We’re gonna say it, MKNG FRNDZ are fucking adorable. Daniel Scott Erickson and Tami Hart are two punk kids from “the neon side of town” who just love to dance. Every time we hear their songs we want to lose our shit on the floor and then go giggle with them. Go listen to “Situation” on their MySpace and tell us you stayed seated with all your limbs in check. Then stop lying… that shit’ll get you in trouble.
We went for coffee with them and left with our cheeks hurting from all the larfs. In fact, we md frndz fr lfe!
Chief Magazine: Let’s just start at the beginning. It’s easy. Where are you guys from originally?
Daniel: I’m from Anchorage, Alaska. People are always like, “Sarah Palin!” It’s always a talking point. Oh well. Growing up there was awesome in retrospect. When you’re growing up you’re pretty isolated, and it’s a really small scene, but you make it work. I went to some pretty awesome shows. Like Red Ants came there, Seven Year Bitch. You would have never thought those kind of performers would come up there but they did. It was pretty cool.
Tami: I’m from Beaufort, South Carolina and we’re famous for Pat Conroy and Forrest Gump! And crack. There’s a lot of crack. I remember my senior year of high school, it was like, ABC and NBC news were coming down, because “Beaufort was turning into New York, because of the crack epidemic!” Kids would come up to me at school and be like, “Wanna buy?” I was eighteen. It was kinda cool.
Did you ever try it?
Tami: On accident once.
Daniel: “On accident” off and on for a few months!
[giggles ensue for a good minute]
Tami: Our next record: I Accidentally Smoked Crack. Anyway, I was living in Portland, Oregon and I was hanging out with this girl that I worked with at Whole Foods. I thought she was really cool, she was this ’77 punker girl, and her name was Asia, and she talked really hoarse, you know. She was a mess. She always came to work late and the first thing she would do was run to the bathroom because she had to puke. And I thought that was really cool! [laughs]
Daniel: So Foxfire.
Tami: Totally! One night I ran into her at the Jockey Club, which was this total punk dive bar that I loved. I went into the bathroom, and she was in there with this lady, and I was like, “What are you guys doing?” And they put the pipe in my mouth and were like, “Try this.” And I was all, “Alright, I’ll try anything once!” It didn’t even feel like anything, it just felt gross. And then I remember leaving the bar, and she was literally in the parking lot, like dying. And I was like, “I don’t think that’s a good thing.”
And then it became an after-school special.
Tami: Totally! Actually, the next day, I got really depressed because there was this review for this show I was playing in the paper, and it was like, “Tami Hart is the new Elliot Smith of Portland.” It was this big review, and all my roommates were like, “Here we go, let her head get bigger.” And I remember having just heard Elliott Smith was a crackhead, and I was like, “Great! Following my life’s plan.”
So how did you guys come together?
Tami: Crack, hanging out with Whitney Houston.
Daniel: By crack, we mean MySpace.
Tami: I was stalking Daniel.
Daniel: She’d seen me at a show once, and she wrote me a MySpace and I was like, “Tami Hart’s writing me on MySpace!” And we talked about our cats and it kind of snowballed from there.
Tami: By snowball, he means eightball. We’re on a roll today!
One-track minds! Let’s talk about something else. What was going on before you met?
Daniel: I’ve lived here four years ago, and I was trying to get into some kind of music at the time. Get an outfit of some sort, trying to do something, floating around basically and waiting for rescue.
Tami: We watched Truth or Dare at our last band practice and it changed my life. I want that.
What life lessons did you learn?
Tami: How to get what I want.
Anyyyyway, what happened after you stalked each other on MySpace?
Tami: I was playing in a punk band with my girlfriend at the time, and it wasn’t really going anywhere, nor was the relationship, but that’s a whole other can of crack. I had been accumulating equipment, like I had bought an eight track and keyboard and all these pedals. I started writing like hip-hop and punk and electronic stuff. I really liked making that, and I was excited, and I wanted to start a band. I wanted it to be really performative [sic] and I wanted there to be dancing involved. I didn’t want it to be cheesy, but at first maybe I did. I was like, “I want outfits!”
Daniel: She actually got in touch with me and was like, “I’ve seen you before, we’ve looked at each other!” MKNG FRNDZ already had some songs and she put out a bulletin saying, “I want some dancers, let’s get together and see what you come up with.” We ended up talking back and forth and I was going to be a dancer and choreograph something, because I love to dance. And in New York, it’s especially hard to come by these days. We ended up meeting finally, like a month later. And we were sitting down at this diner, at like a real date.
Tami: With martinis and everything.
What base did you get to?
Daniel: Freebase! Anyway, so we were sitting there and we were like, “Wait a minute this is what I want! I imagine this!” and then we realized we could come together and just do it, instead of having it be me doing some dancing and getting dancers together versus the performance aspect of her. It happened organically, we just freaked out on each other. Through each practice, we both write the songs, and it’s a really awesome process. We made friends! Then we shortened the name and changed the spelling, got rid of the vowels.
I was going ask you about that! I’ve been noticing this non-vowel movement (which I didn’t realize was a pun until I said it out loud). What’s going on with that?
Daniel: We just thought it looked cooler that way. After the fact, I realized that MSTRKRFT was the big one doing that.
Tami: It looks better.
Daniel: Yeah, it’s just aesthetic.
Tami: It is trendy, for sure.
Daniel: But we don’t have “wolf” in our name.
Or “crystal”.
Daniel: Or “foxes.”
Tami: Mkng Crstl Wlf Frndz.
With foxes.
Tami: And AIDS.
Daniel: There was a phase that was like, “Why do all these bands have AIDS in their name?” And Crystal Castles had on their page, on the what do they sound like thing, AIDS or HIV or something. We quite never got the joke.
Tami: But it is kind of hilarious.
Daniel: I said we sound like full-blown AIDS. You’ve got a month to live, so you better dance your ass off.
What do you guys do when you get together?
Daniel: We sit around and laugh a lot and then we’ll fall into something. We’ll make new songs that go back to unfinished ones we had before. She’ll show up with music, or I’ll have written something, and something will pop out of us. And then one or both of us catches it and goes with it. We wrote a song last week that she wrote the music for and then I started singing these lyrics and it’s a full song.
Tami: It was great, because I loved the music but I could not think of how I wanted it to be sung and then Daniel totally came in and it was amazing. Then we came up with the chorus and it was just like… and that’s happened on some songs that Daniel’s written music for too. I’ll be like, “I wanna sing it like this,” like “Love Cruisin’.” I feel like we complete each other’s sentences a lot.
Daniel: Our song “Sexual Forest,” I was fake singing like Bronski Beat, and all of a sudden it became a real song.
What’s your favorite funny Internet thing? You know, the one you always pull out.
Tami: “Smell Yo Dick” is pretty good. But have you seen “Sit on You”? It’s like this chubby guy singing these weird 80’s things, and he’s just like, “I sit on you.”
Daniel: I have so many. Do you remember the YouTube video where that woman was really, really fat, and it was made for the Olympics or something, and basically she has surgery to become a poodle, and she has her hair in pigtails. And literally, she’s like, “Do you want to end up like me?” and she’s super fat, and then they’re like, “Let’s do some exercise,” and it’s her and a bunch of life-size poodles doing their exercise. Actually, you guys should go on YouTube and type in “Heavy Metal Parking Lot.” I loooove that documentary, but there’s that one where that guy is dressed up in that zebra outfit and he’s like, “Madonna’s a dick!” Every single line from that movie is awesome. “My name’s Graham, man, like gram of dope.”
What about when you’re not pouring your brains into YouTube? Are you still doing other punk stuff?
Tami: I feel like we’re pretty punk. The songs we started out with were sort of introductory, and now we’re going to this whole other level, and we’re going to introduce saxophone, more new wave stuff, and we’re still going to have the electronic pop element. I feel pretty pumped about it.
Daniel: The punks who love to dance.
Tami: Sometimes when we practice we have a riot grrrl band.
Daniel: She’ll jump on the drums and I’ll have the guitar, and we’ll just jump into something. We’re not there yet. We’re still blending in a lot of things, and we definitely have our sound that we notice, which is kind of separate from everything. That’s going to be a bit.
Are you going to make new friends or will it still be just two?
Tami: I think it’ll be us.
Daniel: We don’t see anyone else. It’s hard enough for us to get our schedules aligned to do practices, and we have a really good thing doing. We vibe really well together, and to introduce somebody, I don’t think we’re up for that. We’ve just been a band for like a year.
Tami: Aw, we’re babies!
What else are you guys psyched on right now?
Daniel: Definitely people who come out to dance. People who actually come out to our shows or any shows and start dancing and quit fucking staring and analyzing everything. There’s nothing to analyze here, just go crazy with us. Especially here.
Tami: I feel like we have a good group of friends who let the tension aside and just get stupid with us.
Daniel: We’re really supported.
Tami: Oh, Paris Is Burning!
Daniel: Let’s shout out The Great Rock n Roll Swindle and all the punk kids are in the club and they’re dancing to disco versions of the Sex Pistols. That’s what we are.
Tami: Maybe we should cover that medley.
That’s totally true!
Tami: And I’m obsessed with Madonna.
Daniel: We love Madonna.
Which phase is your favorite?
Daniel: Probably Blonde Ambition through Erotica.
Tami: I’m obsessed with “Thief of Hearts” which is one of the songs on Erotica, and it makes me want to go to Chelsea and twink out a little bit.
Daniel: It makes me want to go to Sydney, Australia.
Tami: Daniel has heavily influenced all my obsessions.
Daniel: I like everything Pharrell Williams touches. I think it’s really good.
Who have you guys been playing with a lot lately?
Daniel: Our friends, the Naked Hearts. They invited us to play their record release party and it was really fun.
What was touring like?
Tami: Amazing.
Daniel: We want to be gone right now. We left in May and we went to the South, and I’d never been there, and I had a blast. We got in a car with our friend who has her on radio show on Sirius.
Tami: She was the editor of this lesbian magazine On Our Backs. And she’s written books and she’s a sexologist.
Daniel: And we got in her car and we were late, and we just took off for Atlanta, for a music festival down there, MondoHomo, It was like the second year.
Tami: It was amazing. There was a lot of chaos. We went on tour with our friends the Dead Betties. We took turns opening for each other.
Daniel: We played this anarchist space in Durham, we played in Athens at some random bar with the Athens Boys Choir.
Tami: Athens was kind of weird. It was on Memorial Day, and it was DEAD.
Daniel: A lot of people came to see Athens Boys Choir, which kind of saved us. It was a good show, though.
Tami: Asheville was awesome.
Daniel: North Carolina, those kids know how to show people a good time. Charleston was the best show we ever had. It was a crazy fucking house party. The walls were shaking. That town was ready to have a good time. There were all these different kinds of people.
Tami: Hippies, punks, everyone.
Daniel: You could tell some people didn’t really know each other, but when we started playing, everyone was off the walls. I think at one point I was singing and making out with someone at the same time. People were knocking into us and we were pushing back. It felt like, this is what we’re doing. I finally felt like I was living my life. It was what I always thought what I wanted to do, growing up and seeing shows. Those kids afterwards coined what we like to call our band. They were like, “We so needed that. That band was like dance trash.”
Tami: New York is really Choose Your Own Adventure. That’s why I like playing more random shows, with people who don’t really know us. Like, some weird straight show. At the end of this record release show, I was getting hit on by frat dudes. I was like, “Really? You guys think I’m straight? And pretty?”
Daniel: A friend that I work with, someone that he’s dating brought some random friends who didn’t even know what to expect, and out of everyone there, they were dancing and going crazy. I would have never been able to talk to them on the street, but we were all having a good time.
Aw, you guys are bringing people together.
Tami: Even in the queer community, it’s very cliquey obviously. And I feel like, we’ve played shows where I’m like, “I don’t know this group of dykes. Awesome.” It’s kind of cool, because it’s people who have never seen us or we’ve never hung out with them.
What would you tell those people your shows are like?
Daniel: We look in each other’s eyes and go into our own heads, and just go crazy. Every now and then we’ll have a lyric like, “Stop don’t turn around” and we’ll pull a little Supremes. Or “waiting for the phone to ring.” It’s all about having fun.
So now that we’re frndz, tell me your deep dark secrets.
Tami: I have no shame. Everyone knows I’m a crackhead.
Daniel: I’ll totally go there. I went to high school for two years while I maintained a more than healthy dope habit. Growing up where I grew up, that’s what we did. We met these kids, me and a girl I was dating, they were these skinheads from the south. They were hiding out in Alaska, and we met them randomly at Value Village. And it was like, “Hey, wanna come out hang out with us?” And then we did the same thing every day, and just like that. I went to an art high school, an “alternative” school, so I had my freedoms here and there. I had independent studies or whatever, but I had a full-fledged drug habit in school. And then one day, I was not living at home anymore, and you know, smoking crack accidentally [laughs], and my mom came around when she figured out where I was. And she said, “You made the decision, you need to come home.” And one day I just stopped. It sucked, it totally sucked. Not many people know about that.
Tami: Mine’s not that exciting.
Come on, what is it?
Tami: I’m a closet jazz pop listener.
Daniel: That’s way cooler than mine.
Tami: Manhattan Transfer.
Daniel: I was singing “Twilight Zone” last night at the top of my lungs!
Tami: See? We’re always on the same page. Do you know “Birdland”?
Daniel: Yeah! I was totally telling the story last night. I like Manhattan Transfer and my mom bought the tape, you know the kind you get at the gas station? We hated most of the songs on the record, so boring, but that “Twilight Zone” came on and me and my brothers would just sing at the top of our lungs. Those jazz harmonies…
Tami: One of the singers, Janis Siegel, came into my restaurant when I was brand new there. I was flipping out. The owner knows the Manhattan Transfer. I was very impressed. But nobody else. She’s totally this 60-year-old, Upper East Side, really cute old lady. I couldn’t help it. Other famous people have come in, and I’m just like, “Whatever,” but here I was such a fan.
Daniel: Their outfits were so amazing in the early days.
Tami: I told her, “I just have to tell you, I love the Manhattan Transfer.” She was very sweet, but then she was upset that the clams were dirty. I’m still a fan. My step-mom had the box set. I used to sneak it into my room. She was also a trombone player in the Marine Corps marching band, and she listened to Manhattan Transfer and do you know Sypro Gyra?
Daniel: They’re kinda famous. They fit into that t-shirt band era.
They come up in crossword puzzles a lot.
Daniel: That’s the coolest thing anyone has said to me.
Thanks! You guys are so cute. Do you get that a lot?
Tami: “Hot sluts” is what we get a lot.
Daniel: “Groundbreaking.”
Tami: “Life changing.”
Daniel: There has been a lot about “Are we serious?”
In what sense?
Daniel: Like, are we serious about what we’re doing. I’ve heard people say that we’re just about getting drunk with our friends and having a good time, which is totally true. But, we are serious about doing this. And it is just punk kids exploring dance music.
People seem to ask that a lot about anything you can dance to.
Daniel: Especially in the punk community.
Tami: There was definitely a novelty aspect at first, but I feel like we’re very serious, but at the same time, it’s like, I don’t ever want to take myself so fucking seriously that I have something stuck up my ass all day.
Daniel: If we’re not having fun, neither one of us are interested in doing it. If a song is becoming too much work, it really just doesn’t work. It’s done. It’s all very organic, kinda mulchy. We also like to throw affirmations at each other that no one else can hear.
Tami: People like us! We’re the best band ever!
Well, I like you! And now I want to know what your ideal show would be like, if there were no limits at all.
Daniel: We want an upside down pyramid with a skull and cross bones on it.
Tami: Madonna. No, I want Tommy Lee’s drum set, where he goes out in to the crowd and rotates.
Daniel: That thing’s so scary. I would love to be catapulted up and down on bungee cords across the audience.
Tami: On a surfboard.
Daniel: I saw something on YouTube the other day. My roommate and I were on there and we somehow fell into the Kylie Minogue channel. There is this live performance, I don’t know where she is, and she’s doing the “I Can’t Get You Out of My Head” and “Blue Monday” mashup. And the curtain opens and there’s this huge CD player, totally 90s, and there’s all these dancers around the huge speakers. Where’s Kylie?! OK, the CD tray opens, she is laying on her side, and the CD pops up and she’s like hanging on to this bar and the bar comes up and it says “Kylie” across her body, the song starts, and she starts singing and it’s AWESOME. It’s not worth watching anything else beyond that, just rewinding that part over and over. She’s the CD in the CD player!
Tami: I just want to go on tour forever. I want to go everywhere.
Do it! All of it!
Website
Interview by Gloria Holes
Photos Courtesy of Amos Mac and Catalina Monsalve
Tags: chief, Chief Magazine, Issue 17, mkng frndz
Love you guys!