We Came From Celluloid

Imperil's Corey Azok on Songwriting, Peabody's Nostalgia, and the Horror of Wanting Attention | We Came From Celluloid 014-G

Welcome back to We Came From Celluloid. I'm Nicky P, here as always with Brian, and this week we went and made it a tripod. Corey, vocalist from Imperil, a Cleveland-area band we shared a stage with a couple weeks back, joined us, and what started as a get-to-know-you conversation about local music turned into something I wasn't expecting: a pretty honest conversation about what it actually takes to build something that matters. Corey found his band the way most good things happen, accidentally, through the internet, and because someone saw him doing a solo acoustic set at the Garford Arts Fest in Elyria and thought, 'yeah, that voice could work.' He spent the first year of the band not gigging, just writing and practicing until they were ready, which is the kind of discipline I respect even while admitting I've performed songs I don't have full lyrics for. We're all doing our best out here. The conversation found its center early when Brian and I started talking about what Maple Grove has started to feel like, a place where bands that don't know each other keep ending up on the same bill, and why that matters. I went on what I'll acknowledge was probably a little bit of a rant about music scenes, how Seattle wasn't just a sound, it was a group of friends. How Coheed and MCR didn't come out of nowhere; they came out of a very specific New Jersey and New York orbit that included Glassjaw. How the early '90s Chapel Hill indie scene was basically a dozen people who cared about each other's work. And how the Cleveland scene, for all its talent, has a bad habit of eating itself. I'd like to see that change. I think Corey would too. On the film side of things, Corey had just gone to see New Faces of Death, the new movie built around the mythology of the original Faces of Death snuff films. His description of the central twist, that the killer starts out targeting influencers and ends up becoming one, telling himself he has to give his fans what they want, is genuinely the most interesting horror premise I've heard summarized in a while. We went from there to Hostel, Human Centipede (both the one you think it is and the one it actually is), and Martyrs, which I am once again recommending to everyone. And then somehow we landed on Bo Burnham's Inside, specifically the way it interrogates whether anything any of us is putting out into the world actually needs to be there. Brian closed it the way Brian closes things, with something you didn't realize you needed to hear. The idea that even something temporary, even something that doesn't last, even a conversation that no one records, the act of creating it is worthwhile. The footprints in the sand before the tide comes in. And then Imperil played us out with '4 Days Alone In Alaska,' which you can hear at the end of the episode. Give it a listen. These guys are worth your time. Subscribe, rate, and review We Came From Celluloid wherever you get your podcasts. And go check out Imperil.

Jug Band Bass, Buke & Gase's Final Show, and the Dad Band Backlog Nobody Warned Us About | We Came From Celluloid 013

Welcome back to We Came From Celluloid. I'm Nicky P, here with Brian Pritchard, and this week's episode was supposed to be a casual check-in. Instead it turned into a full-on rabbit hole about how instruments actually work, why two of the weirdest bassists in rock history happened to be roommates, and the ongoing soap opera that is trying to finish a Puma Thurman record while also, you know, being alive. We open with some genuine excitement, Brian sent over tracks, things are starting to sound like something, and there is a light at the end of a tunnel we have been walking through for a very long time. We're talking about the process of recording music when you're a working band with jobs and kids and other obligations, and how the backlog of material just kind of accumulates until one day you look up and realize you've got multiple EPs in various states of done-ness and zero of them are out. Classic dad band problem. The emotional center of the episode, though, is New Soul, a Puma Thurman track with a history. The whole EP it lives on was recorded once, destroyed when Nicky P's daughter poured a soda on his laptop, and then recorded again entirely from scratch. The version they have now is getting closer to where it needs to be, and hearing Brian break down the actual guitar discovery behind those opening chords, fingers on the fifth fret sliding to the first, stumbling into something that reminded him of the Neverending Story score, is the kind of moment that reminds you why these guys started making music in the first place. From there, the conversation goes exactly where you'd expect from two guys who grew up on this stuff: Jack White's two-by-four pickup stunt in It Might Get Loud, cigar box guitars, jug band bass (which is exactly what it sounds like, one string, a broom handle, a wash basin, and your whole soul), and somehow, inevitably, the banjo. Brian's discovery of Buke & Gase, a two-piece that built their own instruments and whose final-ever show was this past weekend in Hudson, New York, is genuinely moving in the way only music people talking about music can be. He bought tickets. He couldn't justify the drive. The show sold out anyway and he gave his spots away to someone who needed them more. And then the roommate thing. Mark Sandman of Morphine, the guy who took the frets off his bass, set it up for a slide and decided a saxophone was a better rhythm section than a guitarist happened to live with Chris Ballew of The Presidents of the United States of America, who was also pulling strings off guitars and playing with the physics of the instrument. Two people, in the same apartment, separately deciding that the rules were optional. Make of that what you will. This one ends with tour news and the kind of cautious optimism that comes with having six dates on a shirt that looks like it belongs on a shirt. Midwest, summer, Puma Thurman is coming. Stay tuned. Subscribe, rate, and review We Came From Celluloid wherever you listen. Follow along for tour updates, new music, and the ongoing saga of getting all these songs out of a hard drive and into the world.

The Great Conversation, Musical Collaboration, and the Singular Weirdness of Werner Herzog | We Came From Celluloid 012

Brian sent me a voice memo recently. Just a rough idea, heavy, intentional, something he'd written specifically to sound like a metal song. Which doesn't sound remarkable until you know Brian, and then it's actually a signal that something has shifted. His old bandmate Max is coming back around. Re-engaging with music after a few years dealing with adulthood. And something about that, the possibility of someone re-entering your creative world, made Brian sit down and write something for a specific person for the first time in a long time. Not for the band. Not because it fit somewhere. Because someone he trusted was listening again. That's where this episode starts. And it cracked something open. Because here's the thing, Brian said something that I haven't been able to let go of: some of his favorite melodies, the ones he's most proud of, only exist because he was reacting to what somebody else played. He doesn't feel like he can fully claim them. They weren't generated from nothing. They were pulled out of him by the friction of someone else's idea hitting his. That's not a footnote to his creative process. That's the whole engine of it. Which led us somewhere I didn't expect. There's an idea in academia called the Great Conversation, the premise that human knowledge isn't built by individuals working alone, but by a chain of voices responding to each other across centuries. Socrates to Plato to every thinker since, each one articulating something the noise around them couldn't quite say. You don't get the canon without the back-and-forth. You don't get the ideas without the collision. Lennon needed McCartney. Gallagher needed the other Gallagher. The Beatles and the Beach Boys spent years quietly trying to one-up each other and accidentally produced some of the greatest music of the 20th century in the process. Metal sharpens metal. And then there's the version of that which is genuinely terrifying, the healthy, productive, oh shit kind of terrifying. Tarantino goes to see a new Paul Thomas Anderson film and walks out knowing he has to raise his game. That moment isn't comfortable. It's also the moment that makes both of them better. I know this feeling from a completely different direction. I ran cross country on scholarship in college. And the dirty secret of being the fastest guy in a small program is that winning by half a mile doesn't actually make you better. You're not finding your ceiling. You're just lapping people. The invitational, thirty teams, a field full of runners who could actually scare you, that's where you discovered what you were capable of. You don't find your limits until someone is right behind you. Great collaborators and great rivals do the same thing. They show you where your ceiling actually is. Always wanting to go a layer deeper, i pull out one of my favorite anecdotes. When I say the word "dog," you picture something completely different than I do. We're using the same word and seeing different animals. Now try to communicate grief. Try to communicate longing. Try to do it without words at all, just pitch and rhythm and the space between notes. And somehow it works. Somehow a song finds you at exactly the right moment and makes you cry in your car and you don't fully know why. That's not incidental to what music is. That might be the most remarkable thing humans have ever figured out how to do. We close, as we tend to, somewhere completely unplanned. Brian found out there's an IMAX 3D screening of Cave of Forgotten Dreams, Werner Herzog's documentary about 32,000-year-old cave paintings. Which led us to the Loch Ness hoax film Herzog appeared in, the shoe he ate on a bet, and an SNL bit imagining a clothing line inspired entirely by various shades of beige. If you've ever had a collaborator who pulled something out of you that you couldn't have found alone, this episode is about why that person is the most valuable creative relationship you have.

School Shootings, Speed-Fueled Elvis Shows, and Sam Rockwell Chewing Scenery | We Came From Celluloid 011

Welcome back to We Came From Celluloid, where two Ohio dads from a band you've probably never heard of show up to talk about film, music, and whatever tangents we can't avoid. I'm Nicky P, here with Brian Pritchard, and this week we saw movies. Two of them — the Baz Luhrmann Elvis documentary and Good Luck Have Fun Don't Die — and somehow still ended up debating whether Blur or Oasis won the nineties, why Orwell was actually a communist, and the very American tradition of pharmaceutical performance enhancement. Brian went into Good Luck Have Fun Don't Die having seen zero marketing for it. I'd watched the trailer forty times. We both loved it, which might be the most interesting thing that happened. The Elvis doc is exactly what you'd expect from Baz Luhrmann: stylish, agenda-forward, and more interested in vibe than historical accuracy. What it does nail is the sheer physical reality of those Vegas residency years — once you clock that Elvis was doing three shows a day, the speed stops being scandalous and starts being math. That conversation spun out into Vietnam soldiers receiving military-grade amphetamines ("go-go pills," apparently), Michael Jackson and the enabler-doctor pipeline, and Elvis covering Beatles songs in rehearsal while someone was quietly engineering him more UK number ones than the Beatles themselves. Good Luck Have Fun Don't Die gets a proper breakdown — including why going in without a trailer might be the most radical cinematic experience left in 2025, how the film handles a school shooting sequence in a way that works precisely because it isn't trying to make a point, and the long-title marketing problem that claimed Edge of Tomorrow and nearly claimed Everything Everywhere All at Once. Sam Rockwell chews scenery. It's great. We also get into what separates good political storytelling from bad — using Jessica Jones Season 2 as the canonical cautionary tale and Orwell as the gold standard. Fun fact: the guy who wrote Animal Farm was himself a committed socialist. The book has been used to argue positions he explicitly opposed. That's what happens when the craft is good enough to outlast the author's intent. Somewhere in there: Beatles vs. Beach Boys (Paul McCartney settles it), Blur vs. Oasis (Brian had never heard of Blur), Gorillaz eclipsing Blur on a global stage, and a meteor that exploded over Ohio the day before we recorded. Brian's first association was Creep Show. That's the correct first association. I spent most of the week without power due to windstorms. My DVDs did not care. The Bottom Line: Good storytelling can handle any subject matter — politics, violence, cultural discomfort, drug-addled rock legends — as long as the writer is serving the story and not the other way around. The moment you feel lectured at, the spell breaks. We've both felt it break enough times to know the difference. Also featured: Beetlejuice and Brown Coat Man vocal sessions at Max's studio, Brian's Wednesday creative blocks, Quantum Leap on a dying phone battery, and a Bill Murray Neil Diamond quote you can look up yourself. Subscribe, rate, and review We Came From Celluloid wherever you listen. We're building something weird and we'd love for you to be part of it.

Songwriting Secrets, Touring Without a Full Band, and the Diary of a Working Act | We Came From Celluloid 010

Welcome back to We Came From Celluloid, the podcast where two middle-aged musicians talk about movies and, apparently, sometimes talk about everything except movies. I'm Nicky P here with the great Brian Pritchard, and I'll be honest with you — we fully intended to talk about film this week. That didn't happen. What did happen? A genuinely candid conversation about what it actually takes to keep a band together, survive the recording process, and still like the people you play music with when all is said and done. What We Cover: * The current state of Puma Thurman's recording process — mastering is happening, acapella and instrumental versions are being prepped for licensing, and yes, we're still waiting on the final cut of "Beetlejuice." * Song structure philosophy: why "less is more" works for a punk two-minute ripper but Brown Coat Man needs every layer it has. * Brian's composing instincts vs. Nicky's "hey can we have a chorus?" vocalist reality. * The "Speed Song" time signature war — how two people can play the same song and be counting beats from completely different places. * Tool, math rock, and Stewart Copeland being an absolute slippery genius on the drums. * Copeland's journey from punk guy in The Police to orchestral film composer — and how bringing in Andy Summers changed everything for that band. * The real reason bands fall apart: money, ego, and what happens when a paycheck changes every decision you've ever made. * Sting holding himself back for the band and the resentment that comes with it. * How to handle creative friction without blowing up friendships that matter more than the project. * The Deftones and Mastodon as models for navigating lineup flexibility without the band falling apart. * The "minimum viable product" acoustic duo concept — Nicky and Brian as a lean two-piece to start building an audience now, not later. * Wayne Gretzky, dribbling the ball forever, and why "don't let perfect be the enemy of progress" is the most important thing a working band can internalize. The Real Talk: This episode is basically a therapy session for anyone who has ever tried to make something with other humans. The stuff about The Police is textbook — Sting was ready to be Sting for years before he actually became Sting, and whatever that cost him in terms of creative freedom built up into resentment that likely contributed to the whole thing eventually going sideways. You love the band. You love your people. And then one day the money shows up and suddenly every decision is a negotiation with stakes. Deep Dive — Friction as a Feature: Nicky drops what might be the most honest line in the episode: some of the best songs he's written were written as a "loving fuck you" to a previous collaborator who kept pushing back. That tension — different people pulling in different directions — is the thing that makes creative work surprising. Nobody wants comfortable sameness when they could have something that sounds like two worldviews smashing into each other. The Bottom Line: Puma Thurman is getting closer to releasing new music. The mastering process is underway. "Stay Gold Pony Boy" and "Snow Falls" are incoming. In the meantime, Nicky and Brian are building the infrastructure to perform as a duo — which is maybe the most pragmatic move they've made yet. Also featured: raccoons in the bathroom vent, birds in the kitchen, and a brief meditation on why renting, actually, has its advantages. Subscribe, rate, and review We Came From Celluloid wherever you get your podcasts. And if you've ever had a creative partner who counted beat one in the wrong place — this episode is for you.