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Ephemeral Wagon is the pop-punk solo project of David Adkins. He’s a guitar shredding robot enthusiast with a heart of gold, and he invited Spud Magazine into his awesome presence this month to talk about what he’s up to.

SPUD: I checked out your stuff on Bandcamp.  Your album is way older than I thought it was going to be. How long has this project been going on?

DAVID ADKINS: Right before I moved here, I knew I was going to move here, so I started writing it and putting it together. It was supposed to be something like Suicide Machines, like really ska-core, and it didn’t really end up like that. My grandparents went out of town for a week and I was quitting my job, so I just spent that whole week recording there. I couldn’t do anything for drums, so it’s all MIDI. I recorded all the parts and put the drums on later because I wasn’t sure what the hell I was going to do for drums. Then we played a show, and I moved here two days later. Now two of those songs are Illicit Nature songs. (I’m Not Alright, City of Stone)

I’m thinking about re-recording it. I just want something with real drums, honestly. The song Lines, that was the first one I knocked out. I didn’t know anything about scratch tracks, so I don’t think there are any scratch tracks on that whole album. I just played the bass line to a metronome, then played the guitar to the metronome on top, and sang, and put the drums on later. I can’t believe that it actually turned out. There are parts where it’s pretty fucked up. There’s one verse on one of the songs and it’s completely off-tempo. It’s just one of those things where I was going through shit and I was depressed, and I was like ‘Dave Grohl made an album by himself, so fuck it, I can too.’

Did you have a band back there?

Well, I think everyone hates each other back there. I had some friends, someone who played bass for me and someone who played drums for me, and we started practicing a week before the show. We did like an hour practice every day that week, then we played. We did Blitzkrieg Bop and then we played through the album. They were like, “Keep playing!” and I said, “I don’t have anymore songs,” so I pulled some covers out of my ass. I asked, “You guys like the Ramones?” and they’re like “Hell yeah!” so I’m like “Well, we only know one Ramones song. You guys want to hear it again! Hell yeah!” It was a fun-ass night. That was my first show ever, it was wild.

That is exciting, doing everything last minute like that.

Yeah. That’s how all my shit gets pulled together. I learned that in art school. There’s a skill to it. There’s a difference between doing something last minute, and half-assing something last minute. I just work better under pressure. “Pressure makes coal or diamond,” or something like that. My manager yelled that at me once. Fuck that guy.

You said you wrote it about your experience in Huntington(W.V.). Can you elaborate on that?

It’s depressing. It’s a really poverty-stricken place, everyone’s moving out of there and all the buildings are coming down and shit. It’s got a high crime rate, and it’s the center of the opioid crisis, too. Huntington had the most OD’s per capita than anywhere else in the US. The restaurant I was working at was right across this McDonalds which was right by the hospital, and someone would OD in the bathroom like, once a month. Part of it was like college, and a bit of existentialism, and it was a time when I was really starting to discover who I am and stuff. Also that was right when Trump got elected too. I wanted to write music but I wasn’t sure what I wanted to write about besides like feelings and ex-girlfriends and shit. I started getting back into punk and once the Trump election happened I was like ‘Oh! I know what to yell about!’ There’s no specific experience really that the whole album’s about, it’s just an amalgam of… it’s a big soup of feelings.

You should visit sometime, it’s fun!

How do you compare working on a solo project to working with a band?

It’s a totally different experience. I go at my own pace, it can be whatever the hell I want it to be. It’s a good space for me to explore… I don’t know how to say it, like dumber ideas? Like, right now I’m writing a bunch of pop-punk shit. It’s an opportunity to do that. Sometimes, it’s like sketching. Maybe I have a bigger idea and I want to work on, it, so the best way is for me to just start writing and if it ends up like “You know, I could just do this on my solo project and just make a demo,” then I can do that. It’s weird, I haven’t really used it as a place of self expression, more just having fun. I just need to do more shit with it and see what happens.

It’s an opportunity for me to do ska!

I can’t wait to get more stuff on Spotify. It’s going to have a better sound quality to it.

Where do you start with these songs? What’s your main instrument?

Usually it starts with a riff on the guitar. Every now and then, I find a vocal melody that I really like and I write to that. The ones with a catchier chorus started with a vocal melody.

City of Stone, I had all the instruments but I wrote the lyrics as I was recording it. I kept blanking on them for some reason. I picked out note for note what the riff was on guitar, and made a song around that. I wanted something that felt a little surfy. Maybe there’s a band and I want to try and like, see how they make their songs and I just try to write a song that sounds like them. That’s what I’m doing on the next album. I have a song that sounds like a complete Blink-182 ripoff.

Correction: As originally published, David Adkins was misspelled as Atkins.