Right now, I'm about halfway through a great three-hour interview with Have Heart/Fiddlehead frontman Pat Flynn on Mutually Assured Destruction/Eliminators frontman Ace Stallings' hardcore podcast Forum Of Passion. It's a great listen. Flynn really knows how to talk about his own life and hardcore music at the same time, eloquently talking about how it feels to be a middle-aged professional — he's a high-school history teacher in his everyday life — who's still knee-deep in this stuff. Flynn has chronicled his own growth in his music, and it's all over Fiddlehead's great recent record Baby I'll Change, one of the year's best EPs. He and his band also brings that eloquence and gravitas to the stage.
If you can go see Fiddlehead live, you really should. Given the professional obligations of all the band members, they don't do a lot of heavy touring. But they play when they can, and they make sure their shows are special. That happened a couple of times in the last weekend, a busy one for Fiddlehead.
On Saturday, Turnstile headlined a massive show at Thompson's Point in Portland, Maine. Fiddlehead were on the bill for that show, and so were Dinosaur Jr., New England alt-rock heroes from a completely different generation. Fiddlehead opened their set with a special guest. Before Fiddlehead played anything, Dino Jr. bassist Lou Barlow came to the stage for a solo-acoustic version of "True Hardcore," a 1989 song from Barlow's other band Sebadoh.
"True Hardcore" is a semi-sarcastic lo-fi acoustic meditation on the nature of hardcore, the culture in which Barlow and the members of Fiddlehead grew up. On record and in person, Barlow starts it off by saying, "This song is a complete ripoff of every song I've ever done," then warbles, "True hardcore is forever young/ True hardcore is left undone." Fiddlehead included their own song called "True Hardcore (II)," presumably in tribute, on their 2023 album Death Is Nothing To Us; Justice Tripp, from Angel Du$t and Trapped Under Ice, guested on it. At the Portland show, the band then immediately launched into "The Deathlife," then later ended the set with "True Hardcore (II)." Watch the generational convergence below.
On Sunday afternoon, Fiddlehead played a very different type of gig: A pop-up at Alewife Station in Cambridge, Massachusetts, just outside Boston. I don't know how they managed to hook this up, but the place evidently looms large to the band. (The Baby I'll Change EP was originally available on "Alewife Red & White vinyl.") They got absolutely mobbed. In some videos from the show, you can sometimes barely see the band because they're surrounded on so many sides by people singing along ecstatically. It's awesome. Look at some footage below.
They sold T-shirts, too.
