Song Highlight: Armchair Martian - You Deserve This

 

When I consider the songs that had a profound impact on my life, and ones that made me a music enthusiast, the music of Armchair Martian sits towards the top of the list. It was 2007 and I was midway through college. A friend of mine was introducing me to the world of punk rock outside of The Clash and The Ramones. In particular, he showed me Bad Astronaut’s cover of the seminal NOFX song, "Linoleum". Bad Astronaut was the side project of Joey Cape, the singer of the California skate punk band Lagwagon. Cape wanted an avenue to be more exploratory with the music he was writing, and work beyond the confines of the punk that Lagwagon was playing (the members of Lagwagon would balk at the notion of incorporating a keyboard into a song). Bad Astronaut’s version of Linoleum is less abrasive, and slower, focused more around Cape’s great voice, and mounts to an explosive second half. I loved it and I was immediately looking for more of Bad Astronaut's music, which brought me to War of the Worlds, a split album between Bad Astronaut and Armchair Martian, where each band played the other's songs. 

Drag The River – Garage Rock (2009)

Growing up, I basically wrote off country music as a genre that I would never enjoy. While I had not realized it at the time, most of the country music I had heard was just pop music meagerly disguised with acoustic guitars. It was not until my later years in college that I learned that there was a whole other side to country music, quite unlike what I grew up hearing on the radio. One of the first bands to help me realize this was Armchair Martian, a relatively unknown punk rock band from Ft. Collins, Colorado. While they were not a country band, the band’s vocalist, Jon Snodgrass, had a noticeable country twang to his voice, which was something I was not accustomed to hearing in rock music. I quickly fell in love with the band, and eagerly acquired all of their releases.  Throughout Armchair Martian’s career, they slowly began to adopt more of a country flare. In fact, once they called it a day, Jon Snodgrass went on to form a country rock band called Drag the River with Chad Price of the punk band ALL.