. The base of my knowledge is funk and jazz, and I throw that in there when I can.

BEGLER: A lot of Doors stuff for us. Jim Morrison is a big influence for me vocals-wise.

Your EP has a surf-rock sound, and the album leans more into psychedelia. Do you hope to experiment more in your career?

BEGLER: Our sound, it’s weird telling someone what our sound is like because when we started, I was doing a lot of folk and country. We were incorporating those into our sets, so we’ve always have an evolving sound, but we have a new direction with the neo-psychedelic and fuzz. This amount of psychedelia we were adding is a taste for what’s gonna come further along. Dan recently got me into synth stuff. We’ve been listening to a lot of Viagra Boys. Just noise-driven, out-there stuff.

I love the vocals on your songs, but I can’t understand the lyrics sometimes through the fuzz and distortion. Is this your strategy to get more listeners?

RITZ: Even I don’t know what he’s saying sometimes.

KUEHNLE: When we did our album show, Max goes, “Sing along if you know, and it’s all just fuzz.” I’m like, “Nobody in their right mind knows the words. I don’t know the words!”

BEGLER: I tried for a long time to write meaningful, heartfelt lyrics. Eventually, what I decided on was that the lyrics are just the instrument to get the voice there. The vocals are the most important. I’m still trying to write things that are meaningful, and lot of this album was more pointed in meaning being a huge thing over being abstract. I like using voice as a weird instrument itself. The album is semi-conceptual, and you can get a lot of meaning out of it if you want.

The album contains a few politically charged numbers, particularly “Money in Hell.” Are you interested in doing more political numbers?

BEGLER: That’s Dan’s song. He sent me a demo, and I thought, “It rocks. We need to do this.” I mean, our songs “Goner” and “Ground Soup” are political. “Ground Soup” is a song I wrote not long after the East Palestine train derailment. We’re an hour away from there, and you could see the smoke from where we were. Sometimes, Iyou get those angry jolts and write a song. I don’t know if the political side of it is important for what we’re doing next, but it will always be part of us, since we are a political band in a lot of ways. We’re not a Dead Kennedys, but we will tell you things.

With seven Weathermen in the studio, how does the group effectively collaborate?

WATTS: For the album, it was just us three [himself, Begler, and Ritz]. We got a lot of demos down. From there, I would meet with our bass player Colin to go through everything. Jason would work at his home studio and send me his stuff. Everybody had an opportunity to get as many tracks as they wanted to on the album. It was really us three sifting through the tracks and making the album.

BEGLER: Nate did a lot of things that Dan or I wouldn’t have thought of. He took the songs and bulked them out in a way that we loved. Any things we wanted to try, he was open to doing that. When we put synth on “Snake Bite,” we didn’t know how much synth would be on the album. We said, “Let’s play around with this.” How we operate with music is we’ll say, “Hey! I have a song, Nate has a riff. Let’s see what we can do with it.” We see what we can do with it until things come around. It’s collaborative because we know we can do something cool.

What do you do when you experience a lack of creativity?

RITZ: With this band, there’s a lot of old material. Max and Dan are always working on new stuff, so when we get tired of one thing, we revisit an older idea. For me, that keeps the process going.

WATTS: I rely on these guys, but listening to other music also helps. Not to steal, but to give me ideas as to where I want to go and turn into my own thing. For “Money in Hell,” I came up with the chord structure, the lyrics, and a simple riff, and everything else came from the band adding their own elements to the song. We rely on each other to build the songs from the ground up.

BEGLER: We talk to each other a lot. We’re always sending each other demos. Dan and Nate work 9-5s. I work, what’s that called, freelance, and we get ideas throughout the day and send them to each other. I’ve learned to trust that when I’m not writing something, there’s something else I’m working on. I don’t force myself to write. I might just play guitar or work on skill stuff.

Let’s say that Sunny Daze & the Weathermen grows so big that the band goes on national tour. Who would you have as the opening act?

BEGLER: That’s so hard.

WATTS: I think a band that would make sense to play a show with is Viagra Boys. That would be fun.

BEGLER: If our sound was a little bit tougher, I’d feel like probably the Osees or King Gizzard. I really like Babe Rainbow. Those guys rule.

WATTS: I want Joni Mitchell to open all of our shows to set the mood.

RITZ: Elton John.

BEGLER: With Billy Joel, the Piano Man.

If Sunny Daze for President was a serious campaign to get the band into office, what would be the first thing you guys would do?

WATTS: Make weed legal and start war with Canada.

BEGLER: We’re gonna go back to nature. We’re gonna have a liquidation sale of the furniture in the White House.

RITZ: We’d implement a nationwide high-speed rail.

BEGLER: We’ll resolve homeless, implement the nationwide high-speed rail, and make Congress sell off all their assets.

KUEHNLE: In Minecraft.

Once you destroy the office, what’s the new national anthem?

ALL: “Freak Power.”

Last, but not least, what’s your favorite song that you’ve done so far?

WATTS: “Wasting my Time.” There are some good musical moments that you wouldn’t think makes sense.

BEGLER: “Snake Bite.” When we were playing it, it had a lot of dance-punk elements to it. We knew we wanted synths in it. We wanted Jason to play synth, but we didn’t see it as electronic as it is. We threw in a countdown at the end that says, “These are the stakes.” Not “These are the snakes,” as many people have come up and said to us. That’s from LBJ’s [Lyndon B. Johnson] ‘64 political campaign. Everything we did to it was weird.

RITZ: Mine is “Snake Bite.” It’s my favorite because I’m a big dance-punk head. It’s one of the main genres I take inspiration from with my drumming. It’s really fast, the high-hat’s pounding, very calculating. There’s not a lot of movement. I love how danceable it is. To me, I think it’s one of our best and one of my favorites.

Sunny Daze & the Weathermen’s music is available on Spotify and iTunes.