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Music

The Loved Ones Are Back, for Now

Dave Hause clarifies some things about the band's kinda, sorta return for the ten-year anniversary of their debut album, 'Keep Your Heart.'

The Loved Ones never had a giant public implosion, nor did they celebrate an official finale. The Philly band just sort of faded away into punk limbo sometime around 2010, cementing their place among bands like Avail and Leatherface in the What The Hell Are Those Guys Up To These Days? conversations. This week, though, they’ve emerged to announce a round of shows to celebrate the ten-year anniversary of their much-beloved debut record, Keep Your Heart.

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But before you go scrawling “OMFG The Loved Ones are back!!!1~!” on Facebook, tagging all of your Fest buddies, let’s slow down a minute. The Loved Ones are not really back. Or maybe they are. Frontman Dave Hause said that while they’re not looking to ride the reunion train, he also casually mentioned that the band members have each written some songs that they’re been sitting on. Verrrry interesting.

So should we lower our expectations or should we run out into the streets screaming like raving lunatics, getting “One more song for the brokenhearted” tattooed on our throats? We talked to Hause on the phone to get the story straight, and while we were at it, pressed him on that mysterious new Falcon record he’s been working on with the Lawrence Arms’ Brendan Kelly and Neil Hennessy and Alkaline Trio’s Dan Andriano.

Continued below…

Noisey: When was the last time the Loved Ones played together?
Dave Hause: When we were still kind of a band, we did that tour with Gaslight Anthem in 2009, and then we did some scattered little bits here and there. We did a headline show at a warehouse with the Menzingers in the spring of 2010. We did one or two gigs. But as I’ve been doing solo stuff, we’ve left the band where it was. Everybody was burned out and wasn’t able to tour as hard as we had. So we sort of just stopped. I had that Resolutions record written and ready to go and the intention was just to do one solo record and come back, but things started to really roll solo, and we just never got back to it. Everybody started doing other things really intensely and we just didn’t get back to it.

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Fast forward to this past spring, we got asked to do Groezrock and we happened to all be available to do it so we all agreed to it, just because it was something fun to do and the money was pretty good. But we didn’t want to go into a festival cold so we booked a couple of warmup shows—a show at Johnny Brenda’s in Philly that sold out really, really fast. In four minutes or something. Then we added an Asbury Lanes show and that sold out almost as fast.

When people asked, did you always say you were on hiatus or what?
I just honestly said I didn’t know what we were doing. We never broke up officially. A lot of times I tease people because I just don’t really have an answer. Whenever we get together, it’s just to hang out, to drink beers, especially Dave [Walsh] and I.

Have you written anything together?
I have a ton of songs that would be a Loved Ones record. I know that Chris and Dave also have songs, too. So there are enough songs for a new record if we want to do that. It’s just a matter of getting everyone in the same place at the same time to do it. But basically once those shows happened this past spring, it occurred to us that the ten-year anniversary of the first record is in February, 2016. It’s no secret that that’s the one everybody really, really connected to. When your first real band comes out with a record out of the gate that people like and that kind of establishes you, you don’t really have perspective. And so all these later, knowing that happened, you have a lot more gratitude. We should probably honor that and celebrate it.

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So we’re putting together some shows on the East Coast to celebrate. But here’s the thing. Most people have enough wherewithal and cynicism when you see a band play a couple shows and they say they’re not doing anything, that typically means the next step is to play Coachella and Bonnaroo and every other festival and do the whole circuit. [Laughs] But that’s really not what we’re up to. I think the right thing to do is to play these shows as a celebration of that record and then pretty much do nothing else unless we do make a new record.

Are you ruling that out—if you got offered a big tour or festival?
Pretty much, yeah. We’ve turned stuff down. We’ve gotten asked to do a bunch of stuff we typically say no to. In my estimation, unless there’s new material, this is the last thing we’ll do.

Really?
Yeah, when we get together to rehearse, we’ll knock around some of those songs, we’ll see if there’s anything there. And if there is, I think we’d take it slow, because everyone is so busy doing other things and has moved on. I just don’t think it’s fair to the fans if you don’t have new material to keep grinding at those records that are so old. I think it was cool of Refused to actually make a new record, that was the honorable thing to do. If you’re gonna be a band, make music.

I’ve seen both ways have success. Refused were promoting a new record then, but Blood Brothers also got back together, played their old material after a decade, and left it be.
I think you’re right about that. To me, to watch the Replacements do what they did, and then stop, I think there was some dignity in that. Just do something you set out to do. It’s weird because the Loved Ones never broke up but it does feel like a reunion.

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Do you miss your band days?
Yeah, I play with a full band on my solo material in spots where it’s affordable and makes more sense. But it’s more of a punk rock energy that I do start to miss from time to time. It was a pretty rough day-to-day existence. To get into a really rusty van and those things, as much as it was fun, I don’t miss that part of it, wondering how you’re gonna eat and that stuff. We were definitely taking a huge risk at that time to go out and not know what was gonna happen. What I miss more is the guys. I miss the hang. But I do like playing loud, I just don’t like doing it all the time.

Is it going to be physically taxing to go back to play in a punk band where people are jumping on you and diving off the stage?
Yeah, but everybody thankfully is still in pretty good shape despite getting into our deep-to-mid-30s. Everybody skates and runs and plays music. Everybody’s still in shape enough to do it. And musically, everybody’s better at playing music in general than when we were touring all the time. And I do think having gratitude for the fact that anybody cares about records you made—at this point, a long time ago—helps the vibe of the show.

So you’re also working on the new Falcon record now.
We just finished. It’s being mixed right now. It’s a fun thing to do. It’s a trip into Brendan Kelly’s brain which is, um, it’s a really weird place to be. [Laughs] But there’s a couple of awesome benefits to being in that band. One is that playing with Dan and Neil as a rhythm section is a real treat. And Brendan’s approach to songwriting and recording is really brave. We talked about it a lot before we made the record and I was like, “Yeah, we should approach this the way hip-hop producers approach songs!”

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In what way?
Basically not being caught in the same three-chord patterns that punk rock typically is. There’s a lot of weird guitar I put on it. There’s some concertina on the record. There’s some strange tempos and feels you wouldn’t find on a punk rock record. And it’s pretty fierce. It’s definitely more of the early D4 approach to punk and it’s not poppy. For all the other bands we do, pop is certainly part of the equation, but this is a lot more fierce. It’s more punk-sounding. It’s really kitchen sink. Weird vocals, too. We weren’t doing any auto-tuning or pitch correction or anything like that. What I mean by the hip-hop thing is just throwing in weird elements and making it sound unique so that it defies the genre a little bit.

Well Brendan won’t shut up about it so I’m expecting it to be good.
Yeah, it’s really fun to be a part of. It’s nobody’s main gig, so this is more like a party.

What else are you working on nowadays?
Well, the All Brights record I made and the Falcon record were really cool detours from playing solo. That last solo record of mine I feel like is the best thing I’ve made. One thing I’m trying to get involved with is the humor side of my personality in my writing. The All Brights were sort of a byproduct of that, so is the Falcon. There’s certainly an amount of sarcasm and irreverence that Brendan writes with. I was listening a lot of Father John Misty and Jason Isbell, and both of those guys employ humor in their writing in a way that’s really smart. I love to have fun, I love to have laughs, and I think that’s one thing that’s been missing from my solo writing. So these were good detours to take, but what I’m focused on now is making this new solo record, the third one.

The Loved Ones' Boston and Philadelphia shows go on sale Friday.

Dan Ozzi is on Twitter - @danozzi