DS Interview: Nicole Laurenne on The Darts’ upcoming “Halloween Love Songs,” her journey to becoming a punk rock judge, her limitless musical passion and much more

2026 is shaping up to be quite a busy year for Nicole Laurenne. By some metrics, it might be her busiest one yet. Laurenne’s primary band, the campy, gothy garage-punk four-piece The Darts, are due to put out their latest record, Halloween Love Songs, on March 3rd. It marks the band’s seventh studio full-length in less than ten years (to go along with a few EPs as well…and yes, plans for number eight are already well underway). Meanwhile, Laurenne’s jazzy, loungey neo-soul side project Black Viiolet just put out a brand new full-length, Dark Blue, earlier this month. Most of the months of March and April and May and June and definitely July and into August and a little of September and then basically October through December will be dedicated to the life of a road dog, as both bands will make an exhausting slate of appearances across the US and across Europe (especially France!) and Australia and Japan for the balance of the coming year. 

And yet by other metrics, this is the ‘easy street’ portion of Laurenne’s life. This is what retirement looks like after close to three decades in the legal field, the lion’s share of which was spent as a municipal court judge in Gilbert, Arizona, during the time that that community was in the throes of becoming the fastest-growing municipality in the United States. Close to two decades of her time in the robe was also spent as a touring musician. Not full-time one, mind you, but about as full-time as you could get given the success of her early project, The Love Me Nots. Oh, and she was also a mom to twin daughters. The fact that Laurenne was a judge – a fact that she initially wanted to keep secret when starting smaller bands in Phoenix before quickly getting her cover blown at an early Love Me Nots gig twenty years ago that just so happened to be attended by a staffer from the Phoenix News Times – has been talked about in many places over the years. And while the “what” of the story is certainly fascinating, the “how” and the “why” are endlessly compelling.

We caught up with Laurenne from her newfound home in the Pacific Northwest – Tacoma, to be precise – in order to talk primarily about Halloween Love Songs. Centered on the theme that ‘every day can be Halloween,’ the album features a retooled version of the Darts lineup (Becca Davidson on guitar, Lindsay Scarey on bass and the return of Rikki Styxx behind the drumkit) and may just represent the band’s most fun and campy and best-sounding record to date. As a matter of course, the conversation steered into the deep musical curiosity that’s been a constant thread in her life. With varied and wide ranging experinces venturing from her younger years as a classically trained pianist to becoming a member of the University of Michigan and an opera accompanist and part of a jazz trio to her first pop bands and her time in The Love Me Nots and now taking the reins out in front of both The Darts and Black Viiolet, Laurenne’s musical journey, while at times chaotic, has been in many ways a true stabilizing outlet.

And so we of course discuss the kitschy fun sound and process that resulted in Halloween Love Songs and the build-up to what’s going to be an exciting and exhuasting year of touring. And we spend a lot of time putting this current period into it’s right contextual place, discussing the long and winding and fascinating journey from growing up in Chicago as the child of two incredibly gifted but not musically inclined – or musically interested, for that matter – parents, her start as a classically-trained musician her journey to Michigan for undergrad and Arizona for law school and somehow sorta backing into a career as a judge in a trailer court and then starting and maintaining a series of increasingly successful bands while still serving as a full-time judge AND a mom to twin daughters. It’s a super fun chat and we think you’ll dig it. You can order Black Viiolet’s Dark Blue now and still pre-order Halloween Love Songs, and here’s where you can catch both bands on tour in the coming months (like Medford, MA, in April!)

***The conversation below has been condensed for content and clarity. Yes, really.***

Dying Scene (Jay Stone): Nice to meet you! This is really cool. Where are you now? You’re in Seattle right? 

Nicole Laurenne (The Darts): I’m actually technically in Tacoma.

What beautiful country. As a 90s alternative kid, I had been wanting to go to Seattle for 35 years or whatever it was, until we finally went last year to visit some friends. I could have stayed (forever).

Oh my God, that’s exactly what I thought! When I was able to finally move where I wanted, my first choice was France and that fell apart because of some tax reasons. I was living in the desert in Phoenix for so long and I just hated the desert so much. I hated the weather. I grew up in Chicago, so desert stuff was not me. When it was finally time to move, I was like, you know, I’ve always loved the Seattle scene. Every time I tour here, I have a great time. It’s beautiful. There’s rain. There’s beaches. There’s cliffs. It’s beautiful. 

The people seem great. Like not just in the scene, but certainly the people in the scene.

It’s super not competitive or backstabby like a lot of cities I’ve been in. It’s like very community focused. Really unique place, if you ask me.

And so how long were you in Arizona for? Was that like law school and then like your whole professional career? 

Yeah, you get stuck. Because, you know, wherever you go to law school, you kind of make all your contacts. I actually not only made my professional contacts, but I got married and everything just snowballed into Arizona. And it was not what I intended at all, but that’s where it was. So, yeah, I was there, let’s see…from 1990 when I started law school until 2022. (*both laugh*)

You were in in Phoenix? Or the greater Phoenix area?

I was in Phoenix. I was living in downtown Phoenix for most of that time. And then towards the end, my job was on the outskirts in Gilbert, which is one of the suburbs. So I moved out there at the very end just for a year or two. And then that was it. 

And then Pacific Northwest. That’s really… that’s three real polar opposites; Chicago to Phoenix Arizona to Tacoma.

Although, you know, this feels to me a little more like the Chicago that I knew when I was growing up. It’s smaller here, but I don’t know…it just feels like culturally very diverse, musically and otherwise, you know? Super cosmopolitan. There’s people from all over the world here. It’s really unique; it’s very artsy in its own way, but it’s also got that whole Google, Amazon, Microsoft thing. 

Yeah, that is a little strange.

There’s like this giant tech bro scene, but there’s also this huge cultural scene going on simultaneously. And they live side by side and they even enmesh sometimes. I don’t know…it works here!

Let’s talk about the new record (Halloween Love Songs)! The new record is really, really fun. They’re all really, really fun. But the new record is really, really fun. Also…you write an awful lot. (*both laugh*)

I do!

Has that always been the thing or has that started more since retirement, too? 

No, no, no. I mean, I was in The Love Me Nots before The Darts. Maybe because I started late in life in this whole rock scene, but I always feel like I want to put out a record a year. That’s been my goal from the beginning. So when you think like that, I mean, I’ve pretty much done it, except for when I missed a year in Covid, and that was only because nobody was putting out records.

Who can blame you, right!

I had the songs! I’ve always written songs. Even when I was studying classical piano as a kid and everything, I was always writing stuff. It just comes out of me. It’s my therapy. It’s what I do. It’s my favorite thing to do, and so I’m always doing it. I have just loads of lyrics stored away and loads of riffs stored away and partial songs and a million things, so when it comes time to put a record together, I just kind of pull it from all my ideas and start assembling and editing and creating something new.

How long did it take you to write this record? Is this all stuff that was written new for this or is it all like do you have so many ideas that they’ve just been percolating for years? 

I got the idea to write a Halloween themed record in Summer 2024, when I was doing an interview with Rock & Folk in Paris. The journalist and I were like, “there just aren’t enough Halloween theme songs. We can’t just have ‘Monster Mash,’ there has to be more!”

Yeah, there’s that “This Is Halloween” song, and then that’s it! (*both laugh*)

Yeah! I walked away from that interview like “I should really get on this.” And from that day, I started thinking about these songs and they all quickly wrote themselves. The real cherry on top was when I had to revamp the lineup for touring. Lindsay Scarey, who’s also from Seattle, is my new bassist. When she came on board, she didn’t even know I was writing a Halloween-themed record, but she’s also a great songwriter. She wrote in her last band, too. And she said, ‘I have a song idea. Maybe you can do something with it.’ It was called “Phantom Creep.” And I was like, “oh, my God, this fits in perfectly with my band!” And so I revamped the song. And then we decided we wanted to have a song that had a dance that goes with it that everybody could do. And so she worked on the dance. And I don’t know. So, yeah, that song came together in about a second. (*both laugh*) But yeah, all this stuff was written since Summer 2024. So less than a year.

I mean, it’s in your normal wheelhouse, except that it’s all like sort of specifically Halloween theme songs. I can imagine that that’s a fun process. Like once that once that snowball starts going at the top of the mountain… 

Oh my God! Writing a record with a theme is really fun because immediately you start with a concept like, ‘oh, I’m going to write a song about zombies’ and it’s going to be about how you hate your day job because you feel like a zombie there. And now I’m going to write a song about vampires, but they’re going to be in love and I’m going to write about that, you know? And so every song quickly had a story when you started thinking about monsters. They are very kitschy, which is also very easy to write because it’s thematic, you know? As I started writing these songs, I realized that there were those monstery, kitschy songs that are Halloween-ish, but there’s also this, you know, late night, knock down all the mailboxes, light everything on fire side of Halloween.

Yeah, the mischief night stuff. 

Yeah, right! The darker part of it, the bonfire in the middle of the night kind of thing. And there were songs I was writing that fit into that theme, even though they might not be Halloween songs like the song we’re releasing tomorrow is called “Apocalypse.” And that came to mind, not at all about Halloween. I saw the Apocalypse Tapestry in France. I don’t know if you know about this. It’s from medieval times.

I don’t. But where is it? We’re going to France this summer!

Oh I’m so glad! That’s awesome. Well, the tapestry is in Angers. And Angers is also cool because it’s where the the people put together the Levitation festival in France. It’s a really big music city. But there’s a big castle there. And on display inside the castle is the Apocalypse Tapestry. It was made by women back in medieval times. And it is so huge! It goes around the walls of this entire giant room. And they’ve restored it. It’s in perfect shape. It’s really colorful. It’s two tapestries. The top tapestry tells you the gods’ perspective on the apocalypse. They actually are planning it. And they’re trying to, you know, take out the bad guys and start fresh. And they’re all happy. And then the bottom is all the death and destruction and the kings going down and all this stuff that’s happening to the humans. It’s the coolest thing. And I walked out of there like, “oh, my God, I’m writing a song about apocalypse! This is great!” And part of it is the gods’ perspective, which is like, “yay, let’s start over. This is a mess.” And the other part of it… you know, royalty was big back then. And there was a lot in the bottom tapestry of kings and queens being destroyed by the gods. And as I was walking out, I wrote the line “There’s no kings.” I wrote that line. It just stuck out to me. I put it in the song in 2024. It was out in the demo. And then we recorded the record. And then all of a sudden…

It becomes a movement!

Yeah, right! Right! This is perfect! It’s perfect! Everybody understands it!

Right! Wow. I’ll have to look into how far that is from the city and how to get there. That would be cool to see.

There’s a train that goes out there. I think it takes about an hour and a half. Black Viiolet also recorded in near Angers in the Loire Valley. That’s where we did our recording for this last record with at Black Box Studio, which is where Dry Cleaning and The Kills and all these bands recorded. It’s an amazing place. I’d always wanted to go. It was a dream. And so, yeah, my half my band took a train from the Paris airport out there. 

So why France? I mean, is it just a country that you’ve fallen in love with? Obviously, it seems like the bands do well there. 

There’s really one big reason, but it led to two reasons. Back in the day, I just wanted to tour Europe and the Love Me Nots weren’t really anything yet. I just whipped out a credit card and I was like, “I’m just booking shows. I don’t care if anybody shows up. I’m going to once in my life tour Europe!” And we went and we played in Paris among other places and a record label guy wrote to me an hour or two before the show and said, “hey, I’m from this label in the south of France and I want to come see your show. Is that OK?” And I’m like,”hell yeah, that’s OK!” (*laughs*) He ended up signing us that night to a great label called Bad Reputation. It doesn’t exist anymore, but that signing led to the biggest tours, the front page of Rolling Stone, a million things came from that night of that signing. And so when The Darts started, we already had this super solid French thing. The French people have always liked my music for some reason. They always responded well to it, so when The Darts came along, it was like those fans just sort of hopped on board. And in the meantime, since we had fans there, one of the people we knew through the grapevine was this agent in Bordeaux. Actually, outside of Bordeaux in the vineyards. Ludo from Adrenalin Fix Records. He took on The Darts booking for international things, and he’s like my brother now. I mean, he’s been booking us and managing us ever since. And I think when your agent is in France, you end up going to France a lot because that’s where all the contacts are. But also France is really unique musically because the government…some of the governments in other countries in Europe do this, too…but in France, they give you a grant, if you can show that you’ve worked in the arts a certain number of hours per year, it’s called intermittence. If you can prove that that you’ve done these hours, you get money from the government to do the arts. 

Imagine that!

It’s insane! And so they have venues, beautiful venues. You can’t even get your head around how beautiful these venues are. Huge stages, lights, production, hospitality you can’t even fathom. And all these people doing stage work because they want their hours. They don’t even have to make any money necessarily, but they’re under contract. So you have the farmer and this guy and that guy all running the lights. And you’ll have this dude making dinner, bringing it. And, you know, this guy booking the show. And it’s like the most amazing experience because their hearts are so in it and they’ve learned how to do everything perfectly. And they just like to host bands. This is throughout the entire country. It’s so unique. Some of the best, best venues I’ve ever played are these community run venues.

How much touring could you do as an active judge? Like how much time did how much time did you spend…

Not as much as I wanted!

Yeah, right! 

You know, when The Love Me Nots thing started, I had been a judge only for, I don’t know, five years or six years or something like that. I didn’t have a lot of the vacation time stored up yet. I had little kids. My twins were still young. I needed time with them. It was rough. And The Love Me Nots were getting these huge offers from everywhere to do big festivals and all this stuff. Luckily, I mean, I was making money…everyone joked that I was only a judge to pay for the music but it was kind of true. (*both laugh*)

There’s nothing wrong with that.

I mean, it’s what I really wanted to do from day one. And I was able to do it this way.  I would save up all my personal time that I had available. If you looked at our tour schedule, you could figure out that we toured on these long weekends where I had to build an extra day or two. And then I would tack on my ten days of the vacation on top of that. And then I would do these long weekends where I would take a sick day or a vacation day or whatever they would let me do throughout the whole year. And when you put the tour poster together, it looked like a whole bunch of dates all over the world. But when you break it down, it was like long weekend, long weekend, long weekend, Thanksgiving, you know? (*laughs*) We made it work. We had to really pick and choose to make the money. We didn’t break even because we had to tour like that, but it was worth it to me. And it was great. And the band was incredible. And when The Darts started touring, same thing. I made it work. My PT hours were increasing because with the government, the longer you’re there, the more you get. And my kids were older. I never really used a sick day unless I was dying or things like that. I had a bout with breast cancer. I had a lot of things also happen where I needed FMLA leave and all these things. It was a lot going on. But when you need to do it, you do it. And I needed to do this or lose my mind in my life. It was like a dream every time we headed out. And there were many, many times my flight from Paris would land at 630 a.m. at the Phoenix airport, and I would literally Uber with all my luggage to court. (*both laugh*) With my eyeliner still on, you know, and then throw on my robe, go do court and then go home and sleep for the 12 hours. Every tour was like that because I had to milk every bit that I could. And I took both jobs really seriously. So it was a lot.

On paper, that sounds like it’s crazy, right? And if you talk to average Joe then they say, “you must be nuts to do that,” except that I’m sure at some point, like you said, sort of before, it’s a necessity to you. Like you have to do it.

I mean, it’s a matter of my own mental health to be able to do what I love. I think that’s true of most people. If you’re not doing something in your life that just gets you super charged up, then what are you doing? What’s it all for? I’m fine with sitting on the bench doing a hundred guilty plea proceedings a day, or a six-day-long jury trial or whatever, and listening to the same DUI testimony over and over and over. I’m fine with that, if I know the reward is coming, you know? And to me, it’s not about the paycheck, the reward was the tour or the recording or the press interview or even just the dumb little things that I just love so much. So it was worth every second of it. Then when it came time to be able to retire, luckily I was with the government from the hour I started working (*both laugh*) so retirement came early. I made my points. And the minute that happened…I mean, my pension kicked in at noon on September 29th and by 3 p.m. I was on a plane to Europe! (*laughs*)

That’s amazing. That’s awesome. You said kind of from the beginning that this was always sort of the thing you wanted to do. Obviously, the law pays the bills, but when did that really become a thing where you were determined to be a professional musician too? Like, was it pre-law school? I guest spoke in my kid’s justice and criminology class today, and I talked about like the decisions you make to pay the bills and the decisions you make to keep the creative and the the mental health side like going for you, which is why I got into the whole punk rock thing. But I knew I was never going to make money doing it. But like, I can’t ever not do it. Is that kind of the same sort of mentality? 

Pretty much. My mother’s from India. She’s very driven. She’s a physicist. And my dad, who died a couple of years ago, was also a very high-level scientist. 

You couldn’t just tell them “I’m going to be a punk rocker!” 

Not only that, they did not and still don’t really get music. It’s not part of their world. I hate to say it this way, but they really don’t see the value in it. And they don’t love it. They don’t get it. And so to them, when I started gravitating as a tiny child to the little piano that they had, they were like, “oh, that’s cute.” And I think my mom, when I started getting really into it and started competing in classical piano competitions as a kid, she’s really competitive, so she got it in that side of it. “Oh, it’s fun to bring the trophies home!” But she didn’t understand why I wanted to be the drum major of my marching band or play the piccolo or write goofy little songs in between my Beethoven stuff, you know? And so when it came time to go to college, she actually drove me to the University of Michigan for an audition for the music school for a scholarship. I had already played an audition with the Chicago Symphony. I’d done a lot of really big things, so I thought I was a shoo-in. And they offered me a partial scholarship! But in the end, my mom was like, “you can’t do music. That makes no sense. Why would we pay for tuition and have you go to this great school when you’re going to study music? If you’re going to do that, I won’t even send you to college.” The only other thing I really liked was deviant psychology. (*both laugh*) I took as many psychology classes as I could, and you asked me about undergrad and all that. I really didn’t have the time to keep my classical chops up because that takes hours. But I was still paying some of the bills by accompanying the opera students at the music school. People don’t realize this, but opera students need a piano player for all their lessons and rehearsing and everything because they need the music. They would hire pianists, so for five bucks an hour or whatever, I would go in and play all weekend with the opera students. And then for the first time ever in my life, somebody asked me to play in a rock band. It was one of my marching band cohorts. I was like, “you know, I write these crazy little pop songs, but I don’t really know anything about playing pop music.” And we started a little band…

This is at Michigan?

This is at Michigan. And I’m still in touch with both of them, actually. They both come to my shows. 

That’s awesome.

They’re amazing people. But we started this crappy little band that played like at the Flint Michigan Festival of the Trees. You know, things like that. (*both laugh*)

Yes!!

Yeah!! Great, great, great shows like that. But it was my first dabble into pop music, and it was really intoxicating. It was really fun. 

Were you out front, too? 

I was playing keyboards and singing! And I didn’t really know how to sing, but I was kind of just faking it and having a good time with it and whatever. There were no stakes involved.

It’s the Flint Michigan Festival of the Trees. I’m sure you were just fine. (*both laugh*) 

It was the Flint, Michigan, and the trees were pretty and the guys were cool, so there. And they’re still my friends, so it was worth it. (*both laugh*) So after I graduated from Michigan, I was like, “okay, music!” And my mom was like, “no, grad school!”

“We’ve talked about this!” (*both laugh*)

I’m like, “grad school? What am I gonna do? I don’t like anything!” And she was like, “well, you like this weird psychology. How about law?” And I’m like, okay, I could probably do criminal law. I could see, you know, there’s a lot of injustice. Actually, I did my undergrad psychology thesis on women’s prisons outside of Detroit. I spent a lot of time there. I saw a lot and I was like, there’s so much I saw, I could be a public defender and probably feel like I was helping people and would feel like I could handle this job. So that was my goal. I went to law school, got a full ride at U of A down in Tucson. That’s how I ended up in the desert. And never intended to go there, but there I was. And while I was in law school, even less time now for music. Now I can’t even accompany the opera students anymore because then even that takes practice. So my law school roommate happened to be a really good singer. And we started talking and she was like, “we should do a jazz combo. We could play in the resorts here and make bank and only do it on the weekends.” And I’m like, “Jazz? Jazz must be easy compared to classical. So yeah, let’s do it!” We found an upright bass player and I played piano and she sang. And I learned for the first time in my life, all these jazz standards. And I wasn’t really good at improvising, but you could give me sheet music and I could improvise off of that, because I have a classical brain. I could make that work. And so we played in all the resorts, like the nice resorts outside of Tucson. Made a ton of money, played Friday night, Saturday night and Sunday brunch. And celebrities would come in and stay at the resorts. It was really fun! And I learned a whole lot about jazz for the first time. And so that was law school. Graduated from law school and now I’m a lawyer. I’m a prosecutor, which I didn’t want to be, but it was the only job available in a court that’s literally in a trailer (*laughs*) in the desert outside of Phoenix. It was the only job I could get because I did so badly in law school. (*both laugh*)

Oh no!!

And this tiny little trailer court was right near where they put the Intel headquarters and it blew up! And so this tiny town became like, literally the fastest growing town in the nation! And the judge, who wasn’t even a law-trained judge, he was an appointed judge, but he was a teacher back in the past. And he was like, “oh my God, I need another judge! Like now! And we can’t pay you anything because we’re still in a trailer! Do you want the job? Because nobody else wants this crappy job!” And I’m like, “I’ll take it!” I’d never get a chance to be a judge again. I’m like, “this is amazing!” 

So you’re like fresh out of law school, essentially?

I was five years out. 

That’s nuts.

And I was working in this trailer, seeing the same judge every day, day in and day out. We would just do cases every day. There’s no way in a million years I would ever become a judge, except for happenstance and this weird situation. And it stuck. The town grew. Pretty soon we had a courthouse. We had all these judges. I was teaching ethics courses for judges. By the way, I was teaching ethics courses because I had to juggle this punk rock life. And they thought that was fascinating. And so all the ethics courses were hiring me to do that. It was funny. And in the meantime, I have even less time for music. So even the jazz fell by the wayside and now I’m playing rock and punk rock and covers and screaming into a microphone and playing three chords because it’s easy. 

And you don’t really have to practice!

I did not have to practice at all. And I mean, I loved practicing, but I didn’t have the time. And then I was pregnant and it was a whole long story there, but I was pregnant by somebody I was in this cover band with. And he was also a lawyer and we got married because we were pregnant and we raised twins. And then we started a band that was all originals. For the first time ever, I’m playing in a band where I’m playing my own originals around Phoenix. It was called Blue Fur. It was named after all the blue Muppets. 

Oh, funny.

And we just played. We were all lawyers in the band pretty much because that’s who we hung out with. There’s a lot of great musicians who are lawyers, by the way. I think the songs I was writing edged towards this Blondie kind of new wave sound. And it took off! And we started playing everywhere. We started playing constantly. They weren’t big shows, but we were playing all the time, all around the Arizona area. And the best part was I was writing songs and I was singing and I was learning how to sing. I was learning what worked and what didn’t work. And we built a little recording studio and I was learning what worked and didn’t work there. And I learned so much. And finally, one day at one of our little shows where there were two people in the audience, a guy walked up to me and said, “hey, I want to start a band and I want you to front it.” And I’m like, “oh yeah, right. Who are you?” I look him up and he’s Michael Johnny Walker, who was like, for Arizona standards, a pretty famous guitar player.

Yeah, right, right. Phenomenal guitar player. 

Phenomenal guitar player! And we started The Love Me Nots together. And that’s how that all took off. And for the first time in my life, I had a job that could pay for a great band that could tour everywhere. I could write all my own songs. He was helping to write too, obviously. I got divorced, I married him. We toured everywhere, we did everything. It was like this crazy, crazy life. It was a double life, for sure. I would go to court and I kid you not, one morning, I was talking to some defendant on a little shoplifting thing or whatever. And he goes, “judge, can we go off the record?” And I’m like, “yeah.” He goes, “homie, I was at your show last night! That freaking ruled!” I’m like, “oh my God, now I gotta recuse myself!” (*both laugh*)

I have seen that written up. I forget where, in doing research for this, I have seen a news story from somewhere in Maricopa or whatever that references that. That’s amazing. 

Yeah, it happens. I tried to keep it underground. I tried to not let people know. When The Love Me Nots first broke, at our very first live show ever, there happened to be nobody there except a reporter from the Phoenix New Times who loved it and put us on the cover of the New Times the next week. Big picture. And I didn’t want my court, or especially the lawyers appearing in front of me to know that I was in this rock band. I wanted to keep it really separate if I could, but I didn’t expect my bands to really go anywhere either. And sure enough, the presiding judge walks in with a copy of it, puts it on my desk and says, “the city council’s gonna have a problem with this.” And I’m like, “why?” He goes,”look at your outfit. You’re wearing a go-go dress, a mini dress and go-go boots. Is this the kind of dignified thing they wanna portray when people come before you as a judge?” And I said, “well, two thoughts on that. First of all, my mom made that dress. It’s very 60s and it was very popular in the 60s. And I feel it would be very dignified if you were in the 60s. And secondly, if I was an Olympic swimmer, I would be on the cover in a swimsuit with my gold medal and you wouldn’t have any problem with that. This is just a different field. And it’s the same kind of success in my mind.” And he kind of (*shrugged*) and he kind of took the thing and walked away and never heard another word. And 10 years later, the court is retweeting my band tweets and saying, ‘we’re not your grandfather’s court!” (*both laugh*) We understood each other, things changed, but we all had to learn how to do it. 

Who looks at it weirder, the judges and the people inside the courthouse that you are this secret punk rocker or the punk rock people who are like, “wait, you’re a judge? How does that work?” 

Punk rockers definitely. It catches them way more off guard because like I was saying, a lot of lawyers are musicians. They play in bands. A lot of them are frustrated musicians and they wish they, like me, followed that path instead. And lawyers, I think, tend to be, for the most part, pretty educated, pretty cultured in some ways. And they’ve had a lot of exposure to all styles of music and they’re collectors. I don’t know, they’re very intense people. And if they’re musicians, they’re very intense about it. So they’re not technically surprised. They’re stoked and they’re a little maybe like, “how do you make this work? Because we wish we were doing that too!” But they’re not necessarily surprised. I think for the punk rock community, it was a double-edged sword. In a way, they’re impressed. In a way, they’re freaking terrified because the law is right there! You know what goes on in the bathrooms and you know what goes on all over the punk rock community. It is very anti, and to be an authority figure in an anti-authority environment is a little scary for everybody. And I think once they heard the music and they got to know me, the Phoenix scene very quickly came around and everybody was cool with it. In fact, over the years, I’ve looked over contracts for fellow musicians. I’ve referred them to lawyers when they need help. There’s a whole symbiotic relationship between law and punk that actually is there.  (*both laugh*) You just don’t see it. So yeah, it’s still a surprise to me that I somehow made it work and made it to retirement without anything exploding. Thank God. 

And now you can be on the road! Looking at the tour flyers, both for The Darts and for Black Viiolet, you are making up for lost time.

I really am. 

And why not? You deserve to! 

First of all, there’s nothing else I want to do. And as long as there’s people that want to listen, I’ll go and I’ll figure it out. I have great agents on both continents and they’re making it work. And even like today, for some reason, Black Viiolet couldn’t find a show in Columbus in April. We were having so much trouble. It’s Record Store Day. A lot of the venues are closed. There’s a lot of reasons. But we were having trouble, trouble, trouble. And I thought, you know what? The band’s just not good enough. We’re just not big enough yet. We’re just getting started. And then like today, I find out that he was able to book like one of the coolest clubs in Columbus. They finally came through for Black Viiolet! And so as long as people want it, oh my God, that’s cherry on top. I never take that for granted. You write a song and somebody actually wants to hear it? That’s still unfathomable to me because of all the time it took to get here. Maybe my parents got that in my head a little bit. Like who would ever want to listen to music? But people are listening and they’re buying and our pre-orders sold out in a day, in an hour!

I saw, that’s amazing!

Crazy stuff is happening. And it’s so cool. I don’t take it for granted. In fact, I just want to do it as much as I possibly can until I drop dead.

Til the wheels fall off, right? 

Yeah, that’s fine. If I drop dead doing this, then I win. (*laughs*)

Do you think that if you had stayed with the Beethoven side or whatever, like the classical piano, that your mom especially would have gotten it at some level? But then when you get into rock and roll and then when you get into like, horror, goth, punk and whatever, she’s like, ‘what the fuck?’

Oh, yes she is. Yeah, I mean, a lot of interviewers ask me, ‘what’s the first concert you ever went to?’ And I have to say it was the Boston Pops at the Chicago Public Library when I was five.

Oh, hell yeah!

And that was what my mom took us to because it was great, it was free, it was at the library. It was classical, but it was fun classical. And yeah, to say that your daughter is a musician with the Chicago Symphony or playing at the Met this weekend, that’s something that her world and the people she hangs with can appreciate. And it’s not scary; it’s dignified. When she first came to the Yucca Tap Room in Tempe, Arizona, to watch me play, she pulled me aside and said, “Nicole, these people have tattoos.” (*both laugh*) And I’m like, ‘they have tattoos on their face, mom! Look! This is great.” And she’s like “why is it so loud?” My God, it was this completely foreign environment for her and my dad. But to their credit, they babysat a lot while I was out there on tour. I got a lot of lectures, but I also, in the end, got the support I need. Now it’s really spun around. My mom really does get it, I think, and loves to host my bands when I’m in the Bay Area. And now she has become the vinyl warehouse for me, since I don’t have a room in my little place in Seattle. Her dining room in Sacramento is now full from the floor to the ceiling with boxes of records waiting to go to the distributors. (*both laugh*) She’s become a record dealer. 

I love stories like that. That’s awesome. Let’s get back to Halloween Love Songs. The album comes out March 3rd, which I think is amazing that it doesn’t come out around Halloween. It doesn’t have to come out around Halloween. 

No, every day is Halloween!

Exactly! That music, it plays all the time. It’ll be especially playful at Halloween time, but it’s a really great record as a standalone record. It just happens to be called Halloween Love Songs.

Because that’s the theme; that’s the idea. But there’s so much more to the idea of Halloween than running around with a pumpkin trick-or-treat basket. 

I say that as, like, the desk that I do these calls from is stacked with skulls and we have more skulls. (*both laugh*) My wife’s birthday is at the end of October, and so she’s a Halloween kid. And so we just leave the Halloween stuff up all the time pretty much. And my daughter’s an early January baby, so she likes Christmas. So we end up with like, Christmas decorations on the Day of the Dead skeletons and stuff like that. We have to do both. It’s awesome. 

Amazing! I love that! Maybe that’s the next theme.

Exactly, yeah. If every day is Halloween, right, Christmas can be Halloween, and 4th of July can be Halloween. (*both laugh*) 

Also for some reason, the rhythm ever since the Love Me Nots was to record in September, release in the spring. That timing seems to work really well. And I think it’s because September is kind of the end of the summer tour period. And there’s a little gap in time there where we have time to record. Usually I’m writing the whole time in the van so that by the time September hits, we’re ready. And it takes about that amount of time from the time it’s recorded to get it mastered and pressed and promoted and then have the release date be in the spring. And then the tour starts again for the summer. So that rhythm actually does make a lot of sense. It’s been what every one of my bands has ever done. 

This record also sounds really good. It sounds leveled up production wise. And I don’t mean that it’s overproduced, like it’s not shiny and polished necessarily. But I had it on at the gym the other day and then at the grocery store after the gym the other day and I was thinking, in my headphones, like this album sounds awesome. 

Oh, I’m so happy to hear that! Oh my gosh, so happy to hear that! We went back to Mark Rains in LA, which is where we did Boomerang. With Boomerang, I was with the older lineup of the band. And our whole goal after making Snake Oil, the one before that…Snake Oil was co-produced by Jello Biafra and Bob Hoag. 

Just some guy. 

Just some guy, yeah. That great guy. But what he is, is extremely intense. Not a surprise. And so making a record with Jello Biafra and Bob Hoag almost broke our brains because it was like so much information and advice and ideas and it got richer and bigger. There were 126 guitar tracks on Snake Oil. 

Good Lord.

I mean, that’s the level of, I don’t know, the OCD level that it reached with two producers that are that intense, thrilled to work together for the first time and making a masterpiece. And it is a masterpiece. It’s wonderful. It’s incredible. But coming out of that, we were really ready to just do something raw and just go back in. And I was also ready for just a new take on the music’s sound because we had done every record of my life with Bob Hoag in Phoenix up to that point. And I was like, “I just want to see what else is out there.” One of my favorite records of all time that got me through a really rough spot in my life was Death Valley Girls’ Glow in the Dark from back in the day. And I played that record until it was falling apart. And so I went back and looked at who produced it, and it was this guy, Mark Rains from Station House Studio in LA, who I didn’t really know much about. Did a deep dive into that and found out he’d done all these great things. From Marilyn Manson to Tanya Tucker, he’s done every style of music brilliantly. Grammys, the whole thing. And I was like, well, I mean, at the time, my old drummer, Rikki, was in Death Valley Girls, so he probably knows who I am. He immediately said yes. And he was like, “I have this time slot free.” And I’m like, “that’s our time slot too. This is our one chance. Let’s get in there and do it!” So, and I was like, “we don’t want you to do anything. Here’s my demos.” A lot of people don’t know this…when I write a song, I write it on GarageBand on my laptop as I’m writing. So I write the bass line. I add fuzz that I like. I write the drum part. I put in the fills where I like them. And I add the right overdrive and I do all this stuff. And then I do the guitar line and I add a second guitar. And by the time the demo’s done, it basically sounds like almost a produced version, except those instruments are fake. 

Basically I know all the effects I want. I know all the backing vocals and everything’s ready to go. I do this with every album, but I gave these demos to Mark and I’m like, “the band agrees. We just want this record to sound like the demo. If you’ll just sit back and let us take the reins, we can do this.” And he was like, “no problem!” Really cool of him, by the way. And he did. He just laid back and I was like, “can you add some, you know, space echo to this?” And he was like, “I gotcha.” He’d just add his little magic. I did all my vocals in one day for the whole record. And I walked in that day and he had a candle lit and the lights were low, and he had this chain of microphones, a Neumann over here, a weird little mic over here, a 58. And they were all in front of me so I could sing them on. Bob did like some of that stuff in Phoenix too, but it was just like he already knew. 

Yeah, he got it. 

Mark knew what needed to happen without even talking about it. And it just so easy. So after that experience, when it came time to do Halloween Love Songs and Rikki is back in the band now, that was just a no brainer to go back to Mark for sure. 

Did you do anything differently this time in the studio than the last time? Or was it kind of like, “if it doesn’t, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”? 

The big difference was the musicians. 

Okay.

Different lineup. And they play differently. They hit differently. Poor Becca, my guitar player. We had been on tour all summer when we went into the studio. Becca had a family tragedy at the very beginning of the tour, but wanted to do the tour anyway, to her credit. Super strong human being here. And she went on this long tour and came back and immediately had to go to a funeral back at home because that was the only time they were able to do it when she was there. Horrible experience for her. And then we started recording because it was our only time off. And she didn’t have time to prepare like she likes to. She’s a little bit different than my past guitar players in that she’s a very thoughtful guitar player. She thinks about what she’s doing more than any punk rocker I’ve ever known. She comes out of the Spindrift mindset where they spend a lot of time and there’s a lot of whammy bar and there’s a lot of nuance. And I love that about her. It’s not the way I think because I’m just like, “oh, let’s get it done, let’s trash it up.” What she brings to the table is this really cool nuance that we’ve never had before; this texture of a spaghetti western style with a Darts riff. And I think what you’re hearing a lot of is the way she plays that guitar. It’s not slammy and trashy like I maybe would have written it, which sometimes overshadows the rest of the production. 

Oh, totally. Yeah, I can see that.

It just eats up a lot of space in your ear, right? You can’t even hear some of the vocals sometimes in some of the old records unless the vocals are equally distorted. And there’s a lot, you have to work around that kind of distortion, which I love. But when you have Becca, there’s space all of a sudden. You can hear the percussion, you can hear the background vocals. Mark can do a little more magic with things. We added some trashy guitar riffs underneath, like a layer of rhythm guitar, for example, that had fuzz on it in the chorus or whatever, but it’s panned and it’s at a low level. And so it doesn’t take over anymore. And this is a big difference live too, there’s a little more space in the sound on stage. Rikki also hits differently than my other drummers have. A lot of people don’t know this, when she’s even playing live, she plays to a click. And unlike a lot of punk drummers that I’ve played with, when you’re playing live, the adrenaline goes and you start picking up those tempos and everybody starts going crazy. And it’s fun. It’s really fun. A lot of energy. Rikki keeps it where it’s supposed to be and we have to match her. And what that brings is a lot of force and power. You know, when this lineup hits, it hits you like a black metal hit, you know, it’s like. 

Right. It’s not like a buzz saw all the time. 

Yeah it’s like, you know, Godzilla stomping. And so you’re hearing that too, that she plays these parts differently than my other past drummers have. And granted, she was on the band in their early records, but I don’t think she was as powerful then as she is now. She’s done a whole lot of years of hard touring with Death Valley Girls and a lot of other bands while she was away from the Darts and she came back powerful. So yeah, she plays differently too. Lindsay’s bass parts are incredible. Lindsay’s the kind of person that you give her a song to learn and she’ll start learning it that day, even if we’re not recording for a year. (*both laugh*) And so she lives with these songs and really she owns these songs by the time we’re ready to get into the studio. 

As a failed bass player myself, I tend to sort of lock into that. I definitely locked into her sound on this record. Her sound is really cool. 

It’s really cool! I mean, I know Mark’s chain and I know he’s sending their signals through pretty much the same signal path that he was with the last lineup, but it comes out sounding different because the way you hit your string is different. 

The way you attack it, yeah, right. 

There’s a lot that’s going on, especially Becca is very different from the past, but even Lindsay, just the way there’s a playfulness in the way that she plays, just there’s a fun.

Yeah, fun is the word I would use. There’s real like fun grooves, I think between them, especially…

The power of Rikki with the fun of Lindsay is a really interesting rhythm section. It’s got a joy to it, but it’s hitting you in the face. (*both laugh*) A joyous hit in the face. 

And you want another one and another one.

I want another one. Give me more. (*both laugh*)

This lineup is pretty locked into like just being road dogs? 

Yes. They were brought on board because they’re road dogs. Kind of the issue with the last lineup was families, jobs. I had three guitar players in one summer because we were doing that much touring and everybody had jobs, families. And we had to keep pushing. It was hard. And being on the road, it makes you grumpy. It makes you tired. It makes you fussy. It doesn’t pay. There’s a lot of things that are really, really hard about the road. It’s just not for everybody. And this lineup is just, they’re professional road warriors. That’s what they do. They expect it. They know what’s coming. They all have their camping towel packed already. They know what’s going to happen. So it made it very easy for me to go, “okay, so our Europe tour in the fall begins on October 6th and ends on December 6th. Are you guys up for it?” And they’re like, “we’re good to go. No problem.”

Now, the only catch to that though, is this one year in 2026, Rikki has decided to go back to being a teacher, which she always did back in the early days too. She quit to write a book for a while and do some other things that gave her a little more freedom. But she’s going back into the classroom starting in the fall. And some other things are happening in her life that are making it a little bit tricky, so she has to step out of some of the tours. And luckily, even last year when this happened, we had Heather Thomas from Nashville step in. And Heather Thomas was actually a Seattleite originally, which is how I got to know her name. But she’s based in Nashville and she’s a session drummer professionally. Incredible drummer. I gave her the songs for our last tour and then didn’t really hear from her for a long time. I was like “are you going to be ready? I don’t really know you?” And she was like “don’t worry,” and everyone who knows her was like “don’t worry.” So she showed up…we met her for the first time in Marseilles, France. Our flight had landed late. We got to this record store with an entire crowd lined up around the block to get in. We had one minute to set up, brand new drummer, didn’t know anything about her.

Never, ever played together?

Not a single note. She sat down with her little page of tiny notes and just killed every single song. We sold so much merch that first show, it was ridiculous. She’s INCREDIBLE. And she’s a pro. She used to teach at Seattle Drum School. She approaches the learning of a song in a very academic way. She writes out the parts. Kind of like me with a classical background, she learns the same way. She’s going to be doing a ton of dates and probably recording with us too. It’s going to be a fun year with some fun people!

Those real professional musicians have brains that work in ways that my mind can’t fathom. 

They have to! I mean, I’ll take Lindsay as an example, who probably never thought she would get the call to go on tour professionally. But in the back of her mind, she always kind of hoped that call would come. And now that it’s come, she has learned how to learn a song fast. She’s learned how to pack quickly. She’s learned how to, you know, book all the flights in two seconds, because she wants it more than anything. You figure it out, you know? And plus, it’s not rocket science, it’s punk rock. (*both laugh*)

Right, but there is something to making it sound good and cool and authentic, and not too professional. And I think that sometimes like professional musicians have to know when to pull back a little bit, right? And when to let the the chaos of the moment be the chaos of the moment, not be like, too perfect and whatever.

Exactly. I think the more you play live, the more you learn to work in chaos effectively. It’s just like, it’s just like what we did in the criminal justice system. When things are insane…I’ve got this homeless guy yelling at that drug addict and my corrections officer is losing his mind and everybody’s screaming, that’s kind of where we all excel.

Yeah, right. Exactly. (*both laugh*)

Yeah, that’s when I can take the microphone and say, everybody calm down. You do that. We all do that. That’s what we do. And it’s the same exact thing for a live musician who plays a lot. When the crowds go on bananas, and everything’s broken, and your pedals not working. This just happened in Hawaii, where half of our gear got left in the van, and the show was about to start, we didn’t even realize it. And we had to find like a pedal board t literally a pedal board with pedals on it – that would make sense to our band, right? Even cables for the guitar, we had to find everything in like five minutes. And somebody was just like, here you go. And we’re like, we plugged it in. And it was like, oh, they happen to have the right gear. And we played a great show, you know?  Sometimes  we’re learning that chaos works to our advantage. 

Yeah, sometimes when everything’s on fire all the time, there can be a sense of calm. 

Sometimes when it’s all on fire, you get warmer! (*both laugh*)

Yeah, right, right. There can be some sort of like a calm in it, right? You know that you have to figure it out, so you just figure it out. 

Yeah, you become very quietly focused when everybody’s panicked around you. Especially in the rock world, that kind of almost makes sense to me because you’re used to people screaming in your face all the time, right? I mean, if you can play a guitar, and sing and crowd surf all at the same time, you can kind of do anything because that’s like the most unpredictable moment of your life right there. If you can keep that going, you can kind of handle anything. (*both laugh*)

That’s the stuff that made me want to just be like a journalist and not like…

 I thought you were gonna say a musician!

No, no! Even going to punk rock shows from an early age and being like, you know what? I don’t feel like breaking my guitar because I crowd surfed and somebody kicked me in the head and I’m bleeding from the ear like, I’m okay to take pictures. Like, I’ll learn how to do photography. I’ll learn how to write and interview bands like…

I’m so glad because somebody has to do that too. That also is a dying art in a lot of ways. And it thank God there are people like you who do want to document it because we’ll lose it forever, otherwise. 

Yeah. And I like, I dread the day that there really are no places left. I mean, I think enough, enough places will open up wherever in suburbia, like, like Deep Cuts (in Medford, MA), shout out to Deep Cuts. Places like that will be able to keep the machine going. Like that it’s whatever, it’s punk rock, it’s rock and roll. It’s always going to morph and be something else and like shift around and…

it will go into the record stores and then it’ll go into the libraries and it’ll go into the basements and it’ll come back up and it’ll be at the coffee shop again and then it’ll be back in the dive bar and then it’ll be in the big venues. And it’ll be the waves. I’ll tell you, talking about PNW, I mean, just like you were saying, Seattle is so rich with this history here. Everybody you meet, even the young people, it seems like saw a lot of it, you know, they were here for a lot of that stuff. And they, I mean, KEXP, they’re all very entrenched in the history way more than a lot of cities I’ve been in. There’s something in the water here. I’m telling you, it’s really special.

There’s something sort of like mystical being. I don’t feel like that’s a thing that we just sort of create like in our brains, but it does feel like there’s something there, whether it’s in the water or the air or the mist or the mountains or whatever. 

Or I could get a little more science-y on you and say, maybe there were some people here who just had it in their blood to be great musicians and people learned from each other and kept the tradition going and grew it. Because I’ll bet you all those nineties kids were influenced by those sixties kids. 

Yeah. Oh, totally. 

Right. So it’s a tradition you pass down. I was just talking to somebody about this in Hawaii, that you really don’t learn to love to play live music I don’t think unless you’re going to live music and you’re seeing it live. That’s when you really fall in love with it, when it hits you in the chest. Right?? And so they got to see it here. They got to see the really good stuff here from an early age. And I think that influenced just way more people than we ever would have guessed in this area.

I wonder too, if there’s something, and you mentioned Hawaii and the Pacific Northwest, and I wonder if there’s something too, in the Native American culture that is sort of like the thread in both of those places really. The way that they tell stories and the way they preserve stories and not that it’s necessarily a large or really any Native community in the rock scene necessarily in the Pacific Northwest. But I almost feel like the importance of the culture and the importance of the storytelling and the importance of like the art itself. There’s an interesting sociological thread there that I didn’t think about until two minutes ago. 

Yeah, you’re absolutely right. I will say this, though, in Hawaii, where we played last week, the kids came out and we played a lot of, they were almost all all-ages shows, they came out in droves. Face paint, goth hair, mohawks. It was like the time of their lives because they were saying that not a lot of bands come out there. The chance to see and experience a great live show at the underground punk level is really hard. You might have to go to Honolulu to see a big star to see what they see in Seattle every single day, where the club is hopping still. That doesn’t exist in Hawaii. And so it was a huge night and a huge event where everybody on that side of the island would come to this one little show in this record store and go nuts because it was their one opportunity. And yeah, they’ll probably talk about it. The promoter there is who I was talking to it about. He said it’s really sad because the kids that come up here don’t get to see stuff and they don’t really they don’t really get to see what a great guitar player sounds like when they’re just right in their face on a small stage. They don’t get to look at their pedal boards.

You don’t get that spark. Yeah.

Yeah. You don’t get to see how how you can do it yourself. You know, they see the big stars, but they don’t see the grassroots level punk. 

The stuff that makes you realize that you can do it.That’s what got us all to pick up a guitar or whatever when we were 12, because you like “I don’t have to be Yngwie Malmsteen.”

(*laughs*) Please don’t be!!

I know, right? Like “I can be Billie Joe Armstrong.”  I don’t have to be Joe Satriani or Steve Vai. Like that shit turned me off from a young age. But then like but I could be like, I don’t know, Mark Lanegan from Screaming Trees 

Or like I could play like the Sonics. No problem. You know, trash it up. And these kids, you could really see a light bulb go off in the middle of the mosh pits. You can see it happening. I was just telling a story to an interviewer last week. She said, “what was your favorite moment in Hawaii?” And I was like, we got done playing in Maui at this little record store. It was packed to the gills. And this girl came to me. I saw her in the front row the whole night. She was goth to the nines. And she’s dancing every song. And she was with all her friends having a great time. We were like, “this is amazing!” First of all, it’s amazing to see girls at the shows. 

Yeah, totally. 

Shewas waiting in the long merch line, and she finally came up and she said, “would you guys sign my face?” which a lot of people were doing. So we signed her face. And then she’s walking away. She goes, “I have no money for any merch. I’m really sorry, but thank you for a great show!” She walks away, turns around with our signatures all over her face and goes, “I’m starting a band!!”

Hell yeah! That’s awesome!

That’s what it’s all about. I mean, that’s what should get us all so stoked up.

That’s that’s what keeps you going, because touring to Hawaii is ambitious. Like that’s a lot of work. Sure, you’re in Hawaii, but that’s a ton of work.

It’s so much work because you have to fly from island to island, so you can’t just throw your stuff in the van. You’ve got to repack it for a flight again the next day. It’s so much of a hassle. And it was an expensive undertaking that, you know, there’s not a lot of population there. And we did well. We did as well as we could have financially. But it’s rough, you know, and we did it for the exposure. And that’s it was worth it for those kids. It was worth it. 

Hopefully that kid does start a band. Hopefully all those kids that you signed faces and arms of do. 

All the new Hawaiian garage bands! Bring it!