Header image credit: @honeybaby.images
You don’t know the South until you go to a Waffle House. It’s an institution that informs disaster response. The sketchier the place looks, the better the food. That’s why I didn’t hesitate to say “YES!” when Ocean and Gilligan from Boygirl Rising suggested Waffle House for our interview.
Unsurprisingly, talking music over a dinner-breakfast is an amazing time. I swear there’s an alternate timeline where the Waffle House Sessions exist as some crazed hybrid between Daytrotter and the on-the-nose SNL sketch. I brought my partner and, in true queer organizer fashion, she started brainstorming ways to connect folks with the band’s upcoming Slugfest.
In a world of instant gratification, groups like Boygirl Rising are working to build community support where there is none. Their labor goes beyond music and playing shows to creating a music festival for an entire network of bands across the East Coast. It couldn’t help but come away inspired by our chat (hopefully you do, too.)
What do you do in the band?
Gilligan (they/them): I am a writer, vocalist, and play guitar and banjo.
Ocean (they/them): I play ukulele and banjo, sing, and write songs also. It’s folk music; everybody has to do everything all at the same time.
What’s something you’ve been listening to lately?
Gilligan: Lately, I’ve been listening to a little bit of Barefoot Surrender, they’re another folk punk band. Also Rumbletramp; they’re our friends and about to go on tour. Their music is just really good.
Ocean: I have been listening to Never Shout Never, apparently. But Never Shout Never is folk punk, even though I know that the folk punk people will get mad at me about that. I’ve also been listening to the new Apes of the State album [What’s Another Night] that just came out. They’re our friends from Pennsylvania and their new album is really fucking depressing. And I love that.
What was the first musician that each of you remember finding on your own and obsessing over?
Ocean: Never Shout Never. [laughs]
Gilligan: I was really into pop punk as a middle schooler, which is way worse because all those bands are dead or cancelled. I was really into My Chemical Romance, but also into All Time Low, which cancel each other out.
How has your musical taste changed since then?
Gilligan: I grew up listening to a lot of folk and country. My great-grandparents were farmers in Lumberton. Most of grandma’s siblings were farmers, but she was the first one to go to school. My mom’s taste was reflected in her mom’s taste, which passed onto me.
As I got older, I got really into dance emo, pop punk, and that kind of stuff. And I felt a lot of shame in liking country music. As I’ve gotten older, I think I’ve found a way to sort of reconcile those two things. There’s no such thing as bad music. You can just like both. And there’s good things about every genre.
Ocean: My original love of music was bands like Kill Hannah and Never Shout Never. A bunch of MySpace pop. Blood on the Dance Floor. I went through my “scene phase.” And then when I turned 14, I decided that I didn’t want to be associated with that shit anymore. To the point where I started only listening to The Beatles. I was like, “Pop and emo music are bad. I hate country. I only like The Beatles and Neutral Milk Hotel.”
Now, I hate The Beatles and I love pop music, especially 2014-era stuff like MARINA, Lana Del Ray, and Robyn. I also listen to country music and all this folk punk, which is basically just like emo country.
How and when did the band come together?
Ocean: I was in a band for a couple of years, and that ended in a brutal breakup. About three weeks after my band broke up, I went to this DIY open mic on my friend’s porch. I was super anxious because there were a bunch of young, cute, queer college kids. I was 25, but everybody else was like 21 and having so much fun. I played, and it was like the worst solo set I’ve ever played in my life. I was horrible. My voice was cracking the whole time because I was super nervous. I was just going to leave right after.
Gilligan: I met Ocean’s friend [who hosted the open mic] a few days prior; we met in a coffee shop as strangers, hung out for hours, and they invited me to this open mic. I wasn’t playing or writing any music, but I decided I was going to go. I watched Ocean’s set and thought, “That is the kind of music that I make. But I can’t talk to that person, I’m too shy.”
Our mutual friend told me to go talk to Ocean, but I was too nervous. They did that to me throughout the night until Ocean was leaving, and I had to talk to them.
Ocean: From their point of view, they were freaking about talking to me. But I just saw this hot person who said, “I loved your set. We should jam sometime.” And then I said, “I’m single,” but I meant that I wasn’t in a band or anything anymore. [laughs]
We exchanged information, and eventually we ended up jamming and it went really super good. We were both like, “We’re in a band now.” It was like instant best friendship, immediately codependent. We’ve been inseparable since.
Gilligan: That’s true. We became friends and had to sew ourselves together a little bit. And now it’s three years later, and we’re still making music.
Image credit: honeybaby.images
When did y’all start performing live?
Ocean: Our first show was the Hopscotch Day Party at the Night Rider on September 10th, 2022. We first jammed on July 17th. I have never written any of this down.
Gilligan: It was crazy. We started making music in July, and then by September, we were playing at a Hopscotch party.
Whoa, that’s awesome! What has your creative journey been since that show?
Ocean: About 10 months into being a band, we released our debut and currently only release, This is an intervention. It’s a six-song EP with three Gil songs, three me songs. We did our release show at the Pour House in Raleigh. It was really well attended. We had a lot of support. It was a big community effort, just all the promotion and that stuff.
From there, we’ve done a full 180. Instead of mostly focusing on ourselves as creatives, we turned our efforts into community building. There were like two bands we could play with when we were booking our early shows. Because everybody’s in a full band with a drum kit and we’re just two bitches with acoustic instruments. If we’re going to headline, we can’t have a full band with a drum kit open for us.
So we’ve hosted events, started booking shows for touring bands, and essentially brought a whole scene out of the woodwork. Just meeting people, playing out and trying to make sure we’re playing in accessible all-ages spaces.
I host an open mic. It was at another bar for the last few years, but I just moved it to Clouds Brewing Taproom in Raleigh. That’s where we’ve met a ton of the people that we know now. It turns out if you do an open mic and you’re like, “This is a gay open mic,” a bunch of queer people with shitty guitars and a lot to say will come. And it’s really fun.
Gilligan: You can’t have a community with two people. I’m really proud of the work that we have done to build a music scene here. We started out with a lot of friends who didn’t make music, and now we have a lot of friends who do.
Ocean: We all take turns going to each other’s gigs. There’s like an eight-band rotation that plays all the folk punk shows.
Gilligan: Our writing has also changed since we put out our EP. All of the songs that I wrote on it were from my pandemic years. I just pulled all of my college music out and was like, “What’s good?” Since then, I’ve written way more consistently. I am way more politically minded now than I was then. I’ve always been a political person; I have a political science degree. And I can channel that in the way I write songs.
Have y’all been working on a follow-up to that EP?
Gilligan: We have, it’s been a mess. [laughs] We probably have around 30 or more unreleased songs in our backlog. We picked seven to go on a sophomore album, which is set to come out later this year. We’re just waiting on the masters to be finalized.
Recording was way easier this time since we weren’t working on a strict timeline. Our EP was recorded over a weekend. We spent like 15 or 16 hours over two days while working full-time. This time, we got it done every Sunday for a couple of weeks.
Tell me about Slugfest! How did y’all start it and what went into putting together this year’s festival?
Ocean: We’ve made friends up and down the East Coast at this point. People coming through will hit us up and say, “You want to do something?” And we’ll either do something with them or we’ll set something else up for them and then hang out. We wanted to have some way to get a bunch of these queer folk musicians together in one place.
I went to Huron Stage and said, “It would be so cool if I could have a festival here.” I reserved the date with Josh, but we weren’t family-friendly enough. We had 12-13 bands booked for the whole day, which ended up being 15. So it just wasn’t possible to do it there. I was trying to do everything by myself, and it did not work very well because I’m insane and also very disorganized.
Gilligan: I have a background in event coordination and was watching Ocean struggle. I just started helping; it wasn’t a question. [laughs]
Ocean: We ended up having to move it three months out to Panther Lake. It’s a campground with a stage, run by this sweet old head who really cares about the music community. He didn’t make us pay to book the festival; it’s only about 25-30 minutes outside of Raleigh, but feels very remote.
Gilligan: The festival date came, and we were certain that no one was going to come. We did like under 20 pre-sales and were expecting there to be like six people. I thought we were going to have to pay all of our touring acts nothing and apologize. And then…
Ocean: 130 people came!
Oh my god!
Gilligan: Yeah! There was a huge turnout. The owner Samme said it had been the biggest that Panther Lake had seen.
Ocean: We ran late. The cops got called.
Gilligan: We had to finish our set unplugged.
Ocean: We had to get food together at the last minute. It’s remote enough that you have to drive about 20 minutes to a restaurant or a grocery store. We swung this hot dog cart, which came and set up at the campground. It was awesome, but it was a huge mess.
Gilligan: But also very successful! On the Sunday after that event, we sat down in my living room and I said, “We’re putting together a calendar for this upcoming year. Here are all of our deadlines. Everything will be organized this year.” It’s turned from one day to a two-day event. We’re going to have 25 acts this year and an art market.
A lot of the festivals in our niche genre tend to happen in the Northeast and sometimes the Midwest. If there is an event near us, it’s in the deep South, like Louisiana or Florida. You don’t really see a whole lot of folk punk festivals in the Carolinas or Georgia. We’re hoping to make this a community space for that.
Ocean: Especially to uplift queer and marginalized artists, because there are so many of us. But when you ask anybody about folk punk, they’re like, “Oh you mean Johnny Hobo?” Can we stop talking about white men who realistically didn’t even pioneer the genre?
Gilligan: Folk punk occurs naturally. I feel like the genre 10 years ago was predominantly straight, cis and white. And the bands that are big right now are almost exclusively queer, which is really cool. I do still think that people of color in the genre are being cast to the wayside, but festivals like Chapel of Dog that are explicitly for artists of color are great. We would love Slugfest to be like that.
Ocean: We want to give space to anyone who doesn’t normally get a platform. It’s crazy how much we’ve been able to build a community. Slugfest is like an amalgamation of all of that work. At this point, we’re planning a tour for the fall because we’ve made so many connections, and we’re pretty much just doing that.
Gilligan: It might be like Ocean’s brainchild, but it really is our community. We would not be able to do it without other local artists. Last year Rumbletramp really pulled through, same with Marble Berry Seeds. There’s a huge number of artists in this area that we have to rely on and who we are so glad to rely on as part of our community. We might be putting the thought to paper, but it doesn’t happen without them.
Ocean: Without Pat Van Buren and Corina from Rumbletramp, who would be planning the Spicy Pickle award ceremony at Slugfest this year?
How do you balance your musical passions with your day jobs?
Gilligan: We take turns being unemployed. [laughs] I lost my job in January. I was formerly a legislative assistant working for Natasha Marcus, a state senator out of Charlotte, who was gerrymandered out of her district for being a little too outspoken on the Senate floor. She was one of two elected officials who were gerrymandered in North Carolina. Because she didn’t have a job, I no longer had a job. Fortunately, I am about to start a new job in May. Planning things for us has been kind of my full-time hobby for the last couple of months.
Ocean: I’m disabled, so it’s honestly hard to balance. I was unemployed a lot of last year because I have an autoimmune disease. Even with the free time, I was really sick. It’s huge to be able to rely on our friends because I can’t even do a lot of the physical things when we’re involved with doing stuff like Slugfest. Everybody’s been so awesome and helpful.
Gilligan: Mutual aid in the Triangle is phenomenal, too. We’ve got a lot of friends who work in the Raleigh United Mutual Aid Hub and volunteer with different chapters of Food Not Bombs throughout the Triangle. When I haven’t been able to afford groceries, I know that I can go to Food Not Bombs and get a hot meal. And when we’ve had to plan shows and are working crazy weeks, we can confidently rely on any other band to help us out, whether it’s making a flyer, reaching out to a venue, or just communicating with the touring act.
Ocean: Most of all, lots of crying. Shout out to my wife for holding me while I panic-cry after my nine-hour day because I have to message a food truck.
One person’s going to be like, “I relate so hard to this.”
Ocean: I’m here for that one person. But it’s been fun to put together. I just reached out to AIDS Alliance because we had on-site STI testing at last year’s Slugfest, and we’re hoping to do it again. We’re also getting a supply of naloxone and, hopefully, Musicians for Overdose Prevention are going to do a presentation on how to use it. Plus Raleigh is going to be handing out literature on being fat in the U.S., which is really awesome.
To wrap things up, who are your favorite local/North Carolina bands?
Ocean: Shout out to M.B. Mulkey, Will Berry, Pat Van Buren, Marble Berry Seeds, and Puppy Alphabet. Also Pokin’ Holes, even though he’s on a forever hiatus or whatever.
Gilligan: Paul Petrol. Incredible artist. He is so much fun. Oort Patrol; basically anything Landon [Johnson] drums in, but especially Oort Patrol.
Ocean: Cherub is just now starting to release music. They are a person we met through my open mic, and everybody who hears them loves them. It’s like Fallout music for girls.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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