A couple of years ago, sometime in March, Minneapolis punk band Supportive Parents got on a party bus with a simple plan: head to a bar more than an hour north of Minneapolis. They gave the driver the bar’s name, nobody checked the address, and apparently nobody paid much attention to what was happening outside either.
Nearly an hour later, the bus stopped at a completely different place with exactly the same name.
They could have called it there. They didn’t. The bus carried on towards the place they had actually meant to visit, with one of the worst blizzards of the year going on outside. More than six hours after leaving, and several beers further into the evening than planned, they finally reached the right bar and made it home at around 2 am.
That trip became “Party Bus From Hell”, a three-song concept EP released on July 24.
Almost everything in those songs actually happened.ย There is one small exception. Part III includes the line: “And soundtrack to our doom, some fucking song by Chappel Roan, but at least I won’t be going out alone.”
Chappell Roan had not yet become big enough for that detail to make chronological sense. Supportive Parents decided the fictional addition was minor enough to keep.
The EP was supposed to be one song. Singer Matt Webster started writing about the night, reached the chorus of what eventually became Part I and realised he had a problem.
“Oh shit, I’m only a third of the way through this goddamn story.”
They considered stretching the first song out, but what they already had sounded right. Matt still spent a couple of weeks messing with the structure, trying to squeeze the rest of the trip into one track.
Eventually he took the problem to fellow Minneapolis musician Jordan Carr.
Jordan’s answer was simple: make three songs.ย “All the good stories are trilogies.”
Matt brought that back to Supportive Parents and everyone was into it. It also suited the story almost too well. The night itself had started with “let’s go to a bar” and turned into a six-hour mess. Their attempt to write one song about it got out of hand in pretty much the same way.
“What started as writing one song turned into this monstrosity,” the band said.
The band are Matt Webster on vocals, Brian Follick on lead guitar, John “Boomer” McCully on rhythm guitar, Aaron Schulke on bass and Lee Cerier on drums. Lee also did the artwork.
Supportive Parents always write their stuff before Matt adds lyrics and vocal melodies. Once they knew this was going to be three parts, they could shape each one around where the bus was in the story.
Most of Part I was already there. For Part II, they wanted things to get more anxious and messy, matching the middle of the trip. Part III needed to sound more accepting at first, then move towards the sense that they were finally getting out of the whole situation. They wrote Parts II and III with that in mind, then Matt finished the lyrics and tied the story together.
The three songs do not all behave the same way, which is part of what keeps the whole seven minutes moving. Supportive Parents have never been interested in sticking to one fixed sound, and Kid Dynamite, Every Time I Die and No Trigger are all somewhere in the mix. They were not sitting around assigning one influence to each part. Those things just came out while they were writing.
Part II gets twitchier and more unruly, while Part III starts to ease off before pulling the story out of the disaster. Even with only seven minutes to play with, the band wanted enough turns in there to give a first-time listener a couple of “what, what the hell” moments.
Their own explanation is less serious.
“It turns out when nearly everyone in your band has some level of ADD, you can write some pretty fucked up music.”
Once they had the three-song setup, Matt came up with another idea. He had been reading gothic prose and started thinking about spoken narration, with Vincent Price’s part in Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” as the obvious reference.
For the voice, Supportive Parents went to Billy Morrisette of Dillinger Four.
“Billy is made to do voices,” Matt said.
Morrisette’s narration opens Part I. On tracking day they lit candles, set the mood and basically let Billy keep going bigger. They recorded a pile of takes, then built the finished narration from the bits that worked best.
One of the throwaway takes ended up giving them something else.
At some point during recording, Billy laughed and said, “fuck supportive parents.”
The EP was already 99.9 per cent done when they went back through some of the unused takes and heard it again. The laugh also fit the Vincent Price idea, especially the famous laugh at the end of “Thriller”, so they stuck it onto the end of “The Full Trip”, the version that runs the whole story together. Then they dragged it out with what Lee calls some “intentionally questionable looping”.
“We thought it was funny, at least.”
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They recorded at Treespeak Studios with Andy Mattheson, who produced the EP with Supportive Parents and handled the engineering, mixing and mastering too.
They did not record the three parts as one giant live run. Instruments and songs were tracked one at a time, then Andy and the band worked out the transitions afterwards so each part could stand on its own without the full version sounding chopped up.
“We cannot say enough good things about Andy. He got the concept right away, always entertained our often insane ideas, and knew how the songs needed to sound.”
At first, Supportive Parents thought these three tracks might sit on a bigger release with other songs. Once they heard the whole thing together, that idea stopped making much sense. The bus story had become its own little record, so they left it that way.
You can still play the three parts separately, but “The Full Trip” is there for anyone who wants the whole stupid journey in one go. It also means the last thing you hear after everybody finally gets home is Billy Morrisette laughing and swearing at the band.
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There is something almost cheerful running through parts of the EP, even though the story is about getting lost in a blizzard, imagining your own death and spending far too long inside a party bus. The melodies can stay bright while everything around them gets more agitated, and with only seven minutes on the clock the band keep switching things up before any one idea hangs around too long.
For all the work that eventually went into turning the night into a three-part story, the reason this EP exists is still stupidly simple: five people gave a driver the name of a bar and forgot to check which one.
They did get there in the end.
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