Schoolyard Heroes

A conversation with Ryann Donnelly

(June 2005)

Interview by Adam McKibbin

Craggy old favorites of the Seattle music scene (two members are of legal drinking age), Schoolyard Heroes are set to spread their zombie gospel to farther lands, armed with an adrenalized new album (Fantastic Wounds) and their most ambitious tour to date.  Drawing on colorful figures of yesteryear from Jerry Only to Freddie Mercury to Bruce Dickinson to George Romero, Schoolyard Heroes play a theatrical hybrid of metal, old-school punk rock and new-school dance-punk, featuring telling song titles like “Centaur:  Half-Man Half-Motorcycle.”

On the frontlines, Ryann Donnelly sneers and shrieks with considerable panache, aided by her upbringing in musical theatre and her training in the operatic arts.  When she’s not singing about taking your dead soul away, it turns out that she’s quite charming and well-mannered.  Or is that merely a guise so you’ll let down your guard?  Run to the hills!

What’s going on to celebrate the record release?  Are you setting off on tour? 

Yeah!  Yeah, we are.  The record comes out Tuesday [June 21].  We’re really excited.  We’re doing a couple little things to gear up for it.  I don’t know if you’re familiar with 107.7 The End up here – they do these things called End Sessions and we were really honored to get one.  It’s just a little exclusive thing with an artist, and everyone from the White Stripes to the Gorillaz have done one.  So we’re playing and they play it live on the radio, after they edit it or whatever.  Then the night of our CD release, we’re doing an acoustic midnight performance.  And then we have a few shows around Washington and then on the first week of July we go on tour for six weeks. 

Did you tour the first record?

No, we didn’t.  We’re really lucky because one of our favorite bands, Vendetta Red, is taking us out.  This is the longest we will have ever been on tour, and it’s our first national tour.  We’ve done little things down the coast before, but nothing like this.  We’re all extremely excited.

Jumping back to those early days, I’d read that one of the first marks the band made on the local radar was playing at some sort of Christian battle of the bands.  That was before you’d joined the band, but were you at that show?

Yeah.  Here’s how that show got set up.  I was really jealous because Steve and Jonah were in the band at that point and I was bugging them to let me sing.  I was like, “You guys have to let me sing.  I’m a singer, that’s what I do!”  We had some drummer that was just in our high school marching band or something.  We went to a private school in Tacoma, so that’s how we all met.  We’re all from different cities around Washington—not too far, we’re all like an hour away from each other.  So, yeah, this Christian club was like the only place you could play, and it wasn’t that blatant that it was a Christian club.  But they got up there and they did their songs and they got a warning to stop swearing.  They were going to let me cover that Misfits song… (sings) “I got something to say!”  “Last Caress.”  I got there at the last minute to sing this song, and of course once they heard, “I raped your mother,” they pulled the plug.  (laughs)  I didn’t even get to sing with them.  That was the first show Schoolyard Heroes ever played in its odd form.

Now what were you doing previously?  You said you were a singer.

Right.  Well, you have to take into account that I started singing in this band when I was 14.

Wow.  So you’re 14 when you’re trying to sing Misfits at the Christian club.

I was 14.  The year was 2000.  Before this, I was dying to be in a band, and I tried to start a little thing with some friends.  It was horrible.  We’d sit around and do covers and try to think of a name and eat Jell-O and that was it.  (laughs)  But I was brought up in musical theatre; that’s where I come from.  I did summer musicals every summer through high school.  When I was in ninth grade, this girl that I was in a show with said, “You should go to this opera teacher.  She’s amazing and I think she could really help develop your voice.”  So I started doing opera when I was in ninth grade, and I did that for a few years.  That’s where the opera part comes from on our record.  Jonah was like, “Well, you know opera, so it’d be rad if you sang some opera.”  So I just do big high notes and that’s about it.

So when you guys started playing together, were you able to find a niche right away or was there some resistance because of your age or because of your style of music?

No, I don’t think there was resistance.  I think we actually found a really lucky pattern in that I started working for a non-profit music venue up here called the Vera Project.  It’s a volunteer-run organization for youth and art and music.  I’m still active in it, I’m on the Board of Directors.  We have everybody—the Scene Creamers are playing in a couple weeks, Hot Hot Heat has played there, that kind of thing.  It’s not like this little ditzy youth organization.  I was working there and I was running the door and eventually got up the courage, after about two months of volunteering and working there, to give my demo to the programmer.  And she liked it, so she gave us a show there.  That was our first good Seattle show.  We’d played a Battled of the Bands, we’d played a weird spot opening for Bowling for Soup where no one was there.  So I think it’s just getting into a pattern of getting good shows where people can see it, and that’s it.  That’s all it took.  Once we had the exposure through the Vera Project, the same booker was booking at another all-ages venue on the Eastside.  They call it the Eastside because it’s across the water, across Lake Washington.  But, yeah, what we really needed was to put a record out, and that’s where The Control Group came in.

The all-ages scene is pretty thriving in Seattle?

Yeah.  It didn’t used to be.  There was this horrible ordinance called the teen dance ordinance, and that just put a bunch of absurd rules on all-ages things.  It was actually illegal to dance in the city, that’s how they wrote it out.

Like Footloose!

It was like Footloose.  It was absolutely illegal to dance.  That was the verbiage of it.  But that was replaced by the all-ages dance ordinance and there are so many good places to play here for all-ages.  Not as many as I think everyone would like; I think Seattle is a really supportive all-ages place.  We try to only do all-ages shows, but sometimes when we’re on tour or something it’s like, “Do we play or not play?”  We’d much rather play all-ages shows.  I mean, the fact is that two of our members are not 21.  I have to wait outside in the cold! 

They actually make you do that, huh?

Oh, absolutely.  This local paper, The Stranger, did this Big Shot contest where they picked 12 bands that they really liked and they had their voters vote on them, and we were one of the bands that got to the finals.  They did this big huge free show and it was totally packed, sold out.  We were one of these finalists, and I had to wait outside from like 5:00 when we had to load in until midnight when we played.

That’s a bummer.

It’s awful!  (laughs)  I’m just like waiting outside in my little dress. 

As far as songwriting goes, how much is done individually and how much is fleshed out together?

I would say that the main writer behind it is Jonah, who plays bass.  He’ll come up with the idea, the riff – it starts pretty small.  He’ll come up with the riff, essentially, that goes through the whole song.  We bring that to practice, they set up drums, guitar, and figure it out, toy with it, switch it around and mess with the timing.  Sometimes I’ll write lyrics and Jonah will add things over the top of them, but usually he’s already so invested in the songs with the guitars and stuff that he’s already cooking in his brain how he wants the vocals to go over it.  So that’s hard for me, but, yeah, that’s usually how it works.

Do you end up with a surplus of songs or are you pretty efficient?

We’re pretty efficient.  We knock ‘em out and we put ‘em down.  I’ve thought about this and I think we’ve been really lucky in that we love all of our songs, you know?  None of them sound like they originally sounded.  They’ve all been cut and thrown back together like some… Frankenstein thing.  I stayed away from that quote because of that stupid Metallica movie.  (laughs)   We spent so much time on each one.  They were written pretty quickly after Funeral Sciences.

Lyrically, do you have to go out and look for inspiration?  Or is it all in there already?

I don’t think you have to look for inspiration.  Especially when Jonah writes, he’s just already got the timing and the phrasing worked out in his head, and he just puts in something that suits the song.  But it’s never about nothing, even for the guys and the aesthetic of the zombie horror B-movie stuff.  We love that aesthetic, but it’s always about something.  And when I write—because inevitably whatever I write is going to be twisted around and mushed up to fit the song—then I write whatever I want, and wait for it to be tweaked later.

That leads into something I wanted to talk about.  That B-movie, horror movie element you mentioned – something that a lot of people miss at first glance is that there usually are some moral statements or messages behind it. 

Social commentary, yeah.

Do you think that’s a parallel that carries over to your songs, too?

I really do.  I don’t think we’re trying to make any huge moral statements or social comments, but I think there is more than first meets the eye.  I think there’s a really interesting aesthetic that we write through.

Do you see the new record as a departure or a continuation?

I think it’s a departure.  Well, it’s both.  In our early beginnings, we were very much a straightforward pop-punk band.  Slowly we got better and grew out of that.  When we released Funeral Sciences, there were still maybe three or four songs that were in that pop-punk era.  They were the past.  We’ve started writing more about what the other half of Funeral Sciences sounded like.  It’s a continuation of one part of it and a departure from the other part of it.

Even in a limited selection of articles, there are countless bands that get dropped as supposed touchstones or influences – way more bands that could possibly actually be influences.  Who do you see as like-minded bands?

I go straight to the Misfits.  Not so much in the sound, but we’re both just punk bands at heart—and also the things they wrote about and their showmanship qualities.  I like a lot about them.  As far as musically, it’s incredibly different for all of us.  That’s what brings us all together and makes us sound so weird.  Our drummer is totally into prog, he’s into Rush and Tool and Yes.  We just go crazy for those drumbeats and stuff.  Not like this is only what we listen to, but I’m talking about what inspired us originally.  Our guitar player is into Van Halen and 80s metal that he can shred to.  Especially in doing this record, we were listening to a lot of Queen, a lot of Guns n’ Roses, a lot of big band stuff.

And what are the recent albums that have gotten you excited?

Oh my God, I love that Death From Above 1979 album.  I think System of a Down are incredible musicians, especially with the harmonies and the soulful interaction on the new record.

Are you doing the school grind or the day-job grind?

(chuckles)  We’re a pretty scholastic bunch.  Our drummer, Brian, just graduated in December.  He’s a journalism major and he did an internship in Olympia with a paper.  Jonah just graduated with a major in psychology and he’s actually having a paper written up in Psychology Today or Psychology America or something.  I’m going to be a junior in the fall and I’m an art history major.  And Steve is incredibly brilliant and he was going to school in Bellingham and was so inconvenient that we were finally like, “Steve, you gotta move down here.”  He did in September, and it’s been incredible.

I saw that you’d played a benefit show for music programs in the public school system.  If you get to a point where you’re big enough to really champion pet causes, what do you take up?

You know what?  I think our pet cause would be the Vera Project.  It’s an amazing organization and everyone should be aware of it.  There’s so much I feel we could do if we kept the money going.  Every chance we get we will do a benefit for the Vera Project.

Can you tell me a little more about what they do?

Yeah.  It’s a youth, music and art organization.  There’s everything from silk-screening programs to yoga classes.  Every week there’s a rock show and, like I said, it’s not just a bunch of kids from around town plugging in for the first time.  It’s that, but it’s with amazing national touring acts.  Vera gives these kids an opportunity to open for people that are good, gives them a chance to be seen.  They are a city-funded project; we get about $50,000 a year from the city of Seattle.  Right now we’re in the process of finding a new venue and it’s an amazing amount of money, but it’s an amazing venue and an amazing organization.  I’d check it out.  Check it out.  (laughs)