Amherst Mod Fuzz Trio Perennial Rock All Day and All of the Night

Quotes aren’t necessarily displayed in order to ensure a more seamless reading experience.

Perennial rocket out of an electric bath of manic distortion. Drummer Ceej Dioguardi hammers her kit so hard the snare drum might as well be invulnerable. Organist Chelsey Hahn bobs her body like an acid infused go-go dancer, and guitarist Chad Jewett unleashes a torrent of power chords soaked in feedback. 

The “mod fuzz” three piece finished a tour of the United Kingdom in December, and recently embarked on a week long trip to the American West Coast. The band tours without a booking agent or manager, echoing the practice of Fugazi; that post-hardcore group were a major influence on the band’s sound and ethos.

Before the trio played a set in UMass Amherst’s Mahar Auditorium, I got the chance to sit down and pick the brain of the group’s guitarist: Chad Jewett. Together, we discussed the band’s live show, studio approach and future.

What ambitions, if any, do you have to expand your touring?

I mean, it’s every year we’ve spent more and more of that year on the road. … We get home [from tour], I’ll have two to three days where I’m happy to be home and sort of doing nothing and chilling out. Then around day four, I’m like, ah, I really want to be packing up the van and going somewhere and doing this some more. 

It is the thing that I want to do with my time most in the world. And I think we’re all pretty much on the same page with that, where ideally, this is our full-time job. 

Have you noticed a fanbase building up as you’ve been going out on the road?

“It’s happening for sure, yeah. And there are cities or areas in particular. I mean, like Western Mass, Hampshire County has always been so beautiful to us. So that’s home for us, really is. Easthampton, Holyoke. Then we’ve had, D.C., Philadelphia, Portland, the Bay Area. Those have all been really great. So it is wild.

We played Portland, our last West Coast tour, and folks knew the words to the record that had just come out … that is always sort of a mind-blowing thing. It’s still pretty DIY for us. We have our labels that put our stuff out. We have No Earbuds [a PR and music consulting company] that helps us with press and stuff, and that’s it, you know? We don’t have a manager, we don’t have a booking agent. So it is wild, we’re starting to experience this thing where folks know our know our records and are psyched to see our band in places we’ve never been before”

What are the challenges to keeping the live act as balls to the wall as possible?

“There’s the occasional physical challenge to it. In Leeds … I had climbed up on a chair, jumped off of it, and the chair went as I was jumping, and so I just straight up hit the ground and dislocated my shoulder. But luckily, it was in England where there was free healthcare and you just walk into an emergency room and they take care of you and I got x-rayed, … managed to pop it back in. So like, I spend the rest of the tour very sore, but was able to play the show. 

So, we have our share of, busted knuckles or turned ankles or whatever, but we’ve managed to get through it. Other than that, we just, we never want to have the rest of the night be a disappointment to ourselves … I never want to walk off the stage thinking I could have pushed myself.”

What are the most important things to you as a band, outside of your live show?

“We care a lot about making records that five, 10, 15 years from now, we’re going to be happy with. Our process in the studio is pretty exhaustive, and it’s just for that reason, I really don’t want there to be things that I wish I had spent more time on or, you want to make sure that each record is building on what we did before … We never want to rest on any given approach when we’re recording any given album.

We want to make sure that everyone feels appreciated when they come to our shows and that if they want to talk to Chelsey or Ceej or I, that they feel like we gave them our time. … Nothing sucks more than going to see a band you’re excited about, and you want to talk to someone in the band, and they’re dismissive or whatever. I don’t think it happens that often, and folks have their reasons, you know, someone can just be having a bad day. Tours are exhausting, et cetera, but we always remind ourselves basically, ‘how would I feel?’”

Have you ever worried about maintaining a one-on-one interaction with fans if the band was to get bigger?

“We would just find the time, I think. You know, it certainly gets more complicated, or just sort of harder to figure it out … If you ever go to see a band that’s playing like a larger venue or something, or a band you would think of as famous or in that realm and after the set, they’re at their own merch table, you know? It’s like, “oh, cool!” They could just as easily get chilling in the green room, but they made a point to be available after the show to talk to people and thank them and make them feel appreciated for coming to the show.

I’ve seen it with truly huge bands. It’s like, if they can do it, so can we, no matter where we go to. That’s, again, we’re always sort of asking ourselves, ‘what would I want to see if I was going to see a band?’ Or, ‘how would I want a band to interact with me if I were to walk up and want to have a conversation with them because I love their art?’ … If someday it’s 100 people that want to talk to us, we figure out a way to talk to 100 people”

Before Ceej Dioguardi became Perennial’s drummer, you worked with Wil Mulhern on the kit. What was the transition like between drummers?

“It was honestly pretty seamless.
I mean, Ceej is such an incredibly brilliant drummer who also understood what Perennial does, what Perennial is besides just knowing the songs, you know? Ceej also immediately grasped that there’s something very specific about what we do on stage and the energy that we want to do. So, we were so thrilled and happy to have Ceej join. 

Wil had been in the band for almost a decade when he left, and it was just simply a matter of, he’s starting a family and the increasing tempo of what we were doing. Just becoming tough, basically. And Wil still subs in from time to time if Ceej isn’t available, but you know, that just worked better for Wil. Be the person coming off the bench as needed.

So, it was sad to see Wil sort of take that step back just because we love Wil, but it was equally sort of thrilling to have Ceej and become a player, and have her be on the team”

You have so many different influences, how much of a problem is it when things clash?

“It’s so funny because every once in a while, this comes up as a question, and I just never worry about it.
My belief is, if we call it Perennial, then it’s Perennial. Particularly because the two bands that I was truly obsessed with when I was getting into music in middle school were the Beatles and the Clash. And those are both two examples of bands that just had zero qualms about, ‘Well, today we’re going to do a reggae song
and tomorrow we’re going to do a disco song. And this one’s going to be sort of this power pop thing, and this other thing is going to be this weird experimental tape loop thing.’

And it works because of the energy of the folks making it. And even if it, even if it’s  shooting off in all these different directions, that’s a good thing. That means that there’s still, there’s that energy of creation or trying new stuff out. … We like it to fit together like a collage and we pay attention to dynamics and peaks and valleys and stuff like that, but yeah, I don’t think we’ve ever really worried about, like, ‘Is this Perennial?’ because, if it’s coming from us, it’s Perennial, basically.”

You’ve previously mentioned that being as creative as possible in the studio is a goal of yours. What does that look like?

“So a big part of it is, we go into the studio, we lay down the skeletons of what we’re doing. So drums, main guitar riffs, vocals, organ, and then we leave as much space as possible. And the way it’s worked with the last few records that we worked with Chris Teti on, is, Chris is a very deliberate mixer, so he’ll usually take a little while to get us first mixes. 

And in the meantime, we have these rough recordings from those studio sessions. And I, and Chelsey, we can sort of sit with our home studio and add all sorts of stuff, subtract stuff … If nine times out of 10, the part would normally have an electric guitar, let’s try it with a mellotron, or let’s try it with electric piano, or just tambourine and vocals. Just end up seeing what works.”

For your live show, how did you select your gear?

“One thing that sort of really matters to me as a guitar player, is, I always want to make sure that I’m not sacrificing the energy for technical stuff. So my pedal setup is really, really simple. It’s a tuner pedal, a delay pedal—if I end up deciding I want to make a bunch of noise, it creates looping echoes and reverb and stuff like that—and then a wah pedal. And that’s the entirety of it. … The live approach is almost the opposite of the studio approach, and that’s… we like to keep things very minimalized, so that all of our attention can be energy and movements and motion, and we’re not thinking about. ‘Oh, I have to activate this distortion for this moment and then we’ll have to turn it off.’ I’d rather have a sort of one less spinning plate and be able to jump around.

Does that urgency influence the guitars you choose?

“Kinda.
It’s funny. I do a lot of like, quiet-loud stuff. And so I always have favorite guitars that have a two-pickup selector switch so that I can turn the pickup off and just literally flip the switch and mute my guitar. So that is sort of foundational.”

You’ve previously said that you’ve wanted to be in a band that will last 30 years. 10 years into Perennial’s run, how do you see that dream coming true?

“I haven’t changed my mind even a little bit about that. And it’s because we’re so… so focused on doing the exact thing that we want to do. Writing the songs that make us excited. We do all of our own, all of our own flyers, merch, album covers, we largely, almost exclusively book our own tours and all that stuff. So because we’ve had such a direct relationship to all parts of it, we’ve been able to let it evolve in whatever ways it needs to. So it’s never become something that’s become in bad faithfulness. It’s just again, it’s what I do, not just in terms of the art I make or my job. It’s the thing that I’m defaulting to at any given time. If I’m just sitting around listening to a record, I probably start thinking about whatever Perennial thing I’m working on.”