Everything, Now! Never Left
The beloved Indiana pop rock auteurs just stopped talking to the rest of us for a decade.
Everything, Now! has always felt like a sort of secret handshake among friends—and one of my biggest post-pandemic joys has been the re-emergence of this band I wasn’t sure I’d ever hear again. They returned to the stage in June 2022 for the first show since long before the pandemic, kicking off a flawless set with a cover of Neil Young’s “Walk On.”
I’ve indoctrinated my three-year-old into the club. And I’m proud to report he loves the new record: Hideout Mountain, Everything, Now!’s first studio album since Do It On The Moon in late 2011. When I decided to finally launch this newsletter after more than a year of thinking about it, I knew this would be the first project I wrote about. It felt serendipitous that a band who hadn’t been relevant since the last time I was writing about music was releasing something new for the first time in nearly 13 years.
And—lucky you—they’re playing live again. On Saturday, June 22, Everything, Now! will celebrate the release of Hideout Mountain with a show at State Street Pub alongside local heroes, Oreo Jones, Sedcairn Archives, and Mike Adams at His Honest Weight.
Hideout Mountain is the band’s seventh studio album—and Tyler Watkins, co-founder of Postal Recording, has had a hand in every one of them. “I had a little basement dive of a studio, and this kid upstairs was like, ‘Hey, can you help me get my songs off this digital eight-track recorder onto a CD?’” Watkins said. “So I went up to his apartment and he played back Sunshine of Doom shit, and I was like, ‘Yeah. I’m going to stop everything I’m doing and we’re gonna work on this.’”
Thus began the creative partnership between Watkins and Everything, Now! frontman Jon Rogers.
“I know working with Everything, Now! we’re always going to have fun in the studio,” Watkins said. “It’s creatively inspiring. They’re always going to push the boundaries of what they’re putting on their songs and take well-written songs and make them weird. It’s fun. That’s why we do it. I think that’s why they do it.”
Self-imposed Exile
Rogers was still making music, but he didn’t appear interested in communicating with an audience. He released instrumental music under an alter ego named Golden Moses. During the pandemic, he put out three-and-a-half hour DJ mixes via a YouTube channel he called Hidin Music, exploring deep house, electronic pop, and dance music.
That Neil Young cover and the set that followed felt cathartic, like he was shedding whatever emotional baggage he was carrying over the last few years. “There was a period when I was like, I don’t want to be in a band,” Rogers said. “I think it was an important lesson for me. Nothing is permanent. Sometimes that drive might go away, but then it might come back. You can’t count on it; it’s almost like a negative space. When I’m doing Golden Moses, I try to make sure none of the decisions are the same as what I would do if I was working with the band.”
While Rogers and his Everything, Now! bandmates may not have been writing the pop rock songs that garnered them a small, dedicated Indiana fanbase 15 years earlier, they were still making music together. They recorded what Rogers says is more than 50 cassettes as an experimental, noise trash project called Miami Mice in his garage on the northeast side of Indianapolis. None of this material has seen daylight.
“We were doing that every week, for years, and it felt good,” he said. “You have to shift gears sometimes, and I think there was some growth there—to just be musicians and have fun and not have anybody hear it. Now, we feel more together.”
“It was super liberating to do that,” said Everything, Now! lead guitarist Allen Bannister. “After years of playing songs with very specific parts, I could just react to what other people were doing and see what these guys could add to it. It was an awesome way for us to just mind-meld.”
“Obviously, Jon has the vision for what the band is and what the songs are like. But for me, the reason I stay so long is to be able to be creative and collaborative with the same people. We still have very similar tastes and agree on things. It just feels rare.”
We wanted to see each other again
“I just think after the pandemic I was really emotional,” Rogers said. “We just wanted to hang out. We wanted to see each other again.”
“It’s definitely a band vibe, now,” Watkins said. “It’s a lot different than it used to be in that regard. They make creative decisions together, and good ones, at that. Jon has a vision in his head. They’re his songs at the core, and they all respect that. I think the band members are as big of fans of the band as I am.”
When I crashed band practice in Rogers’s barn/garage, the band admitted they were in the midst of relearning much of the Hideout Mountain material. That’s because they’ve been working on newer stuff during their Wednesday jam sessions. They claim to have another album’s worth of material developed and ready to record.
“I think what we’re trying to do now with the new songs is get the basics for a live setup–five people with five parts,” Rogers said. “Then in the studio, we’re more free to just add shit.”
At this age and their level of experience Everything, Now! appears to have limited ambitions for the project at this point.
“Sell enough records to make another record,” said multi-instrumentalist Drew Deboy, besides Rogers the longest-tenured member of the band.
“I think that was one of our biggest goals when we started writing or putting Hideout Mountain together and working on new songs–we really wanted to record with Tyler at Postal,” Rogers said. “That was just a big goal. And now it’s like I don’t think I want to do it anywhere else.”
Recommended Reading:
An Incomplete History of Everything, Now! by Justin K. Prim
Everything, Now! to celebrate release of first album in 13 years by Seth Johnson via NUVO
Five songs to help get you get moving in the morning by Jon Rogers via WFYI