Phoenix folk-punk legends AJJ on new album and dodging a friendship with 'QAnon Shaman'

“Disposable Everything” is an album inspired by personal grief, much of it written as singer-guitarist Sean Bonnette of Phoenix folk-punk legends AJJ was working through the heartache of losing his mother to what he says were “lung-related things” in November 2019.

But it’s also about what happens when you reach the other side of grief.

“When something that you've dreaded for a really long time happens and the dust has settled and you're still standing, what you have in front of you is something you've never imagined before,” Bonnette said.

“And there's a lot of really beautiful possibility in the grief we learn to live with, and we learn to marshal. Getting to try to see how to move forward with that is to me ultimately an optimistic thing.”

The result is what Bonnette calls “a beautiful album that sets out to make you feel better about everything while telling you just how terrible everything is at the same time.”

That overarching theme plays out in an album that emerges as an at times joyous celebration of life on a planet that constantly seems spiraling out of control.

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AJJ's 'Good Luck Everybody': 'It actually suited the moment'

In that respect, "Disposable Everything" could be heard as a more optimistic effort than the uncannily prescient “Good Luck Everybody,” which hit the streets in January 2020 and found Bonnette responding to the rise of Donald Trump and what the singer refers to in "Normalization Blues" as "the golden age of bigotry."

“In retrospect, that was a bit of a wallow,” he said, “compared to this one and some other things we’ve done.”

Bassist Ben Gallaty, who founded AJJ as Andrew Jackson Jihad with Bonnette in 2004, says he was having second thoughts as he and his bandmates were putting the finishing touches on “Good Luck Everybody” in 2019.

“It did seem like, ‘Oh man, I think we've kind of jumped the shark or something,’” he Gallaty said.

“It just seemed like a lot and maybe overly pessimistic or I don't know. Looking back on it now, it's like, 'Whoa, it’s really kind of eerie how it actually suited the moment.'”

And to be clear, he doesn’t mean suiting the moment in which the album was created. He means suiting the moment that followed in the album’s wake.

Two months later, the world shut down in the face of a nightmarish global pandemic with a death toll now approaching 7 million, ushering in an age of fear and isolation.

Within a year of the album’s release, a group of Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol in an attempt to overturn the will of the voters, with some rioters calling for the hanging of Vice President Mike Pence.

In short, it felt like we were living in the world AJJ had sounded the alarm about in the darkest moments of that 2020 album.

“It was horrifying,” Bonnette said. “It did not feel good.”

Cellist Mark Glick said he couldn’t shake the feeling that they’d put that out there in the universe.

“You can be as pessimistic as you want and you kind of predict the future,” Glick said. “That was the whole feeling over lockdown after 'Good Luck Everybody.’ Oh, it all kind of came true, huh?”

As Gallaty sees it, “It just seems like something greater was at work with that record.”

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How AJJ's singer was almost childhood friends with the QAnon Shaman

One of the goals going into the sessions for this new release was to balance a bit of that negative energy, getting back to a catchphrase that, as Glick says, gets bandied about when the conversation turns to AJJ, the idea of music that’s “sad in the key of happy.”

He points to a song on “Disposable Everything,” their first release on Hopeless Records, about one of the insurrection’s more infamous faces, Arizona’s own QAnon Shaman, Jacob Chansley (AKA Jake Angeli).

On “Moon Valley High,” Bonnette sets the scene with “Jake Angeli, we almost would’ve been friends/ Our mothers used to be friends, and now my mother is dead/ And your mother is proud of you.”

Bonnette assures us this is all true.

“I went to Cortez High, which is a sister school to Moon Valley,” he said. “So in my social media, a lot of friends were commenting after Jan. 6, like, 'Oh, damn, I knew this guy. He went to high school with me.'"

"I looked at his name and was like, 'Wait a minute.' Then I did a little bit more internet sleuthing and saw that my mom and his mom were good friends and they went to high school together. So the song is about how I almost grew up being friends with that kid.”

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How 'Disposable Everything' became the 'thesis' of AJJ's new album

Bonnette sees the bittersweet ballad “Disposable Everything” as the “thesis” of the album, an oddly optimistic spin on the thought that everything we have in this world is inherently disposable.

“I was thinking about how there's so much disposable stuff but ways in which that can be a good thing, too,” he said.

"Like, all these physical products are disposable, but at the same time, maybe also capitalism is disposable. All these old mores are potentially disposable as well if we're gonna enter such a large state of change and flux. I think I might have just entered babbling territory.”

Bonnette laughed, and Glick stepped in to get his back.

“You're making a good point,” Glick said. “I never thought about that connection. But it's like an ‘Unbearable Lightness of Being’ thing. Everything being disposable can be interpreted both as positive and negative. I've never even thought about that before.”

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How ‘Everything is free’ is not the same as ‘Everything is meaningless'

Another key theme in the opening track is “Everything is free now,” a line Bonnette says he got from a Gillian Welch song she released in 2001 about how music piracy and streaming services were ruining everything by devaluing art.

In Bonnette’s hands, the thought that “Everything is free now” comes out sounding more like cause for celebration, turning the words into a joyous mantra as all hell breaks loose behind him in a glorious cacophony fueled by the reckless abandon of punk.

As Preston Bryan, who plays guitar and keyboards in the group, explains, “If things are disposable, that doesn't mean that nothing is worth having. It means OK, now that everything's worth nothing, what do I really need? ‘Everything is free’ is not the same as ‘Everything is meaningless.’”

AJJ recorded their new album on a pecan ranch outside El Paso, Texas

"Disposable Everything" was primarily recorded at Sonic Ranch, a studio outside El Paso, Texas.

“We wanted to find somewhere to go that was away from our homes so our brains would be more fully focused on recording,” Gallaty said.

What they found turned out to be the ideal setting.

“This guy has a pecan ranch that he inherited through his family and he's built these really cool world-class studios throughout these many acres of pecan trees,” Gallaty said.

“We went one day to go get some stuff from a grocery store but otherwise we were within walking distance of the recording studio. We had access day and night and we weren't going anywhere else. So it was, like, a full immersion into the recording process.”

Now that the album is out, AJJ are back out on the road, reconnecting with fans they haven’t seen since the Before Times with a hometown show in July at Crescent Ballroom with special guest Open Mike Eagle.

“It's exciting to get back out there,” Glick said.

“We've gone on some tours since the world shifted, but this is the first time that we're really like, 'We've got to go everywhere. We've got to hit all the cities.' There’s places we haven't been since 2019 — 2018 even. So we've been missing a lot of people,” Glick said.

AJJ in concert

When: 8 p.m. Wednesday, July 12.

Where: Crescent Ballroom, 308 N. Second Ave., Phoenix.

Admission: $25.

Details: 602-716-2222, crescentphx.com.

Reach the reporter at ed.masley@arizonarepublic.com or 602-444-4495. Follow him on Twitter @EdMasley.

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This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: AJJ's new album 'Disposable Everything': Finding hope after grief