Interview with Tim Singer (Deadguy, Kiss It Goodbye, No Escape, Bitter Branches)

A lifetime of creative endeavors that asks the question, 'what's the price of me these days?'

To say I’ve long been interested in Tim Singer’s musical and artistic output would be a massive understatement. He’s the voice (and visual spearhead) behind one of my favorite records of all time, and made some other records that are way up on my favorites list too. To this day, “Fixation On a Co-Worker” by Deadguy is bar none the most pissed off record I’ve ever heard. He has a way of expressing base, primal frustration in a way that cuts to the core of people and he’s well aware of it too. But underneath there is a rather even-keeled middle-aged guy with a good family life, stability, and a way of being approachable to making art and music that balances saying ‘yes’ to whatever comes his way with what he feels he is able to bring to the table and being quite practical about it too. All this for a guy who not only screamed at listeners, “I’m not buying what you’re selling to me” but also “What’s the price of me these days?” I was overjoyed to finally have the chance to chat with Tim Singer back in March when Kiss It Goodbye played a reunion benefit in Tacoma about the ebbs and flows of his creative path over the years, as well as new things on the horizon.

There’s a bit of a parallel between your experience of going from doing zines and doing bands and mine. I had been doing a zine for a long time and was invited to join a band from there, which turned out to be a good fit. You were doing Boiling Point zine and then joined No Escape. Had you ever done a band before that, or had any intention to?

No. I think back then a lot of us went to shows all the time. And if you didn’t play in a band you probably fantasized about it! (laughs) You never know if it’s going to be real or not. So in my mind I thought it was going to happen at some point but I wasn’t doing anything super active to make it happen. Back then new bands would form and collapse all the time. It was just musical chairs. So one of these times, I thought, I’m going to front a band. It’s just going to happen.

I’d say right from the get-go No Escape sounded fully formed though.

Yeah. We practiced a lot. I met Steve (Crudello, guitarist) when Turning Point played CBGBs and I lived in Greenpoint, Brooklyn at the time. Steve and I talked that day and we sort of daydreamed about starting a band that sounded like Youth Of Today meets Absolution or something. We were sort of thinking, ‘what do you do next?’ The youth crew thing had sort of been done and we thought about where to take this stuff next. So we just sort of daydreamed about that.

Then, when I left New York I moved in with him down in Ocean City. He came home one day with a bunch of songs already done because he had started a band that was practicing and the first guy that was supposed to sing for it would never sing at practice. He’d just walk up to the mic and not sing. So Steve came home that day and mentioned how we had talked about doing this band and I learned two songs just hanging out in his bedroom. We just went through them. He had lyrics, I had lyrics, and I’d just practice them over and over to a practice tape he had. So at the first practice I was already singing two songs fully, not even really knowing what I sounded like. I was nervous going to that first practice, but I just went for it. And then we recorded “Silenced” in the studio, still not totally knowing what I sounded like, and that gave us a boost. All of a sudden we recorded for real, and it was going to be on this comp (the “Rebuilding” comp) with these other great bands.

And since we already knew everybody we played our first show and it was at the Anthrax with Burn and Quicksand.

Not bad.

(laughs) Not bad, right?! I think we might have already had demos at that show too. So we really hit the ground running.

With Kiss It Goodbye, Tacoma, March 2025

Maybe it came as a surprise to you as well, but most vocalists start out sounding a bit different, or they’re just getting their bearings, but from even the early No Escape stuff you sound like you, like not too much different that you do today. Obviously, your style changed a bit with more talking in the songs, but it sounds almost the same. The energy in your voice remains consistent.

I try. I also try, first of all, to remember my lane. I stick with what I’m good at and what got me here. So I try to remember that kid in his room listening to punk and it giving him some solace because there’s other people freaking out about shit. So I never wanted to lose sight of that. It’s always been an ‘us against all those other guys’. Fuck everything that is spoon-fed to you that you didn’t choose. Right? Going to CBGBs, listening to punk records, that’s what we chose. We were all handed one thing and we rejected it. So I try not to forget that, and that’s an easy feeling to tap into to this day.

It seems like, and correct me if I’m wrong, but you don’t seem to have been the guy who sets out to do bands. You’re the guy whose invited to join a band.

I’ve definitely been lucky in that regard.

Because after No Escape there’s this pause, and then ‘I was asked if I wanted to join this band Deadguy’.

Yeah! I was walking around New Brunswick and Dave (Rosenberg, drummer) saw me- I was walking one way and him the other way- and he yells out, ‘hey! I’m in this band Lifetime, come hang out!’ He was in Lifetime for like five minutes, but Crispy (Chris Corvino, Deadguy guitarist) was also in Lifetime at the time, and we just hit it off. We talked about doing something because I was done with No Escape. So I always sort of just Forest Gump my way into that stuff. I say yes to everything, I’ll try anything. I put myself out there. I’m very, sort of, available.

I could have tried to form a supergroup or something after No Escape, but I liked what Dave and Crispy were all about in terms of what they wanted to do, and the shit they were listening to, and play what we wanted to hear, and fuck everybody else. So I guess I sort of contributed to that attitude. Now I just have a reputation so if people find out that I’m on the shelf they call me (laughs).

(laughs) Right! So once No Escape was done were you actively searching for another band to do?

No. I thought I might be done with bands. I was going to college, studying graphic design. I was actually working on new zines. I actually have layouts and interviews with Burn and Quicksand that I never published. It’s all laid out with record reviews and stuff, I just never printed it. So I’ve always done something. I also had a girlfriend, who is now my wife, we’ve been together since before I did any band. I wasn’t like some uber-scenester just hanging out at shows trying to find my next band. That’s not how I worked.

Things just kind of came your way.

Yeah. But once I would get in a band we would work hard. When we started Deadguy, with no promise of anything, we worked our asses off. So I think that’s a big part of it too. When No Escape got going we were like, ‘we’re playing shows.’ We played California by the end of the year that the demo came out. We were playing Spanky’s with Statue and all these other great bands out in California by, like, show five. We were always willing to do shit and not be that band stuck in the basement. We were very determined not to be the greatest thing that ever happened just hanging out in the basement ya know? There’s a lot of quote-unquote great bands that just hang out in their basement talking about how great they are. You got to be willing to go out there and just suck.

It seems like maybe from Deadguy to Kiss It Goodbye was the only intentional move into a new band right?

Yup. But that was all Huckins (Keith, guitarist of Deadguy and Kiss It Goodbye). I didn’t necessarily want to quit, I just knew that I was moving to Seattle. I figured we could just be a touring band and practice whenever. It’s a dumb idea, but I sort of wanted to have my cake and eat it too. I knew that wasn’t going to fly though. So I think Keith already had this plan- ‘Tim’s breaking up Deadguy, I’m going to call Tom (Rusnack, bassist) and Andrew (Gormley, drummer) and get Rorschach back together with Tim singing’. So that was all Keith. Tom was living in Germany and Keith convinced him to move back. He was like, ‘trust me, this will be worth it.’

So the premise was we were all moving to Seattle when I moved to Seattle. It was kind of crazy. We did start in New York, but within a few months we all moved to Seattle, that was the plan. We practiced like crazy, we did a demo, played a bunch of New York shows. Rich Hall actually did a lot of that. So, again, we just wanted to hit the ground running. We were sort of in the zone too from Deadguy in terms of practice habits, songwriting habits, all that kind of stuff.

When Kiss It Goodbye was over there was, how do you say, a gap in your resume. There’s a pretty long time where you weren’t doing any bands. Did you definitely feel done at that point, or did other stuff come up?

At that point I thought I was probably done. Back then I was probably 30 or 31 when Kiss It Goodbye broke up. It wasn’t my livelihood. And at that time there was this idea that hardcore bands weren’t something you did into your 30s or 40s. Back then it didn’t seem like a thing.

With Kiss It Goodbye, Tacoma, March 2025

Right! At that time if you were 35 or something you were the really old guy at the show. But now there’s so much history it’s not uncommon for people in their 40’s or 50’s to be at shows.

I remember back then Eminem saying something to Moby like, ‘shut up, you’re old, you’re 30’. So yeah, at that point I thought I was probably done. I thought it would be cool if someone were to ask me to do a guest vocal or something, the way Rollins is on a Tool record or whatever. Maybe people like me in that regard and I’ll do some fun thing and I’ll always say yes if I like the band.

But I started a family. My daughter is now 23 years old. My twins are 21. And I had already been with my wife at that point for a dozen years. We started out together in ’87, so we pre-date any band I was ever in. So I figured I could always focus on my not-sucky personal life with my then-girlfriend, and now-wife. So I had my kids and when that happens you’re definitely not thinking, ‘I should start a band!’ because I’m trying to keep up with this kid shit.

So I don’t think I was back on a stage until Rorschach did a reunion and pulled me up on stage in Philly to do a Black Flag cover. By then my kids were upright and standing and they all went to the show.

It seems that maybe just within the last ten years you’re back doing all sorts of different projects, and guest stuff, and reunion shows. So was that a situation of where now you had time, or was it more kismet?

It was more kismet. Process Black was a project I did with Aaron Edge where he wrote all the music and it came out on Deathwish. There was this drummer Brock, who I never met, who played on it. They sent me this music that was already done, and I really liked it. But it took me forever just to do three songs and I give it a ‘B’. It’s not my ‘A’ work because I wasn’t really in the band. They weren’t really writing the songs for me, or around what I was trying to do. The song files got flattened so I couldn’t mess around with it, or double parts. There was none of that. But it did get me practiced a bit again. And then I did some guest vocals on a KEN Mode thing and Every Time I Die asked me to do a guest vocal, and on all that I feel like I did my ‘B’ work because I wasn’t in a living, breathing band that kept me in shape.

Then I ended up in Bitter Branches. Those guys were all jamming locally in Philly and were looking for a singer, and it just so happened my daughter was doing face-painting at a birthday party for their teacher’s kids. So my kids are in high school and were there as sort of the cool kids who were friends with the teacher. So Jeff Terrabassi’s (Bitter Branches drummer) kid is at that party somehow, and Jeff realized who Stella was, my daughter, and cornered her. I was over at the Alone In a Crowd reunion show at the Church in Philly getting texts from Jeff and Stella that they met at this birthday party.

This is how hardcore bands form now- through their kids! “Tell your dad I want to do a band with him!”

(laughs) That’s what it is. So I met him for coffee and he pitched it to me and it first I said no because I thought I’d just disappoint him. I didn’t know if I had a whole band in me anymore. But I showed up to practice and it was chill in that they weren’t putting a lot of pressure on being super active. We made a record right during covid times, which was pretty timely.

During this time I got a call from Dave (Deadguy), or the director about this documentary, the Deadguy documentary. And I guess that was sort of kismet, and I just said ‘yes’ because that’s what I do and I couldn’t even remember why I was mad at those guys in the first place.

So can you talk about new Deadguy stuff? There is new Deadguy stuff right?

Yeah. And you just have to read the tea leaves of the world because Relapse is releasing it, they will announce it. It’s 11 new songs, it’s heavy as fuck. We’re really happy with it, Relapse is too. I think it comes out at the end of June and there might be a single before that too. There’s the whole machinery of it all, Relapse is very professional. We get on Zoom calls with them and I figure we’re in good hands.

And they’re kind of local to you as well.

That too! I love that. Decibel (magazine) too. I’m in Philly so it’s local to me. It’s this great support system that’s right near me.So all this stuff is in my backyard.

So given the passage of time and age compared to when you were doing “Fixation On a Co-Worker”, or “She Loves Me, She Loves Me Not” and all the anger and frustration that is so apparent on those records do you find it hard to come back to that making new music with a band like Deadguy where the expectation is going to be very high? Or do you find yourself getting into other subjects, or emotions instead?

It’s not difficult. It’s not difficult thematically. The process of writing lyrics I have to re-learn. I’ve never stopped being the same frustrated, what-the-fuck-is-wrong-with-eight-out-of-ten-people sort of person. That hasn’t gone away. And I don’t have the answers. I’m just good at, I think, sharing these thoughts that a lot of people keep in their head. My gift in life is that I have that primal scream that a lot of people don’t have and I think I can deliver it with a good lyric. I do think about a lot of these things and try to find what’s universal about these thoughts I’m having, and I’m convinced I’m not the only one.

So that mindset hasn’t changed, and has only amplified if nothing else. Because now all these platforms where people are showing you their perfect lives are magnified. And the flip side of that coin is that there is way more desperation where people think, ‘what the fuck is wrong with me? Why is everyone else so perfect?’ Just like the wealth inequality, everything is stretched out. What we were frustrated about is like this rubber band and it’s stretched so far it’s going to break. I feel like that’s where we’re at. So that’s easy to tap into.

But it is a challenge because every song is a blank slate and I’m like, ‘I need 11 ideas, or 11 thoughts that I won’t mind expressing for perpetuity’. What are these things that I want to say that I feel might resonate?

And what do you want to say that will stick around for awhile or not be forgotten the next week, right?

Yeah. The opening song on the new Deadguy is called “Kill Fee” and I wrote it literally the day after the election. It’s a business term. It’s basically about how this world is telling you ‘fuck you for being who you are’. If you’re not of this very narrow definition of what’s acceptable this country just said, ‘fuck you’. If you’re trans, gay, whatever, whatever people will literally hate you just because you breathe.

And that’s not too far afield of original ideas of punk and hardcore, expressing frustration around things like ‘hey you got a mohawk? Fuck you, we’re going to stomp you out for looking different’.

It’s people minding their own fucking business that’s driving me crazy. You don’t walk through a mall in the 80’s with a mohawk and not expect a reaction. You’re minding your own business and the world still wants to fuck with you. That’s where we’re at. You just can’t even mind your own fucking business. People are just in your business. So it’s easy to tap into that because it’s just gotten even worse.

I think I’d be remiss if I didn’t ask a bit about your design work. It’s always cool when a band has a design person in the group because then the identity of the band can be expressed a little more directly. You get the essence.

There’s no middle man.

Right. But you do a lot of product design as well so do you find some difficulty in toggling between the artwork you do for band-related stuff, which can be bizarre, or maybe deeply unsettling, versus just making labels for a kombucha beverage or something?

Not really. For me every design gig has it’s own questions to answer and if I’m doing client work and it’s vegan cheese and they need it to pop on the shelf that’s it’s own design challenge. For me doing band stuff for myself it’s more like me making my own content so I don’t really answer to anybody. I barely answer to the band. No one else is doing it, these are my words.

To me it’s all just design. It’s me playing with type and imagery. It can be a bit more challenging to do the band stuff because I put more into it and it’s all coming from me. Whereas a client they have a reason for doing it, and yadda, yadda. The hardest thing is designing stuff for other bands because I’m already in a band and I have an approach. But I don’t have to think about it. It’s my lyrics, it’s our vibe. I know how to evolve it. I’ve been doing Deadguy stuff since the 90’s, it’s second-hand. But when you work for another band you have to understand where they’re coming from, their lyrics, and that can be more challenging because they’re also looking for Tim Singer, the guy who does Deadguy stuff. My regular clients aren’t looking for that. I have design chops that are more standard, I guess you could say.

So if a band comes to me I have to really like them, or know the people in it. I have to get it. So that’s just tough for me. I could do Rev(elation Records) stuff until the cows come home because I was there since day one. They know I get it in a way that other people don’t.

I can see that as well with your artwork for your bands where it’s distinct and different but there’s a characteristic, or style, I recognize that’s your thing. The No Escape records look very different than Deadguy but your design identity is there.

The No Escape thing, that’s just who we were. It’s different guys. No Escape was kind of a reaction to youth crew. We could write mosh parts that kids want to hear, but we wanted to do our own thing. I wasn’t going to put some photo of us jumping in some hero-shot pose. So the “Just Accept It” cover is a live shot, but it’s kind of artier, and I’m unrecognizable in it. It’s grainy and dirty. Deadguy was irreverent. We were just saying fuck you to everything. To me it just made sense to do design work that felt like that. We put a live shot in the record and you can’t even see any one of us.

It was just your feet.

Right! There you go, there’s your live shot.

My attempt at re-creating the “Fixation…” live shot, March 2025

I always thought that photo was cool because it’s also mysterious, like ‘who are these guys?’ I couldn’t just get on the internet and find out. You just have to listen and imagine you’re lunatics.

To me it’s a bit of a call back. I grew up on Dead Kennedys art so I wanted to do my version of that. That’s the shit I got into. I bought “In God We Trust Incorporated” based on just the cover art. It’s like art history. You’re always pulling something from the past and it might not be obvious to the end-user, the person receiving it. They might have to do some research to find out where it all came from. It’s like if you like Jesus Lizard or Laughing Hyenas you may eventually discover The Birthday Party. That kind of connection, like, ‘oh, that’s the source material, I get it!’

I like the idea that a lot of art and music is people trying to imitate their influences and doing it wrong and something new comes out of that instead.

I learned that in art history, when I learned that all this Japanese art was influencing Van Gogh, whatever it is, it’s all kind of cool. It’s definitely more interesting than something like, ‘Judge is really good, let’s write some Judge songs’. But I’m like, ‘Judge already exists, we don’t need another Judge.’ It was the same when everyone wanted to be Quicksand. Quicksand’s good, but we already have one! Do your own fucking thing.