Everything is tight. As mottoes go, it’s not a bad one. However, while the RVA duo known as The Weak Days may lead with a sense of goofy positivity, it would be a bad idea to write them off as shallow. Guitarist Tommy McPhail and drummer/programmer Dustin Reinink (both of whom sing) deal with a variety of intense emotions and difficult situations in their driving, melodic music. At the same time, the fact that these two young musicians are fun-loving sweethearts trying to get the most out of life can’t help but spill over into silliness on occasion. It’s a big part of what makes them so charming. And with the upcoming release of their first 12 inch EP, they’re prepared to win over a lot of people.
This article was featured in RVAMag #29: Summer 2017. You can read all of issue #29 here or pick it up at local shops around RVA right now.
McPhail and Reinink were friends before they started playing music together. At the time, Reinink was playing in another duo, Winning The Loser’s Bracket. McPhail and Reinink began jamming together on the side. “It was super informal, nothing serious,” Reinink says. But then, WTLB came to an abrupt end. “We put out an LP in summer 2014, then immediately decided it wasn’t gonna do anything anymore. That happened in a night,” Reinink explains. Following that eventful night, Reinink (who uses they/their pronouns) immediately sought out McPhail. “I went over to see Tommy where he was working as an RA,” they said. “I said, ‘Hey, this Weak Days thing — I’m taking it seriously now. I need to know if you’re in on this, because I have opportunities.’”
McPhail was just as ready as Reinink was, so the duo started writing the songs that became their first EP, A Week’s Daze. Towards the end of that process, Reinink met Anastasia Rivera through Tinder, a fact that they find somewhat amusing in hindsight. Rivera soon joined the band on keyboards and vocals. With no bass player in the band, Rivera helped fill out the low end of the sound. “We essentially had her play an organ tone the entire time to fill in for bass,” Reinink says. “That added a whole new texture.”
As soon as she joined, Rivera had quite a bit of creative input to offer. The band’s next release after A Week’s Daze was a three-song tour demo, on which Rivera wrote all of the songs. Touring quickly became a way of life for the trio, as Reinink had made quite a few connections during their time in Winning The Loser’s Bracket and was eager to pick up where that band had left off. The band began heading out of town every few months, having success from the beginning. “We’ve never not made money on tour,” Reinink says, attributing the band’s consistent success to a conscientious application of DIY principles. “I keep merch cheap,” they say. “I keep shirts at $5, I keep tapes at $5, I keep CDs at $5. We sell vinyl for like $7 now because… whatever, vinyl should be more expensive than it is, everywhere. That’s just pure economics.”
By vinyl, Reinink means The Weak Days’ first EP, Drowsy. This five-song EP, released in September 2015 on Reinink’s label, Running Around Records, really solidified the band’s sound. Crunchy guitars, driving mid-tempo songs with an upbeat spirit, and multi-layered melodies communicating a variety of emotions added up to an appealing, memorable sound. The interplay between Rivera’s higher, clearer tones and the rougher voices of McPhail and Reinink is another appealing factor that distinguishes the songs on Drowsy. The trio was finding their unified voice, working closely together, and it showed. However, this EP would be the final Weak Days release featuring Rivera.
Rivera’s departure happened gradually. “We did a ten-day tour, which was fantastic. We were already thinking about recording a new EP,” McPhail says. “Then right before [the next] tour, she had to drop out.” McPhail and Reinink went ahead on that January 2016 tour as a two-piece. “The vocals became different, the songs became different,” McPhail says. “I ran my guitar through a guitar and bass amps. We were like, ‘We can do this.’”
However, the way forward was not as clear at the time. “Anastasia was still in the band,” Reinink says. “We played some local shows with her, but then the March tour came up and she had to drop off that because of money. It was like ‘No hard feelings, we’ve done this once before.’” But once McPhail and Reinink returned from tour, they knew they needed to figure things out once and for all. “We still all wanted to make music together,” Reinink says. “So we were like, ‘Let’s go over money, and if you can afford to go in May, then let’s keep doing it. But if you can’t, I don’t want to keep lying to ourselves.’”
Ultimately, Rivera chose to leave the band, playing her last show with the group in April 2016. “Long story short, she was in school and working a job, and just couldn’t make the band happen,” Reinink explains. “We were like, ‘You living comes first, so quit the band so you can afford to live and do other things.’ It was amicable in the end.” Rather than search for a permanent replacement, the band chose to continue as a duo, but keep an open mind towards playing with other interested collaborators. “If somebody wants to be a member, then come practice, and play some shows with us!” Reinink says.
Photo by Aubree Roe
This isn’t an idle offer, either. McPhail and Reinink are absolutely prepared to perform as a duo, and have done so locally on several occasions since Rivera’s departure. However, at least two upcoming tours will also include the presence of Buffalo, NY resident Brad Tuck (also of Buffalo’s Subtle Words) on second guitar. “We play with bass out of a sampler right now,” Reinink explains. “We have a Roland 404, and I sample the bass, then play to a click. So we’re gonna continue to do that in May, and Brad’s just gonna add guitar on top of that. Two guitars, no bass, who cares.”
Brad’s presence is somewhat of a necessity; while The Weak Days continues to tour quite often, neither McPhail nor Reinink owns a car these days. “Brad saved us last-minute in March,” Reinink says. “We literally we had four rides drop through on going to SXSW.” “And that’s OK — they’re all friends of ours and they weren’t trying to be flaky,” McPhail quickly adds. “We were just trying to see if we could make it happen at all. It was like, ‘if we can get down there and back and make any money, cool, but if not, we’ll just go to say we did it.’”
Where lineup expansions are concerned, Tuck’s involvement is by no means the end of the story. “In July, we’re playing as at least a four-piece, if not a five-piece,” Reinink says. “A friend or two of ours from Columbus are gonna come down and practice with Brad again, and we’ll do that tour with them. [Then] we’re trying to do a show as a nine-piece in August. So we’re doing a lot.”
The most important thing The Weak Days are doing in the summer of 2017 has nothing to do with auxiliary members, though. It is, instead, the release of a 7 song 12-inch EP. The EP, entitled Tight, is a quantum leap beyond the band’s previous sound, featuring what is undoubtedly the most assured, inspired, and all-around excellent music of the band’s career thus far. More than a mere collection of songs, this release presents itself as a strong, unified whole.
Unsurprisingly, it was conceived with exactly this sort of approach in mind. “Tommy had an idea,” Reinink says. “He wanted to name a project Tight. I was like, ‘Well then that’s the name of the next record. We have no songs written for it, but whatever.’” McPhail traces some of the inspiration for the record to the way Rivera’s departure from the group played out. “I don’t want to say it was the catalyst for Tight, but it’s more like… how loaded us saying that [phrase] is. It’s not just a super-posi thing. It’s more like, ‘Here’s something that has a lot of emotional baggage, but it’s fine.’”
There’s a lot of very serious subject matter that shows up on Tight. However, they also recognize that this isn’t the entirety of the story. “There’s an inherent silliness to everything we do, because we’re both very serious and very silly people,” Reinink continues. “It’s so genuinely who we are. In a moment, either one of us can have an entirely serious conversation, but cut that seriousness with something to take you out of it and remember that it’s cool, it’s tight.”
Indeed, the album’s one-word title shows up in every single song on the album, becoming somewhat of an album-long refrain, always acting as a humorous aside to leaven some very serious subject matter. It’s a distinctive signature that sets this release apart from almost any album one could compare it to. However, there are many common points in The Weak Days music that demonstrate their kinship with seemingly more serious bands like The Hotelier, or Into It. Over It. The seven songs on Tight tread the same emotional ground as those bands tend to, dealing with the sort of intense personal shit that everyone goes through during the endless process of learning how to survive adulthood.
Opener “National Harbor, MD” begins with McPhail declaring “Everything is tight, we’re fine right here tonight despite constant panic attacks and uncertainty in our lives.” The song’s title comes from its setting, a “fake-ass town” outside Washington, DC with a busy convention center. “There are a lot of anime conventions there, a lot of business conventions,” says McPhail. “It’s so manufactured, with an overpriced ferris wheel that’s just neon in the background.” Both laugh, but then Reinink gets more serious. “I go to a lot of cons, and so I wound up there,” they say. “That entire song is about a friend of mine having a breakdown on the roof of a parking garage while we were there.”
McPhail expresses concern that the band’s tendencies toward silliness might make such serious topics come off as disingenuous. “We’ve gotten called pop-punk, or emo, but getting lumped into those categories doesn’t define us. We’re not like, here’s four chords, some misogyny, and getting pizza with my friends. We never wanna be that.” Reinink vehemently agrees. “We go to the furthest extent when we’re playing a set to make sure we don’t come across that way. Two songs we wrote are about dealing with depression, anxiety, and suicide. We like to say that very particularly, so that people know where we’re coming from.”
That said, there are some obviously silly aspects to the way Tight is assembled. “In the early stages of writing this record, we were toying with doing a song called ‘Tight, feat. Everyone,’” McPhail says. “There are bands that put this killer feature on a song, and that’s it. But with this song, there’d be a paragraph long list of [everyone who’s on the song].” However, the way those people would appear was not the traditional method of contributing a verse, or some backing vocals. Instead, the band would pull from a huge collection of iPhone voice memos. “That was an idea we had early on, to get a bunch of people to do that,” Reinink says.
Indeed, voice memos pepper the record — nearly two dozen, all told. Some are barely audible, while others take prominent positions in the quiet spaces between individual tracks. Guest stars include everyone from Chris Farren (Fake Problems/Antarctigo Vespucci) and Evan Thomas Weiss (Into It. Over It.) to former Weak Days member Anastasia Rivera and McPhail’s bandmate in Charlotte NC’s Dollar Signs, Dylan Wachman. “Dylan was a good friend of ours before all of this, but then he loved the record so much, he was like, ‘I want to put this out,’” McPhail says. Tight will be released jointly by Running Around Records and Wachman’s label, Possum Heart.
The “feat. Everyone” joke lives on in the title of one of Tight’s songs, “Featuring Evan Thomas Weiss.” The Into It. Over It. leader does appear on the song, but of course, only in the form of an iPhone voice memo. The song’s title is not just a joke, though — the main riff was somewhat inspired by Weiss’s playing style. “I was thinking about how Evan Weiss would write a guitar part,” McPhail says. “We were playing around with weird tuning, and I was just like, ‘Let me just fuck around and make a ton of demos.’ So that’s where that lead initially came from, but it wasn’t like ‘Let me think of Evan Thomas Weiss. Here’s a tasty lick!’ It was a derivative of a derivative of a derivative.”
The song that carries this ironic title is based on a very serious subject. “A friend of ours passed away,” McPhail says. “She’d just graduated. She’d been out of school for maybe a month. She’d just gotten a teaching job at a middle school. And people were like ‘What a loss to those kids.’ I was like, ‘Hold up, first of all, somebody died. Second of all, you can mourn the loss of a great person, a great educator, a great daughter, whoever, but let’s take a step back for a second.’ Some people’s first reaction was that it was a waste of talent or potential, as if she owed somebody something. But I’m thinking that I’ll never get to hang out with her again. And isn’t that her worth?” “The whole time I was just coming back to [the question], what does success mean?” says Reinink. “Do we have to qualify her life?”
McPhail and Reinink do not shy away from discussing difficult subjects like these. But at the same time, both still enjoy having fun. Recently, they blew off some steam by throwing together an internet-only EP, Breakin’ Da Rules, which consisted entirely of cartoon show theme song covers. Meanwhile, McPhail carries on his streak of having tweeted at Michael Jordan once a day for over two years now. The contrast between these elements is what makes The Weak Days the band and the people they are, and they celebrate this reality. “We released a cover EP today of songs from cartoons. That’s the silliness we can’t escape from,” says Reinink. “But that’s juxtaposed with a record that’s mostly about not feeling safe in spaces, friends passing away, and trying to deal with the monotony of being a very anxious person every single day.” It’s cool, though. Everything is tight.
You can catch The Weak Days tonight for First Fridays at The Camel alongside Clair Morgan, Opin, and Majjin Boo. The show is a benefit for Side by Side. Doors 8PM, Music 9PM. $6 ADV, $8 at the door.
