Stephen Perry has been working under The Planes moniker for years, inviting a wide variety of friends to leave their mark on the project in its many iterations.
If you’ve been to more than, I don’t know, five indie, punk, or DIY shows in East Williamsburg or Bushwick, you have met a current or former member of The Planes. It’s one of those things where if you throw a rock in any random direction, you’ll hit someone who has played in that band.
But if you up that to like, seven or eight shows, you’ve also probably met the man behind the moniker, Stephen Perry. Since joining the Brooklyn post punk scene in 2021, I’ve seen this man at probably half of the shows I’ve attended or played. He’s just sort of a staple of the scene.
Perry and The Planes are a lesson in how a music project can last a long time, have a lot of influence from a lot of people, and maintain a steady identity. It’s a practical approach to having a band as you settle more and more into adulthood. Over the years, the band has featured members of Crazy and the Brains, Ilithios, A Very Special Episode, Rancho Cowabunga, Onesie, and more. Newcomers and mid-30s vets like myself can learn a lot from them.
Because they are such a staple of this corner of New York music, and many of you probably know them or have seen them, it only felt right to pen a piece about their new EP, Motel for Lightning Bug. Perry and I broke down each track on the new release, but only after talking about The Planes’ history and how one maintains a consistent project whilst keeping its doors open to the influence of so many different members over the years.
Listen to Motel for Lightning Bug on bandNada.
I read the bio in your press pack. The Planes started in 2017, right?
It sounds like you didn’t read our bio. The Planes started in 2009.
I read it once. Don’t tell Jon [Daily - boss] - I’m on thin ice with him right now. Regardless, The Planes have been around for a minute with a rotating cast of band members. Where does the band end as a solo project and begin as a group effort?
There's not really a line between the two. When I started The Planes, the idea was originally to just have friends fill in whenever they were free to do a show. But that ended up being way more work for me than just being in a standard three- or four-person rock band. You can tell there are different eras and different musicians on different albums, but my presence is Songwriter™️ and lead person. There's continuity.
Would you say that the other band members are what give each era its own identity?
Yeah, and that's been really cool. Obviously, I would like to work with people for a long time, but for most people, The Planes weren't their main thing. People have left for various reasons over the years, but it's mostly, “I can't do this and do my three other bands, you know?” [Laughs]
Do you think it makes it easier to get people involved if everyone has that understanding of, “this can be a side project?”
Yeah. If you can’t make a show, it's not a big deal. We can play as a three-piece. There are probably five or six people out there who know all the old songs, anyway. Right now, Patrick [Porter - guitar]’s in A Very Special Episode. Phantom Signals was Mike's band, though I think they’re on hiatus. And you know Josh [Inman - drums] is in a bunch of stuff, and Don [Lavis - previous drummer] before him was in a bunch of stuff.
Speaking of Josh, who wasn’t on the new release - is it weird to use promo pictures with band members who didn’t play on the record to promote it? I’ve done that before (once with Josh) and had mixed feelings about it.
Josh is technically on the record, actually! He sings backup vocals. So we were able to bring him in to actually be a part of it. I would have liked to have Don in some of the photos, but he wasn't free when we did that shoot.
What was the writing and recording process of Motel for Lightning Bug like?
A bit weird. I had a bunch of material that I wanted to work on with Rob Mellinger, who played bass on Dark Matter Recycling Co. and left the band to play with Crazy and the Brains. We were lucky to have Jackie Perone, the bass player on Wax Diamond, back for a year and a half. “Manhole Fire,” “Radio Summer,” and “Sleep/Gash” are songs that her, Don, and I worked on. Then Jackie ended up moving to South Jersey, so Mike offered to jump in. “Cliff diver” is a song that we worked on with him. Patrick was playing with us on and off, and over that year and a half, he became a permanent member. At that point, Don was a little overwhelmed with the amount of bands that he was in, which was totally understandable. He was like, “I gotta step away,” and we were like, “Okay, let's see if we can get a good recording of these songs.” I wanted him to have a record of the work that he put in.
Just to be crystal clear, who all plays on this record?
I play guitar and sing. Patrick plays guitar. Mike plays bass and Don plays drums. Josh does the background vocals.
What does Motel for Lightning Bug mean as a title?
I wanted a phrase that sounds kind of normal but isn't common. It was a transitional time in the band, and there was this spark of creativity that led to these four new songs. To me, the motel is the EP - like this kind of temporary home for this spark of a lightning bug. The lightning bug being that iteration of the band. Loosely, it kind of makes sense.
What did recording this one look like?
We did live guitar (like, the “main” guitar), bass, and drums with Zach [Rescignano - engineer in Brooklyn and drummer of Debbie Dopamine and Reds]. All the bass and drums are from the live session, and about half of my guitars are from the live session. I actually overdubbed some of that “main” guitar too. Patrick and I re-recorded guitar parts separately. And then I recorded vocals at both Josh's studio and my house... And in Jon Daily's basement. [Laughs]
You’ve mentioned so many familiar names, and it makes sense, seeing as you’re sort of this ever-present figure in this music scene. How did you get into music personally, and how did you end up in this scene in Bushwick and East Williamsburg?
I was a child of the early 90s and, you know, like every white boy my age, liked Nirvana. Then, from reading interviews with Kurt Cobain, I got into R.E.M., The Pixies, Sonic Youth, and a bunch of what you would consider entry level college rock, alternative music.
I went to college to be a music major, because that gave me the passion to go to class and graduate. Then I bummed around my college town for, like, two years. I was talking to a friend of mine on the phone and he was like, “We're all in Brooklyn now, you should come here.” I found this loft in Greenpoint and moved in. It was just this big empty room. We were going to have shows there sometimes, and parties. It was with a guy who wanted to start a recording studio and live there. The second night I was there, I was in my boxers walking to the shower. The door swings open, and it's Benji Reynolds [frontman of Drummers Can Achieve. [Laughs] I'm like, “Who are you?” And he's like, “My band practices here.” Through him, I met a bunch of musicians. A bunch of people I knew through that scene are still playing music today. I think the first time I met Jon Daily might have been a Low Fat Getting High show at Silent Barn.
I love that. Let’s get into the tracks on the new EP. “Tear the World Apart” is from a previous release, Echo Forever (2013). What made you want to rerecord it?
It's changed a lot over the years, but it's always been part of our live set. I have never been 100% happy with either of the recordings. I feel like we played a little too slow. We also recorded to tape.
You are one of the only people that I know who recorded to tape post-2005.
Back then, there were still perks to doing tape over digital.
Album artwork for Echo Forever, where "Tear The World Apart" originally appeared.
Who is the “she” you refer to in this song?
“She” is a couple of different people. In my third or fourth year in New York, a lot of people I knew who were in comedy, TV, or film, were like, “screw this, I'm going to go try it in L.A.” And some of them actually did pretty well there. A good friend of mine ended up working her way up and becoming a screenwriter. I think that making that change seems to work for some people. You trade the subway for the freeway. You trade the broken-down L Train for a traffic jam. It's a cliche, but it’s so earnest.
“Radio Summer” is the first song on the EP not previously released. Not to get too guitar nerd about it, but a lot of your riffs and chords sound like they rely on one open string, and whatever else you do around it.
That’s from all the times that I was the only guitarist in the band. A lot of my guitar playing came out of the necessity of having to fill in space while also trying to move some melodic or counter melodic line on top of it, while also singing.
You also might be hearing a third, alternate-tuned guitar doing a bunch of drone-y stuff low in the mix. When we performed it at our release show, Lori [Bingle - previously of Rancho Cowabunga and Onesie] actually played that third guitar part.
That’s awesome. I heard you did a wall of guitars too, which you did on a live stream with 10+ other people, like a year or so ago. Where did you originally get that idea?
It just seemed cool. I'm always trying to think of something that I haven't seen people do for promo or getting the word out. It was part of the release plan for Dark Matter Recycling Co.
I wanted to do something for our [Motel for Lightning Bug] release show that was unique. So I had a bunch of special players, basically. We played the EP, and we had Lori play some of the third guitar parts for “Radio Summer” and “Sleep/Gash.” And then we took a break and then played like a “greatest hits” set. We had guest guitarists and a guest vocalist, and then for the last two songs, we had five guitarists. It was kind of a glorious mess.
The show was at The East Williamsburg Econo Lodge, which is very good for that sort of a shtick.
I don't think we could do it anywhere else. I wouldn't try to go to some bar and explain to them, “Song three, we're going to have four guitars.” The sound person would shoot me.
Do you want to say anything else about “Radio Summer?”
“Radio Summer,” I wrote as a love letter to bands that are out there touring the US in a time when we're inching closer to a fascist regime. The line in the song is “a finger in the face of the king,” which I didn't even realize that we were going to see during the No Kings Rally and all that shit. I think the first time we played that song was in 2023.
So Trump wasn't even elected yet.
It was just supposed to be a stupid metaphor about authority. It wasn't supposed to line up that well with what was going to happen.
“Manhole Fire” is a song about a real manhole fire.
We had my daughter in January of 2024, and they wanted to keep her in the hospital for a couple of days to monitor a breathing thing, which turned out to be no big deal. We were discharged, and for the first three days, we would go to the Upper East Side twice a day to see her.
Wait, let me get this clear. You and your wife were discharged from the hospital while they held your baby?
American health care, you know? They're not going to pay for you to have a hotel room if you're not needed there… It was really, really hard. After going through all that, and then not even being able to be around her? It was the hardest 36 hours of both of our lives.
This one night,we're going back to see Lucy and we smell something really funky at the 6 Train stop at 77th Street. There's a manhole fire outside the hospital. A manhole fire is basically this crazy New York thing where all this infrastructure underneath the street, like degraded electrical wires, decaying soil, and methane pockets, builds up, and they blow up. Sometimes the manhole lid actually flies in the sky. But this one was just a ton of smoke coming up in an underground fire.
Right.
So we emerge [from the Subway] to this chaotic scene. Con Ed is there, cops are there. And they closed down half of the hospital entrances because smoke was coming in. I had this vision of grabbing my kid and other kids from the NICU and running out of a fucking burning hospital with them. And in the middle of it, there's just this completely decked-out, hyper-fashionable, rich Gen Z kid walking right into the train station. You know, big headphones on, oblivious to what's going on around them. It was like half- “this person is really oblivious “and half- “this person is so fucking stylish that they can walk right into the middle of this and the world just stops around them.” So “Manhole Fire” is about the disposition of the anxiety that I was feeling, versus the complete and utter non-phased 20-year-old [stereotype] who acts like they're above reality.
Okay, onto “Cliff Diver.” This song makes me feel like I'm diving into a sea of psychedelics, and I have never even touched drugs.
A friend of mine had an Epiphone Les Paul Junior. When he moved to Colorado, he was like, “Hey, do you want this?” When I heard that Screaming Females broke up, I picked up that Les Paul and I wrote that riff. To me, they're kind of the quintessential band that made a career out of being on the road all the time. To work your way up from DIY touring? They were just doing it and doing it and doing it, putting in the time, not having a normal life. Props to them times a million. I'm sad that I won't see some of those songs live anymore, but I'm happy that I got to.
Next, we have “Sleep/Gash,” which is about a loved one dealing with grief, right?
Correct. I had two cousins die over the last year and a half in pretty tragic ways. And you grieve for the person obviously, but there’s a point where you need to understand that you're still grieving for yourself, too. After a while, it doesn't do anything. You're just suffering for suffering’s sake. It's a really easy thing to get trapped in. At a certain point, you just have to decide that you're going to just take the next step. Tomorrow is going to come, and you either get up for it or you don't.
Explain the title of the song. Both “sleep” and “gash” are part of the lyrics.
The song is kind of inspired by the book My Year of Rest and Relaxation. [The narrator] is not grieving for the death of a loved one, but more wallowing in certain life changes she doesn't want to deal with. It was loosely this concept of “you can just sleep and ache indefinitely if you let yourself.” The “sleep” thing is the tendency to sleep when you’re depressed. The “gashes” are the aches of pain.
For the final track, “The Box,” I gotta ask: why will my bad behavior get me trapped there?
Because you are my cat, Baron, and I'm singing to you about how if you knock shit over, I will place you in the box. That was originally a song from Wax Diamond. That song has been in most live sets for the past decade. It was cool to redo it a little more aggressively.
Apart from you basically comparing yourself to a dictator over your cat - a fascist dictator.
You know, it's funny. Charlie McGrath, who played in the band for a while, after he left, he was like, “I thought this song was about your brother in jail or something.” [Laughs]
As I’ve studied more and more music, I’ve realized that some people just write songs about things that feel menial or silly - and without context, the lyrics seem to be talking about something bigger than what they are.
I mean, you lose control of your stuff when you put it out in the world. At the same time, you don't want to be taken the wrong way. On Dark Matter Recycling Co., we had a song called “First Breath After Mask,” and it's kind of about the painful absurdity of suffering. It’s not really a political statement, but I worried that someone might take it as me saying that wearing a mask is pointless, right? Which is not what I intend at all.
Did anyone take it that way?
No, but I wonder if anyone hears that and thinks that I'm not quite saying what I am, you know, because it's not super direct.
I've definitely had those experiences of people being like, I can't believe you said this or posted that. And it's like, you know, I thought I was being clearly sarcastic. As a songwriter, it’s weird to fear that someone might look at your art and assume bad intentions behind it.
Right? But it's part of being a performer. It's part of being an artist, too, unless you have the time to go around and explain it thoroughly one-on-one. It's so boring to have to justify everything you say. People should be able to hear things and think for themselves.
**Motel for Lightning Bug* is out now. The Planes are playing The Marvel Oaks record release show next Friday, November 14th, at Main Drag. RSVP here.*
