Jeff Rosenstock never seems to stop moving. I don’t mean that he’s fidgety or distractable. In fact, he’s overwhelmingly present when you speak to him. He never gets sidetracked or checks his phone. He’s sincerely nice; the word undersells how welcoming his presence is, but it’s the right word.

What I mean is that the prolific punk songwriter seems to always be doing something. Our interview was bookended by two other interviews that Rosenstock had scheduled. Project Pabst is the second festival he played this summer; a few days prior, he was in Chicago for Pitchfork Fest. Both festivals are wedged into a lengthy tour that hits both coasts, including a marathon seven-show run in Brooklyn. His latest album, 2023’s excellent Hellmode, technically arrived three years after his prior LP, NO DREAM. However, in the interim, he released a ska reimagining of NO DREAM (titled SKA DREAM, naturally), a collaborative EP with Laura Stevenson called Younger Still, and a soundtrack he scored for the Craig Of The Creek movie.

Despite his full calendar, we found a time to chat in his greenroom before his set at Project Pabst, the recently revived music festival on the waterfront in downtown Portland, OR.

So this is a PBR-sponsored festival. Do you have a favorite PBR-related memory?

JEFF ROSENSTOCK: I think about my old band Bomb The Music Industry! playing the Fest [in Gainesville] and drinking just as much as possible. And generally a lot of those are Pabst, and then you get a lot of hangovers… those are my memories of PBR I guess.

Exactly: I associate Pabst with the Fest also.

ROSENSTOCK: The Fest brought punks and PBR together. I mean, they were already together. But, uh, it really solidified it for the next generation [Laughs].

Do you have a favorite festival-related memory? Do you typically enjoy playing festivals?

ROSENSTOCK: Yeah! Well, playing is interesting every time because I never quite know what we should be doing or what we’re supposed to be doing. When you’ve been a band for a long time, it’s fun to take on challenges in that way. Festivals are generally outside, and that’s really, really nice. But also: I don’t really go to festivals. I can never really afford that kind of ticket. It’s nothing like Warped Tour when I was a kid, which I went to a lot when I was a kid. But Coachella or whatever, I don’t go to that stuff. So playing festivals is like the only chance I get to see a lot of these kinds of bands and this kind of shit. I’m really excited to see both Denzel Curry and Big Thief. That’s gonna be fucking awesome. I’ve never seen either of them, big fan of both of them.

I’d say my favorite festival memory is just seeing bands, like when we played Sasquatch, staying for the whole thing and seeing Lizzo play on the main stage at like 2 o’clock in the afternoon. She wasn’t like fucking “Lizzo” yet, but I had known her from her rap shit, ’cause she guested at a P.O.S show that I had gone to in New York.

So I was like, “Oh shit, I should see Lizzo,” and then I was like, “Oh shit, this is going crazy,” and then like a week later she’s the most famous person in the world. That was pretty fun. Seeing Danny Brown at Pitchfork was really fun. And yeah: Getting high at Sasquatch and wandering around and laying on the lawn and watching Bon Iver whose music I really – I don’t really care for his records, but after seeing it live super high on the lawn under the stars like, “Oh fuck, this is really tight.” It’s fun to go to these things and walk around and be around.

Yeah, I like the kind of meandering quality to it.

ROSENSTOCK: Yeah.

Because shows are such a checklist: Load in, set up, sound check, play set, load out.

ROSENSTOCK: Yes.

Having a lot of dick around time is actually a blessing.

ROSENSTOCK: Yeah, and even just the freedom of – your green room is outside in a sense, and you could just like always be stepping out for air. You’re not like, yeah, closed in. It’s nice. But also I’m playing it and getting paid to be here [Laughs].

I feel like people are putting Portland back on their tour routing again, and with a festival like Project Pabst coming back, we get to see a lot of music these days, which I love. Speaking of that: Do you have any fond memories of being in Portland or playing Portland?

ROSENSTOCK: Yeah, I love Portland. I think about the Taxpayers a lot, who are from Portland. My old band Bomb The Music Industry! played with them a bunch at this coffee shop called the Backspace. That was just where we were every time here, playing all ages shows over there. I’ve been to a handful of house shows here, I went camping for the first time a little bit outside of Portland. Yeah, it’s just a beautiful city.

And people are always really nice and friendly and cool here. The shows have always been really good.

There’s a reputation sometimes of the city being a little standoffish or having unenthusiastic crowds: mostly folding their arms and head nodding at most, you know.

ROSENSTOCK: Well, you know… your band needs to not be boring if they want people to not fold their arms and nod their heads.

[Laughs] That’s true!

ROSENSTOCK: Whenever I see people being bored during the set, I’m like, “All right, all right, that’s on me. I got to do better.” [Laughs].

The last time you talked to Dan Ozzi for an interview you said you always like to be working on music. Are you working on music right now?

ROSENSTOCK: Yeah, I’m working on stuff, you know, trying to get a bunch of songs together that makes sense. Right now, they feel like they don’t necessarily make sense together. So just trying to unlock how it works, if it’s gonna work. Still in very early stages of putting a thing together. I guess I’m at this point where I’ve been collecting ideas and songs for few years since we recorded Hellmode, and now it’s just kind of dumping them out in the demo form and seeing what they sound like, seeing how they all sit together, and it’s really all over the place. So it’s either going to be very cool that it’s all over the place, or I’m going to have to fix it [Laughs] and make it not that way.

Do you feel like it’s doing a puzzle blind, where you pour everything onto the table and have to keep moving pieces until it fits, or are there usually one or two songs that become keys to the rest of the record?

ROSENSTOCK: Umm…I think it’s everything, you know. It could be both of those things. I try to work in sequence once I start working on a lot of songs and working on an album, meaning as I have a bunch of demos, when I’m listening back to them, I try and listen back to them in some order that I think would work. I just feel like that makes it easier to inform how to keep other songs… It takes some of the decision making off of you, which leaves [just] the big decisions. It could really guide you, I think, whether it is one or two songs on it that you think are the anchors of the record or whatever – which I don’t know if I ever necessarily think of it like that. But I think that anything that’s in there that helps it not feel like you’re sitting down to a blank canvas every day just gives you a bit of a cushion to give you more freedom to go crazier.

Yeah.

ROSENSTOCK: Which is the spot I’m in now. [Laughs]

You’ve talked about how writing Hellmode was a slightly different process than some of your other records. Is there anything different about your writing process now or something unique about the way it’s going?

ROSENSTOCK:: It’s different in that I’m doing it at home. The last few records I’ve gone away. For POST- and NO DREAM, I went to a friend’s double wide trailer in the Catskill Mountains and for Hellmode I went out to an Airbnb in the Joshua Tree area, just to be completely alone and completely isolated. And I don’t really know if that is how that’s going to work this time around. So I think being home is making it a little bit different.

I don’t know if this is different, but part of me is always trying to unlock how to put the quiet in there and keep the record interesting. And that’s certainly something I’m thinking about on this [new] one strongly because I feel like the two influences or the two vibes that I’m bringing in that are maybe different or newer is: I’ve been listening to a lot of metal, and I listened to that Dear Nora Three States triple-LP box set a lot, especially the first chunk of that. So just making some stuff on the eight-track tape machine and not going to the computer and trying to start demos there and write and see how that all turns out.

[I’m] playing drums on the demos more. I don’t know how it’s going to inform things when it becomes band shit, but: just mixing it up in little ways to try to not keep it this process that I go into doing where I know what I’m doing. I think a lot of that also is Craig Of The Creek ending [and] coming straight from the movie score, which – that was completely different.

One: Now I know that I have [those skills] in my pocket. If I want to have an orchestra on the record, I could do it, and I know how to do it, and I’ve done it. But working at that computer for so long, and then to have it end kind of unceremoniously with our new CEO getting rid of Craig Of The Creek even though we were a successful show that was doing well…I think gave me some amount of computer trauma that’s pushing me away from working on that exact thing that I was staring at for a year and a half straight, very sadly.

Naturally there’s going to be some computer trauma from something like that. You said you enjoyed working on that because you got to build out skill sets like writing arrangements for an orchestra, etc. Do you ever see yourself scoring things in the future?

ROSENSTOCK: Yeah, I would love to. I want to do that. You know, hopefully, if someone ever asked me again, I would probably do it.

It’s that simple. I really, really loved working on Craig, and I want to do it again. I feel like I can do it. I feel like I do it in a weird way that other people don’t necessarily do it, and if somebody wants that weird way, I’m here for them. But at the same time, I also don’t take it as a given that I’ll ever get to do it again. That’s kind of why I approached Craig the way I did, and especially the movie, where it was like: All right man, maybe this is your only movie score. So like, fucking taiko drum ensemble: let’s go; full orchestra: let’s go; sick metal riffs and blast beats: let’s go. Let’s see if fucking Pierce from Soul Glo will sing on something, fuck it, let’s go. Get Ginger for good luck on there, fuck it.

The movie score was me trying to do everything I would ever wanna do in a movie score because I don’t really know that I’m gonna get the chance to do it again, so like fuck it, go hard.

You mentioned your new music being influenced by metal and incorporating metal into the Craig soundtrack. What metal are you listening to?

ROSENSTOCK: Well I’ve been revisiting Death a bit.

That’s the best band.

ROSENSTOCK: Death is really great. I’ve always listened to early Sepultura. I grew up listening to Chaos AD and Roots, but I never really listened to Beneath The Remains. Now I’m like: I got to get into Gojira because that fucking Olympics performance is the craziest thing I’ve ever seen–

Crazy as hell.

ROSENSTOCK: It’s so fucking sick. I listened to that band 200 Stab Wounds, which I saw a review of the other day and I was like, “Oh that’s a fun band name,” and I listened to it and I was like, “Oh this is fucking sick.” So that kind of stuff.

I was just doing a lot of Megadeth and Anthrax while I was working on the show: a lot of metal, a lot of Megadeth for Kelsey. A lot of Iron Maiden/Megadeth twin guitar lead shit for for one of the characters on the show.

I’m from Florida originally, so it’s a lot of—

ROSENSTOCK: OK, you’re metal.

If you asked me what the best metal on Earth is, it’s not like European bands, it’s just: Death, Obituary, Morbid Angel.

ROSENSTOCK: Yeah.

And that’s probably not true but in my heart it’s very true.

ROSENSTOCK: No, I think, you know, Florida just never really gets credit for fucking creating death metal. I mean, maybe it does, but there’s still no love for it.

Right! I feel like Death is a band the kids talk about more now.

ROSENSTOCK: People love Death these days! I didn’t realize it until I started listening to more and then I realized: oh, everybody everywhere is always wearing a Death shirt, huh.

So how about 2024 music? Are there albums you’re enjoying this year? I saw you tweet about the Friko record recently.

ROSENSTOCK: Yeah I like that Friko record.

Really great.

ROSENSTOCK: I feel like I should have prepared because I never remember whenever anybody asks me this but: I like the Friko record. Somebody on this tour just told me about this band Snõõper, who I think is really cool. I really like Little Simz’s Drop Six EP that she put out earlier this year. I really like the Granddaddy record that came out this year.

He’s the best.

ROSENSTOCK: That one is just impeccable sounding, just beautiful, beautiful music.

It sent me back to all the early records, too. I’ve been listening to all of them again. Speaking of stuff I’ve seen you recommend on social media, you mentioned A Tale For The Time Being by Ruth Ozeki as a book recommendation.

ROSENSTOCK: Yes.

Are you a reader normally?

ROSENSTOCK: Yes.

What have you read lately that you loved?

ROSENSTOCK: I mean, that book [claps hands]: hard recommendation. I’m reading another one of her books called All Over Creation right now, which is the final Ruth Ozeki book for me to read. I fucking love it. The Book Of Form And Emptiness is really good too. I would also recommend Liberation Day by George Saunders, his new short story book. He’s fucking crazy. I don’t know how he keeps getting better. Severance by Ling Ma.

Do you feel like other media, like what you’re reading and watching, has any impact on how you make music?

ROSENSTOCK: Sure, yeah. I think that that was part of going away to work on those records for me, especially because around that time, that’s when Craig first started. So for a lot of it I was just in a room this size – [gestures at the trailer greenroom where we’re sitting, then leans toward the phone recording our conversation]. Note: It’s small. I was in Brooklyn, 12 hours a day, just working on it. You gotta get out. If you don’t take anything in, you can’t make anything. I mean you can make like a few things about how you’re fucking stir crazy, but that’s only so much.

I think about Alvvays and how she says that a lot of her music comes from this Alice Munro short story or whatever, and I think that that’s cool. I really like it. It would be neat if I could do that, I don’t know if I can do that.

I’d been playing Hades and some bullet hell games around the time after we made Hellmode which really had a big influence on the art and stuff like – the artwork and the packaging. I think all that stuff really feeds into each other. I feel like: the same way walking around the street has an impact on how you make music, you know? You gotta take shit in.