Feature image of Sunday, Someday cover art and Potty Mouth, via their Instagram

If there’s one thing my friends know about me it’s that I love music. When I’m at work or just bopping around the house, I usually have my headphones on and my favorite turns cranked up at maximum volume. When I get a chance to review music or talk to artists, I really relish it. So getting to sit down with the band Potty Mouth after I was able to listen to their music was truly a treat. Potty Mouth, in conjunction with other music artists, just released Sunday, Someday, a collaborative album that came out of a tour canceled by COVID. We talked about the record, their collaborators, and releasing the album under Get Better Records, a queer-run recording label.

How did you decide on making this a collaborative project between you and the other bands involved?

Um, it started out with a tour that got canceled because of COVID. We were supposed to tour in the UK, April 2020 with No Teeth and Koji, and then that was obviously canceled. And then around the time we were supposed to do the tour in April, Koji just reached out to all of us who were supposed to be on the tour. And they were like, ‘How about, we all meet on zoom and just hang out.’ Most of us had never met in person before. So that happened one Sunday in April. And then that turned into a ritual that we did every Sunday and as we kept doing it, and as we would have these amazing conversations about our experience in the music industry, [we] just needed to make a record together. It felt like a community project that we could do during the pandemic that was going to be serving everyone in our group.

 After these zoom sessions that you had on Sunday that ended up becoming an album collaboration together, what was the process behind creating the actual project and choosing the songs that went on it? Was that also a collaborative process, like writing songs together, or did you do things on your own?

We had those two songs already recorded from some demoing sessions that we had done a few years ago. We have a lot of songs that we have demoed out and still want to do stuff with. So then when this project came up, it seemed like a perfect opportunity to just put out a couple of songs that we personally really love that haven’t made it onto our previous releases. They’re just like songs that we like to play. The second song that we have coming out called “Saroce & Smokes” is, I feel, a very personal song for Potty Mouth, but it’s a very slow acoustic song. So it’s not really our usual style.

And then in terms of the other people on the album, I think everyone was sort of in the same position where everyone had demos, that they were just sitting on and needed a reason to release them. But in that process, we did all help each other out. So Koji and M from Nervus worked on mixing it, they mixed every single song on the album. Then for Sabrina’s songs who is Solstice Ray, she actually had demos of those songs or recordings of those songs that were like a completely different sound. And she said, ‘I’ve always wanted to hear these songs as a pop-punk song.’ So that’s when M from Nervus just completely reproduced those songs by adding guitar parts and having drums added and so Sabrina’s songs have like taken on this new pop-punk format. And it’s really cool because M, who lives in the UK and hasn’t even met Sabrina, was able to just add those parts and reproduce them.

So why did you choose this particular cause to support with your music? Like what was the driving force behind choosing to support trans and LGBTQ youth with this project?

Um, well, it’s started out as an in-group cause where Gabe of Full-on Monet, they were raising money for top surgery. This was back last fall, and this is right when they’re at the beginning, they have this idea for the record. So the first thought was, let’s use this record to raise money for Gabe’s top surgery. Fortunately, Gabe was able to meet their goal with their top surgery before the record has been able to come out, which is awesome. Um, so now the new, um, fundraiser that we’re going to be donating proceeds to is where Gabe works, which is the LGBT Center of Central Pennsylvania. And specifically, the project involved is building an acoustic treatment center for students with sensory needs. It’s a really specific project that we’re hoping to help fund, and it’s going right back into the community where Gabe works. We are also doing a special pre-order for the record in collaboration with a local coffee shop in Central Pennsylvania called Little Amps. So we’re just really hoping that with all this cross-community collaboration we can kind of cover more ground and raise the money.

What is releasing this collaborative album in this particular moment say to your audience, what are you hoping to say with this release?

Everything’s better when done in community. I think that in the last five years, when we’ve been in LA, we’ve sort of done the music industry thing and it can feel exhausting working with people who really, really don’t get you and to find a community of people where we are all peers, we’re not working like in the industry. We’re just artists who sort of fell into this making music. It’s been really helpful to have that reminder, ‘Oh yeah, this is why we do this.’ We do this because this is something that brings us together. This is something that we can do to support each other and uplift all each other’s voices and our music.

I almost wish that it was more normalized to do a collaborative album like this and I wish that music was a little less focused on how individualistic the industry can be, like putting out your record and focusing just on your career. This album has been so much more fulfilling because we’re working as a group and it feels like a yeah, like a collaborative effort and it feels less egocentric and [we are not] competing with one another. We’re all just excited to be working on something together at a time when there are very few options that are available.

Potty Mouth’s collaboration album Sunday, Someday is out now, available for purchase on Bandcamp 

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