Interview: Scoopski
Talking Geek Rock & Power Pop With Jim Lorino
I’ve written a lot about ‘90s geek rock this year, but I’m happy to report the genre is alive and well in 2024.
That’s thanks to bands like Scoopski, brainchild of married creative duo Jim and Kaitlyn Lorino (aka Mr. and Mrs. Scoopski). With a sound that mixes early Weezer and Ben Folds Five with the quirky lyrical specificity of bands like Nerf Herder, Fountains of Wayne and Bowling for Soup, the Philly quintet proudly let’s their geek flag fly.
“We have songs about mermaids, and we have songs about depression. We have songs about losing friends, and we have songs about going to Mars. We have songs about infertility, and we have songs about cats,” Mr. Scoopski told me for the interview below. “I really don't like having limits on songwriting topics, because oftentimes the topic itself is what motivates me to actually get excited about finishing the song.”
Despite they’re geek rock bonafides, Scoopski is just as often described as a power pop band—thanks to their high-energy hooks, catchy melodies and crunchy guitars.
“We usually use the term ‘power pop’ to describe our music, mainly because that's what has been most repeated by people online who have heard us, but it's one of those silly things where I'm not sure if we fully qualify as power pop to the purists,” Mr. Scoopski said.
I connected with Mr. Scoopski by email leading up to the Nov. 15 release of their new album, Time is a Thief. We had a wide-ranging conversation about their music, inspirations and influences, and music genres.
Jim Lorino (aka “Mr. Scoopski”) Interview
Congrats on the great new album! Can you tell me a little about how this collection came together?
Mr Scoopski: Hey Steve! Thanks so much for this interview, I'm a huge fan, and Generation Blue was a very regular lunch break read for me after it came out!
Time is a Thief is really just a bunch of individual songs that me and my wife, Mrs. Scoopski wrote and recorded starting in spring 2022. I should point out that only the two of us actually appear on this album, because we started it over a year before getting a full band together for live shows, but we will have recordings with the other guys out in the near future. Many of these songs we released as singles over the last couple years, but we're still album people at heart, and we wanted them to have a permanent home in a collection of songs.
This isn't a concept album or anything, even though the element of time does come up quite a bit in it. The title really just comes from the title track, and it felt right. When Mrs. Scoopski first played the title track for me after she wrote it, it made me cry and I thought it was such a beautiful song. Actually, for the first few days after the first draft of it was recorded, I couldn't listen to it without crying. I knew it was special and also knew it had to be the closing track and title track.
We feel very strongly about every song on here, and really don't feel like there's any throwaways or tracks that were slapped together real quickly just to fill space. There's lots of different sounds and themes, but I think it still has a cohesion and it's still uniquely us.
The opening track, "Everybody's Guessing," is a joyful power pop ear worm. I really love how hard you guys lean into the "yeah yeah yeahs." What are some of your favorite power pop tropes?
Mr Scoopski: I could gush about power pop forever. I first came across the term when I was about 15 and just got into Weezer after seeing a block of their videos on the music video channel Fuse. Before Weezer I had primarily listened to strictly pop punk, and when I first heard them, it was like a new door had opened up to me. It still had some of the energy of pop-punk, but it had something more about it that I couldn't quite put my finger on. That's when lots of internet research and geeking out brought me to discover that many people called Weezer power pop. Of course, it got a little more confusing after I realized that many people don’t consider Weezer power pop.
I will say, I did like The Knack and Cheap Trick from when my parents would play them in the car when I was younger, but to me as a teen, I had a definition of power pop as ‘pop-punk that's not quite punk enough.’ Today I kind of just consider it ‘melodic rock music where a strong Beatles or Beach Boys influence shines through.’ As you and many others I see in power pop circles hilariously point out via memes on social media, we could all argue about what is and isn't power pop until the end of time! But my earliest understanding of power pop was pop-punk-y energy, huge guitars, lots of vocal harmonies, and maybe some synth and piano sprinkled in. When I was just learning to play music, I was fortunate that there were a handful of cool bands I personally consider power pop cropping up, such as The Pink Spiders, McFly, The Click Five, and of course I loved stuff like Fountains of Wayne and Ozma as well. But again, that intersection where something is almost pop punk, but not quite is always what I had a fascination with…and I think that's always been the stuff that inspired me and the place I tried to land with the music I put out. And I've always had an obsession with harmonies, too.
"Little Ball Of Energy" has snarky pop punk edge in the vein of Nerf Herder or Bowling For Soup with a hint of Fountains of Wayne. What was the inspiration for this track?
Mr Scoopski: Those are some comparisons we get quite frequently, and we love that! We're definitely huge fans of Parry Gripp in our household. I'm not sure how apparent it is, but the first half of our song ‘30 Seconds (I Love You)’ was fairly inspired by one of the old jingles he made for the convenience store Wawa. We also have many, many of his songs on our 2 year old son's Spotify playlist, and ‘Little Ball of Energy,’ along with a handful of others on the album actually happens to be about our son.
The original idea behind this song was to write an anthem about being unstoppable, kind of akin to ‘Don't Stop Me Now’ by Queen. But I wanted a twist to it, so I decided to write it from a toddler's point of view! We're definitely proud of how that one turned out, it seems to be a fan favorite for sure.
You guys have been described as "Weezer meets Ben Folds." Do you agree? What are some of your other major influences?
Mr Scoopski: It's funny, because we heard that statement from 3 different people at 3 consecutive gigs this year, so who am I to argue?
We of course love Weezer, but Ben Folds is a huge crossover between Mrs. Scoopski and I too. I'm pretty sure on the first ever mix CD I made for her I put the song ‘Kate’ by Ben Folds Five (because her name is Kate—ha ha, I'm clever!). We find him immensely talented, and we end up watching the performance of Ben Folds Five playing ‘One Angry Dwarf’ from Sessions at West 54th at least 3-4 times a year and just marvel at it. I believe also on that previously mentioned mix CD, ‘The Prettiest Girl In The Whole Wide World’ by Weezer was on there, too. Anyone I had been with before her was either pretty mixed on or had a dislike of Weezer (crazy right?), so when I first met her and found out she actually liked them, that helped seal the deal. (Her having a Pink Spiders CD in her album collection helped, too!)
On a technical level, I definitely can't shred like Rivers can, and Mrs. Scoopski won't go off on crazy piano solos like Ben Folds does, but maybe on a ‘feel’ level, those acts are just so ingrained in our DNA, and with the crunchy guitars, piano, quirky song topics, and a nasally guy singing, I can see why people say that.
You've said this album is "a snapshot of my early years of being a parent and figuring out how to navigate life while doing so." As a band led by a husband/wife team, how do you strike the balance?
Mr Scoopski: It's definitely been an interesting journey. When our last album See You Soon came out, the release date was kind of timed with the birth of our son (although he ended up being born 6 weeks early, so it ended up missing by a bit). The reason for that was I wanted to kind of make it a little bow on the music we had released up to that point, but also I felt like I wasn't going to have much time or interest in doing music after he was born, thinking I'd be too tired for it based on what everyone says about parenting. Well, it definitely made me more tired, but it didn't make me less interested in making music! In fact, I actually got the bug to get back to playing live about a half year after he was born, so that's kind of when the idea of putting a live band together came about. (Shout out to our band mates Marc, Jack, and Nick!)
What it did do is certainly slow down the songwriting process. From fall 2019 to winter 2021, we had written easily 50+ songs and recorded and released many of those. From the time our son was born, we basically have only written these 13 that you hear on this album (plus a couple others that didn't make it). But I think what it did—and this may actually be chalked up to us growing as people and as parents—is it made each individual song much more important and meaningful, as we spent a ton more time on each one as opposed to just writing so much and seeing what sticks. At the end of the day, I think it was very beneficial.
I will also say our 2-year-old son has definitely been a huge muse to our music. Mrs. Scoopski wrote the title track which is obviously about him, and I wrote the song ‘Everybody's Guessing’ to act as a kind of road map song he can listen to while he's growing up and learning to navigate his life. Funny enough, he actually got a writing credit on that song.
You can also literally hear him vocalizing in ‘Babble.’ All those clips were taken from before he was even 1 year old.
Speaking of which..."Dad Bod" is a pretty hilarious pop rock rave up. Are there any songwriting topics that you think are off limits?
Mr Scoopski: Thanks, that one always gets people talking the most after shows! I'd like to think no topic is off limits for us. I really think it's important to be very open and honest when you're writing songs, at least that's the writing that has always resonated with me. When a line makes me a little uncomfortable to sing, I usually know I'm on the right path.
A good example of that is the song ‘The Inattentive Twist’ from our album. I had the music and melodies done for that song for a long time, but couldn't really land on a topic to write about, I just had some random lines that I liked, which was the opening line ‘those flowers look so good in your hair’ and ‘it's irrelevant, I'm like an elephant wandering around for the hell of it,’ and I couldn't figure out what those lines had in common. Then, I wrote some more lines that also had nothing to do with those, and then one day it finally hit me, ‘Oh, I can't stay on topic with this song... Duh! Just like myself. I have ADHD!’ Thus, the song became about ADHD.
With ‘Dad Bod’ in particular, that song is done through a goofy lens, don't get me wrong. But there's actually kind of a serious topic in there with it all, which is my lifelong battle with weight management. The general idea of the song really kind of comes down to the final lines of the bridge: ‘I've struggled with it all my life, and probably always will/I'm not making excuses, I'm not looking to pass the blame/but now that I've got my baby boy, I think I'm allowed to say that I've got a dad bod.’ I was basically writing a song to say, ‘Hey, now that I'm a dad, am I allowed to just chalk up my weight issues to having a dad bod?’
Ha! I'm currently doing pretty well, by my standards. I've been on Wegovy for a year and I'm currently in the process of losing again.
In addition to describing your music as "power pop," you also often use the term "geek rock." I have to ask—What's your favorite Weezer album?
Mr Scoopski: We definitely get branded with the geek rock label at times, and I'm all about it. My favorite Weezer album is Blue, and it's also my favorite album of all time. I also love Pinkerton, but I definitely also have a soft spot for the White Album, mainly for nostalgic purposes. It came out right before we got married, and I just remember listening to it so much that year. That period of time was just one of the best times of my life. I know Mrs. Scoopski really likes Everything Will Be Alright in The End too, as do I. I actually think we could do a killer version of ‘Go Away’ from that album!
We also love to write themed songs too, as two on this album: ‘I Agree, Marie’ and ‘Steve and Nancy’ are about TV show characters (Marie from Breaking Bad, and Steve and Nancy from Stranger Things, respectively). I suppose that's pretty geeky too!
I love that you namecheck Ozma in the track “Pinata.” If I jumped in the tour (mini?) van with you, what Ozma songs would I definitely hear? What else would I be listening to?
Mr Scoopski: Ozma is great! I remember falling hard for them when I was in summer school, after failing my senior year of high school due to a lot of mental health issues that unraveled me. I'd like to say they had a role in helping me pull through it! Of course, ‘Domino Effect’ is a classic, but I'm always known to blast ‘Rocks’ REALLY loudly when it comes up on shuffle, and I can't help but belt along to ‘Eponine’ as well. Last year I contributed a song to a birthday tribute album for the singer of a great Florida power pop band called The Easy Button, and Daniel Brummel happened to be on the comp as well, so I totally nerded out being on a compilation with somebody from Ozma.
Other music you would hear in our hypothetical ‘tour bus’ would be lots and lots of children's music, as our kiddo would definitely be coming with us! I'm sure you would also get a huge fix of Broadway musicals too, because Mrs. Scoopski is a huge fan of musicals and is always belting along to Wicked, Hairspray, Jesus Christ Superstar, Les Mis, and many others. Some others you'd be likely to hear in our rotation would be Weezer (obviously!), The Dollyrots, The Beach Boys, Green Day, ABBA, Grouplove, The Pink Spiders, Oasis, The Beatles, and much much more.
I really wish more of the band's you feature would release their music on CD! At least a limited edition?
Great interview and songs. Loved hearing the baby on Babble, innovative and fun.
Good to know I'm not the only one confused about genres.