Dolly Parton died an hour before I sat down to interview Somerville rock and rollers Fortuna 500. Or at least that’s when the news broke. Though reticent to align themselves with the indie buzzwords of the day like “alt country” or “indie twang” there’s undoubtedly a bit of downhome swing in Tuna’s righteous brew. Some might say they doth protest too much, there is a banjo onstage after all. In any case, astute readers will know we back this damn band very hard, and their debut LP Two For Flinching is surely among this scene’s finest all year. In fact, Somerville is not-so-sneakily becoming the watering hole for all things rocking around these parts, and members of Fortuna 500 have certainly helped tend to that garden vis-a-vi Someday Fest and this Saturday’s Wanderville. Now with those logistics out of the way let’s talk some rock.
Fortuna 500 play their Somerville record release show tonight at The Rockwell in Davis, tickets are still available last I checked. Click play on the album below and read on for the interview and some more shots of the band by Sarah.
Ed note: The band wanted me to express that Farmer Dave Levine is very much still in the band, he was just on vacation with his wife in Italy at time of this interview.
AP: Do you feel like the gravity is shifting a bit from Allston to Somerville?
Cole: Well we got Zoe Hopper living here.
Julian: I do feel like like the river isn’t as as much of a like a white water rapid situation where you can’t cross. It’s become a lot more permeable, like a two-way street. There have been a lot of Allston heads coming over to Somerville, but I don’t know I feel like Harley’s probably best equipped to answer this.
Harley: I think that as I get older I feel like i’m pulled more this way because what I learned and was able to accomplish in Allston. That’s what set the basis for me to be the successful individual that I am now. I don’t know if the gravity is shifting for everyone but i would say for me personally, as I get older I find myself less drawn to living in the general kind of hell of Allston. That said, for basements Allston is still king, like that Horse Jumper show just ripped, insane show I’ve played that room a million times that was so baller.
Cole: When i first visited Ryan here in 2022 the vibe seemed like quirked up dorkus village which was cute now the vibe is swag.
Ryan: I feel like everyone who i’ve been talking to recently has been the has been saying like “ohAllston’s on the decline” but i feel like that’s like that’s the charm, like in the same way that poetry is on the decline. Somerville is constantly innovating and I know we’re never gonna have the real grit that Allston has, but I moved here specifically so that i didn’t have to deal with the grit of Allston but still get all of the music.
AP: What is it about Davis and Union that feels different from other neighborhoods that are part of the constellation of the scene here?
Harley: The Lilypad, The Burren, The Druid. I think that those bars are sick. I find that they’re easy enough and I don’t really live near Central I live near Davis
Cole: Those bars specifically are why sometimes i’m like we live in the best neighborhood in the world, due to the Camberville bar scene. i also think like these squares have a lot of venues and they have a lot of like municipal programming and there’s just a culture of doing stuff especially when the weather’s nice people are out and about and want to see music.
Ryan: It feels like you never need to have a plan or be invited out like you can pass by pay ten bucks to get in and have a show pretty consistently any night of the week unlike some other places where you need to know a guy who knows a guy and like have an invite or see something ahead of time and it’s very premeditated.
Harley: Yeah I guess you can go from O’Brien’s to The Ave or whatever, but it feels like it feels like we are losing the local haunts there. Here you can just pick a square any day of the week, I just don’t go to The Burren after 11 o’clock unless I want to have a terrible time. Talking like Cowboy Collin and I and we are freaking hammered and i’m getting right in front of the stage scream-singing the covers in my cowboy boots and i’m getting ready to stumble home in the snow. Or I’m walking from The Druid in the snow fish and chips and chips in hand, it’s awesome.
AP: What is it that drives you all uh as a group as a group?
Julian: Just live shows like i love that, it’s always been my favorite part of making music. The fun surrounding shows and playing them and playing with a rowdier group where the sound is pretty fun and in your face. I don’t know it’s a unique experience for me and it feels feels easy in a way there’s not a lot of premeditation. I mean we still try to be tight obviously, but I don’t know how to say what i’m going for without being mean about the cap like the quality of the music.
Harley: We make fast and loose beer rock.
Julian: So it’s a lot of fun on drums too, I get to be rowdy and not as restrained as some other projects
Cole: I have a different answer different sort of answer. I agree with all the things Julian said, but i also think more existentially about like relentless fun and camaraderie in the face of like AI hell and middle age. Time is passing and things are just getting worse and i want to make noise with my guys.
Ryan: That was at once sobering and uplifting.
Cole: I can’t blow up a data center so I have to play these shows.
Harley: Escape from work. There have not been any times in which we performed that i’ve not had fun and that is like the whole thing. This band really feeds off of feeling locked in and how everyone in the room is in on one big inside joke and like riding that that wave of energy during a performance is pretty great.
Ryan: I think that this band strikes a really nice balance between humor and sincerity in a way that I don’t think is all that really intentional or pre-planned or whatever it’s pretty spontaneous. Striking that balance keeps me always looking forward to the next thing.
Julian: This band is very open to antics in a way that other bands haven’t been since college. Like in college we we just decided to wear hazmat suits one day for an Otis show which aged really well because that was like six months before covid.
Cole: No spoilers for the release show but there may be some antics. There was that time at the Tavern at the End of the World where something changed in the air and like half a dozen couples just started making out and i feel like that just that just changed how the band operates completely. I think that the specter of making people make out is exciting.
Ryan: That was the end product of a night that we showed up and the Intac crew was waiting outside and they were all like “are you guys sure that you’re playing tonight?” and we’re like what do you mean and they’re like “well maybe you should just go inside.” So we walked in and there was like full sit-down dinner service happening. We’ve loaded the amps in earlier that day, talked to the manager he was like “six o’clock” or whatever time. So we walk in at six and he looks at us like we’ve never met.
Harley: The amp setup was ridiculous, we did amp wall of death which was awesome. The only option playing to like families sitting down and they loved it, they were getting blasted by the amps. At one point I looked out and it was like four couples all making out of the back of the room surrounded by the families and then a full bar.
Cole: It started with people that were blatantly ignoring us, and then in time it became the sickest night of all time it was awesome.
Julian: We had gotten there literally by walking an entire parade of people from this house just to show up like at the head of a parade to an unsuspecting place, incredible feeling. That was also the most stressed hour i think i’ve ever had getting a drum set into a restaurant.
Ryan: Hell yeah shout out gig advances.
AP: Where do y’all see yourselves within both the Boston music scene and then the so-called “indie twang” thing?
Cole: I’ll speak on indie twang first: de-millennializing it and re-contributing punk energy like re-contributing the cow-punk energy into indie twang. De-algorithming it,introducing something that takes the structure, but takes a step away from “sounds like MJ Lenderman” as a computerizable form. Making alt country un-playlistable, and confusing people. Basically i’m excited to take a genre that people’s ears and brains have gotten too familiar with because of AI trends.
Harley: I think let them have indie twang, just let it die and become a millennial facebook trope. Skip all that nonsense don’t have to re-contextualize anything I think let people be confused and then they’re going to give it a bunch of labels over time and then eventually they’ll boil it down into something for you and they’ll just hand it to you. Ultimately who cares play guitar.
Cole: I’m fearful that when we add a pedal steel to this band it’ll sound very, very good .
Ryan: I think we’re just fun like we’re trying to introduce similar energy as Intac and some of our other peers that are just trying to keep it loose and goofy because i think everyone needs that. After our first series of shows we all got feedback that people were refreshed by the sloppy, happy goofiness of the whole thing and so we have kept stepping into that space.
Julian: Cole has been a frequent purveyor of the value of subverting people’s expectations.
Cole: Speaking of this band’s live shows and the bands around Boston, the people that have really been inspiring me recently are those who challenge the notion of what a live show should be and how it should feel and the traditions around it. I think that’s a goal of of mine for this band, I would like for us to try to contribute to that and kind of test the boundaries because i think that’s the sort of thing that ensures people still come out and see live music.
Julian: I feel like we’re always trying to do something unexpected to reinforce your point. Songs that randomly have a rumba thrown into the middle or what started as a like really fast bluegrass song and then we throw like an Egyptian beat in the middle. We’ve thrown reggaeton into the middle of songs before, i think we have a lot of fun like breaking out of a sound even if it’s to my own severe skepticism.
Ryan: And yet it’s usually your idea.
Julian: It’s true like “Master Key” i was not on board with when i first heard and now i love it, but i can imagine a listener might have a similar experience. That’s part of what makes the project exciting it feels like we’re doing something at least that hasn’t been done by other people, maybe for good reason, but at least it hasn’t been done.
Cole: That said we’re pretty busy all of us independently and we’re in a rush, we’re kind of an off the hip band a little bit more i think it adds to the whole thing like we show up with whatever energy we show up with and make do with what that is. Maybe there will be a few pre-planned gags for something bigger like an album release show, but usually it is not planned to sing a Scottish war song like we did a few gigs ago like when the Scots were around. I do think that is something about the energy of Intac and sidebody and Jonny Tex that are a little bit more focused on entertainment, and maybe that is a Camberville-centric thing.
AP: You’re all in a bunch of other bands, you do some community organizing, you book festivals, some of you write about music, what do you all think it takes to foster a healthy music scene like this?
Ryan: Work. I think it takes i think it takes willing participants, i think it takes willingness to eat shit.
Harley: A love of the game, but also like a love of having fun and a bit of arrogance. i think all of us have a little thing i don’t know what it is but it’s like being out there and entertaining and delivering and producing and creating is the bug, And if i’m not doing that i don’t know what to do
And then it’s like if you love creating then how much do you want that to be work? How much do you want that to be play time? Do you want money off of this? Do you want to spend your life doing this? We all exist within the world, some of us have day jobs some of us are going back to school. I work as a guitar tech so everything i do is like music-centric but we all love and are addicted to creating.
Cole: The make stuff bug yeah make stuff bug plus skill set and interest, everyone captures it in their own way are you Type A like Ryan and i rallying around a common goal or are you someone that is there in a more support role.
Ryan: It takes both creating and sharing opportunities. So many of the bands know each other, so it takes just purposefully inviting different people to play with you than you might not otherwise play with and it takes a certain kind of willful collaboration to make a scene in that sense. Which to me is what makes Boston opposed to more of like a cutthroat city like New York where people are more territorial. Maybe it does take Type A guys to foster those opportunities, but also it’s important to extend each other olive branches.
Cole: There’s a knowledge sharing component too, with people being open and encouraging of other people’s ideas. When i’ve talked to people who are doing their thing, organizing an event or putting a band together or trying to put pen to paper the main hurdle is just getting visibility and like navigability into things in a city where you are just like swimming upstream to create art and culture in every sense of the term. I think that getting people connected and sharing how you did things is the main way to keep it moving.
Ryan: i think a large part of the camaraderie rides on the fact that there’s so much despair here and you are constantly fighting upstream even to just have places to practice the thing that you want to do live. Part of this struggle is what brings us all together.
AP: How does a Fortuna 500 song come together?
Julian: Cole writes it and brings it to the band.
Harley: Cole says you’re gonna play this part at this time, it’s a real Steely Dan situation.
Cole: I or hopefully others in the next album, (although we had some amazing non-Cole songs on this album) bring a 70% fleshed out idea, because the limits of my personal little creativity are extremely high when it comes to the gap between my personal creativity and a Fortuna 500 song. So I bring a mostly-formed idea to the band and then since everybody’s a baller musician things just happen and we play through something two or three times and then Julian’s like “let’s turn this cow-punk song into a jam song, too.” So we try that and then we play it a few times and we record it. Everyone’s really busy, but it would be so great if we actually took the time to just like bring songs and ideas to each other and workshop them,m but if we did that we would just have another album’s worth of material.
Ryan: i’ve been i’ve been cooking on like a dr seuss kind of contraption. So a Tuna song goes through the Cole ideator, and then it goes through the Julian structurator which ensures that we are in fact playing it the same way twice, and then it goes through the Ryan rifferator so that there’s some guitar part on it hopefully, and then it goes through the Dave grooverator or the Logan grooverator so that the hips start moving, then it goes through the Harley noiserator so that it doesn’t sound quite as vanilla, and then it goes back to the Cole visionator.
Julian: And then it gets described by the Ryan articulator.
Ryan: Yeah the snake really eats itself.
AP: We are in what some would call a pedal steel renaissance, is the banjo next?
Cole: i don’t know, no the banjo is annoying bro. I think the thing about the pedal steel is it’s easy to plug in. It goes into an amp. The banjo going into the amp gives us so many feedback problems, though i think it’s mostly pretty exciting problems. I haven’t tried doing the whole pedal banjo thing yet i’m flirting with it for the next round.
A nylon string banjo? Lovely listening absolutely lovely listening to my shit is just like loud, abrasive and funny like amusing, but it’s like most of the time it just does not sound good. It’s fun to try and write a claw hammer banjo song in the exact traditional way that people write a claw hammer banjo song because i don’t know shit about music but i did learn how to play claw hammer banjo and i know the fundamentals and It’s funny to bring it to a rock and roll band. I do i think the banjo is a beautiful instrument when it is as part of solo or duo music, like Sweet Petunia.
AP: What do you have against lemons? Is this a pro scurvy band?
Cole: The lemon man pushed me into a well and made off with my children now i’m in a band.
AP: What’s next for Fortuna 500?
Cole: Whatever Jules says, Julian’s taking the helmet. Actually i should have looked at you when i said that.
Julian: We gotta double band membership by Q4, make it a subscription model, we gotta make the numbers go up.
Cole: I’ve got so many songs i’m frothing at the mouth to teach these guys all i need is a couple of fucking Thursdays.
Harley: They’re all Eagles covers. We’re doing an all Joe Walsh cover set, look out for it this Halloween.
Cole: We have a great Allston Pudding set that we’re very excited for (Ed note at the damn Coolidge Corner Theater!) we will at some point host an electoral debate and we will continue taking up space in the country niche without without surrendering to Waxahatchee-ism.
Julian: I also think one of our goals for this year is to rest on our laurels and to take more things for granted.
Ryan: Julian is driving the boat.
Julian: We’re gonna put our eggs in one basket. We’re gonna organize our ducks.
Cole: We’re gonna create an underground economy i just don’t know about what yet.
AP: When will you bring back the tank tops?
Harley: I showed up that night thankfully with a tank top underneath my shirt, and i saw everyone in the tank tops and i said “guys what the fuck?”
Cole: We’ll do it for you for the Jim Jarmusch night. We need to talk about outfits for our album release show, but i have ideas. Sometimes we do things like talk about outfits.
Ryan: Yeah that part of our show is actually the most contrived.
Cole: That’s that’s when my authoritarianism really shines through, like boys we’re dressing like pelicans tonight.
Check out the rest of Sarah’s photos below
