Welcome to our interview with Underlined Passages, a Baltimore-based band that has cultivated a strong musical reputation and a growing community of fans through their relentless touring and dedication to authentic indie rock/pop songwriting. Their sound—a captivating blend of guitar-driven melodies and emotional intensity—evokes a nostalgic yet modern vibe reminiscent of early ‘aughts bands like Nada Surf, American Football, and Promise Ring, all while remaining uniquely their own. With their latest releases, Neon Inoculation and the upcoming Landfill Indie—set to drop on November 15th, 2024, via Mint400 Records—Underlined Passages continues to impress with their lush, soulful, and shoegaze-inspired music. Praised by The Big Takeover for their profound musicality and hailed by Jersey Beat for their brilliant musicianship, the band is hitting the road once again to connect with new audiences. If you’re a fan of college indie rock that resonates on an emotional level, you’re sure to fall in love with Underlined Passages!
Q: Can you tell us what your new record is all about and more about it in general?
Topically, the record deals with middle-aged perspectives on maintaining purpose, questioning relationships, and reexamining oneself squarely in light of our culture's movement into a digitized, avatar-centric reality. With the advent and availability of AI, especially in songwriting, the loss of relationships in the digital world is stronger than ever.
The record was performed by me (Michael Nestor) on guitar, keys, vocals, and whatever else was left, Roger Stewart on drums, and Gary Hewitt on bass, who played on the last two Underlined Passages records. Joe Markus plays bass for the live band, and sometimes Anthony Freelump fills in on bass. It was mostly recorded in the big studio, with some recording occurring in my home studio (especially a lot of the B-side of the cassette version), Basement Tapes.
Frank Marchand, who I have worked with for over 20 years, recorded, engineered, and mixed the record at Waterford Digital. He has worked with almost everyone, including Bob Mould, War on Drugs, The Thermals, and The Obsessed, amongst a thousand others. Frank is known as a metal, psychedelic, hard rock guy, which is why we work so well together on my delicate shoegaze-indie pop rock, haha (it is out secret sauce)!
The record was mastered by Alan Douches at West, West Side Music, and he also has done work with a thousand great bands, too, like Sufjan Stevens, The Promise Ring, and Dismemberment Plan, among others. Because this will have a unique set of releases in three formats (cassette, vinyl, CD) with unique track listings and song sequences to underscore the boutique nature of physical media, Cefe Flynn at Chroma Mastering and a Grammy-winning engineer also mastered the record.
My old friend and Beechfields Record Label co-founder Austin Stahl, who is an amazing artist in his own right, did the design and layout of the record, and good friend Rick Barnwell from RFBV Films did the photography for the record and will shoot the videos for the singles. So, this was a true team effort from a family of amazing and talented human beings who I owe more than a gratitude of debt. I am so thankful to have these relationships in my life, especially at this age.
Q: Why did you call it Landfill Indie? That’s kind of an odd name for a record.
I was dismayed at how easily songwriting from indie artists in this Spotify age is treated like musical wallpaper. There are real people and lives behind those songs, and we dehumanize that with terms like “landfill indie” coined in this Vice article. The whole idea is that the songs are so generic and garbage that you can just chuck them into a landfill. Talk about cynicism and nihilism while trying to sound ironically artistic! Landfill Indie as an album title is my way to shout back and my take on the gratitude and belonging one feels when living as an outsider to a system one knows can be better and, in doing so, commiserating with folks who feel the same way. But it is much like swimming upstream because about 50,000 songs/day are uploaded to that platform, which is highly discouraging and wallpaper-like.
Q: Can you pinpoint experiences and music that inspired the way you write music?
There was a special moment in music from about 1990-1998 when hip-hop, rock, and pop were allowed to flow free from the underground scene to the radio and people's ears in a de-siloed way. This was because the system was flush with label money, and the big labels were involved in artist development at the grassroots level. Back then, it was not uncommon in our local Baltimore/D.C. scene to see shows where bands like The Poster Children, Acetone, Archers of Loaf, Hum, Velocity Girl, Tuscadero, Hazel, etc., were right next to large label-heavy acts like Nirvana or Stone Temple Pilots, or even Soundgarden. I hung out with Weezer and Archers of Loaf on Weezer’s first national tour in 1994, and both bands gave me tips on how to get my cassettes (yes, cassettes) sent out to labels as we talked next to the stage. It was just how it was.
There was tangibility about that time - where a band could make a great record, play a bunch of shows, and have a reasonable chance of getting seen/heard. I mean, my own band at the time opened for Karate in the late 90s, a band that I had a ton of admiration for-and we were nobodies. That show led to two major stations playing our music on the air and a couple in-studio interviews-and we had no label!
I remember seeing Jawbox open for Stone Temple Pilots at George Mason University, and the crowd was both confused and mesmerized at being exposed to something very new to them. That sort of cross-pollination and discovery was possible during that era because people were willing to explore, and the industry was open to spending money. In addition, there was not a ridiculous saturation of bands, like you have now with the advent of home recording and the internet.
Of course, I always tell my story about seeing The Exploder open for Rainer Maria in a university dorm and how that night inspired me to start my own label. The whole concept of labels like Simple Machines with Jenny Toomey’s projects like Grenadine, or label bands like Ida, or other underground bands from the local scene like Third Harmonic Distortion, Seven Planet Sun, Gist, The Dismemberment Plan, Meatjack, and others instilled the power of DIY and connecting directly with audiences through powerful songwriting. The Simple Machines releases were a roadmap and bible that affected me to this day.
Q: Do you find it hard to be inspired by your peers? Can you name any new artists you find inspiring?
No, I do everything I can to push the music made by my peers as much as I can. Honestly, not everyone does that in this day and age because everyone has been pushed into this crabs-in-a-bucket mentality due to the relentless pressure of social media and streaming platforms. It's tough to watch. That said here is what is in my playlist right now as far as new stuff: NAYAN, Pet Fox, The Racer, A Country Western, Half Japanese, Pigeons Without Wings, The Make Three. I am anticipating the new Clydes record, too, next year. I can name about 100 more bands! Maybe I will do a playlist or something to share.
Q: For your new album, what inspired the lyrical content, album title, and overall vibe?
Like I said earlier, this is an album about what it is like to swim in a soup of categorization and “genre” and labels. Especially as I age, I am seeing an undiscussed layer of age discrimination. That’s fine for the glossy pop set, but I am surprised and exasperated to see it in the underground scene. It's even worse for my female, non-binary, and underrepresented minority indie rock colleagues. We are all in this garbage together but some of us see it more. None of us should be seeing it at all.
I am definitely missing the antiestablishment; stick it to the man mentality that I grew up with in indie rock. It's there in bits and pieces, but I definitely feel that the algorithms have pushed us all into a digital ghetto. I am not a huge Cory Doctorow fan, but damn if he did not nail it with the term “enshittification.”
All that is what the record is about. All that and relationship stuff, which is what all my records are about.
Q: Do you find that you ruminate over writing songs and hold on to them for a long time before including them on a record? Or do you prefer to write them, release them, and be done with them?
Get them out there, warts and all. Songs are like relationships, its best to let them go when their time with you has come to and end. Just do it.
Q: Were there any lessons you learned in the writing and recording process for your current release that you will take with you into your next project?
It is easy to spend three hours looking for the perfect plug-in. Don’t do it. Just press record and let it be what it is.
underlineslove.com (web)
@underlinedpassages (IG)