#112: Weakened Friends: 'It’s too late now. We’re keeping it. It’s who we are'
Talking bad names and guitar shredding with the Portland, Maine, trio.
Band names don’t promise personality.
Just because a group has a funny name doesn’t mean they have anything to say. This is one of the few universal truths uncovered over Band Name Bureau’s 112 issues.
Almost exactly 100 issues ago, we met Weakened Friends, the trio of married couple Sonia Sturino (guitar, vocals) and Annie Hoffman (bass, production), along with Adam Hand (drums) that formed in Maine a decade ago. That they had personality beyond their play-on-words moniker was immediately obvious. There was a series of amusing tweets about their in-progress album (“There’s vocoder on our new record and I hope everyone fucking hates it”), a playful Patreon called the Friend Zone, and, most important, music that paired bracing candor with hooky guitar rock. Their sound forcefully nods to the punkier end of ’90s alt-rock, especially the Chicago scene that bred Veruca Salt, Liz Phair, and Fig Dish.
So it’s fitting to post this interview with Weakened Friends just before the Chicago stop of their current tour supporting the excellent new Feels Like Hell. (I’m particularly fond of the stretch from “NPC”—which features a WTF cameo by guitar maestro Buckethead—to my favorite song, “Not for Nothing.”)
Sonia and Annie spoke with Band Name Bureau shortly after the tour started.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity blah blah blah.
Band Name Bureau: How did you end up choosing Weakened Friends?
Sonia Sturino: Oh my God, I hate it, first and foremost. I chose it. It’s my fault. I did it. It’s, like, the world’s worst band name. I mean, I don’t know if it’s the world’s worst band name, but it’s—
Annie Hoffman: It’s a mouthful. It’s hard to spell. It’s hard to find, because people hear it, and then they type a different word. It’s been a curse.
SS: Yeah, it’s been a little bit of a curse for our band, but it is our name, and I guess—in a masochistic way—I just had to choose the band name that kind of sucks to have. It’s too late now. We’re keeping it. It’s who we are.
AH: When you sent it to the group text, like, “What about this name?” It was before we were together or had admitted that we liked each other, and I just had the biggest crush on you. I didn’t want to say, “I don’t know about this one.”
SS: I really wish you would’ve been like, “Nah.”
AH: But it was a side project! We didn’t even realize we’d be here, three albums deep.
SS: I really had no intention of pursuing this band as an actual career.
AH: They were like, “Maybe we’ll play some shows. Maybe we’ll record an EP.”
SS: Well, here we are.
AH: Apologies from the past.
SS: It’s funny because I’m dyslexic, and I have a really hard time spelling everything. Spelling’s not my forte. It’s like I’ve turned it around on the world and I’ve been like, “Well, you try to spell this word!”
BNB: That’s the curse of having a play on words as a name, right? Were any other names in contention?
SS: I don’t know. I’m bad at naming things. I mean, I like the name of our new record. I like Feels Like Hell. It’s a good album name. I was like, “Yeah, I did one!”
AH: It’s a darn good one.
SS: It’s just hard. Since then I’ve been like, “Oh, that would be a cool band name.” It’s probably already a band name, but I was thinking of a band named Sudsy.1 I was like, “That’s kind of cool.” I like Sudsy or Queasy.2 But then again now that just sounds like I’m a SoundCloud rapper from a few years ago. Sudsy, but with dollar signs at the end. But yeah, I don’t know. It’s a hard world out there in the world of band names.
BNB: It is. You touched on this a moment ago, but is naming things—whether it’s band, album, songs—a relatively smooth process for y’all?
SS: It really depends. I mean, sometimes I’ll have a title before I even have anything else. I’ll have a song title and I’m like, “I want to call a song this.”
AH: “Girls gone mild.” That ended up being a lyric, but it originally was going to be a song title.
SS: Yeah, I just wrote it down. I’m like, “That’s funny.” I think I was just describing my general life now. I’m like, “Yeah, I go to bed at 10. I wake up at 5. I go for a run. I love tea. I don’t drink.”
At first I thought it was going to be this kind of song that was almost funny or parody or whatever. And then that lyric snuck its way into one of the sadder moments on the sadder songs.3
BNB: You titled this album because you liked the line “feels like hell” from one of the songs. How did you settle on Quitter and Common Blah?
SS: Common Blah and Quitter, those are both song titles.
AH: But the song title “Common Blah” has nothing... it’s not mentioned in the song. So did you just like the play on words?
SS: I guess. It was almost 10 years ago. I was really into plays on words.
BNB: You were in your pun phase.
SS: Yeah, in my pun phase. [Laughs.] Instead of a punk phase, I went through a pun phase—it’s like punk without the K. But I went through that, and then Quitter was just like a lot of that song. That record has to do with burnout, because making that record burnt me out and almost made me want to quit making music. We wanted to call that record one of two things: Bonkers Funhouse. [Laughs.]
AH: That was my vote!
SS: Then With Sigourney Weaver. [Laughs.] So then the press would go out, and it’d be like “Weakened Friends With Sigourney Weaver.” So those were the holding titles, and then we went with Quitter.
Feels Like Hell, the contrast to that is it’s not a song on the album. It’s a lyric in the song “Not For Nothing,” which I think the holding title for a second was Not For Nothing for this record. It’s interesting because that thematically comes back because in “Great Expectations” I have the line, “I keep making it hell for myself,” the “it feels like hell” line [in “Not For Nothing”], and then “I’m living in a carbon copy hell” in “NPC.”
BNB: What about the names of your previous bands like the Box Tiger and the Field Effect? What’s the story with those?
SS: Box Tiger is another bad band name picked by me.
AH: It’s not bad!
SS: It was supposed to just be Boxed Tiger.
AH: That is bad.
SS: Which is bad. I was like, “Maybe just be Box Tiger,” and then someone put the “the” in there, and then we just kept the “the,” and I didn’t like the “the.”
AH: The Field Effect, we had a huge list of contending names, and that one rose to the top somehow. But a few of us were/are engineers, and there’s something called a field-effect transistor, and we’re like, “That has a cool vibe to it.”
SS: Nerds.
BNB: A lot of times with band names, people don’t expect the band to catch on. Then it becomes this thing you have to live with.
SS: Yeah. It’s funny, there was a band that came through the venue I work at called Zinadelphia recently. I was like, “What is going on?” There’s just some names where I’m like, “That’s a whole vibe. I wonder what the backstory is.”4
BNB: I was going to say, because you work at a venue, you see lots of names. Then you’re on tour, so you see lots of names that way too.
SS: The stickers in venues are the best. There was one with a sticker, it looked like the Planet Fitness logo, but it said Planet Fatass.
AH: There was one at Ralph’s Rock Diner in Worcester. It was this bright yellow sticker. It said Grampy’s Banana. [Laughs.] That’s a horrible band name!
SS: What was the Slippery When Fat band?
AH: Oh, Fat Boy.
SS: Fat Boy. And they had a record called Slippery When Fat. That was a CD at the studio we used to record at.
AH: They were ’90s or maybe early 2000s Boston band.
SS: We were literally observing one and we’re like, “Wow, that might be worse than our band name.” It was a sticker. It was teardux, but it was “tear” and then D-U-X, all one word.
BNB: Yeah, that’s bad. To shift gears, I wanted to ask about the album. I was struck by how much the press materials go into what it calls the “Fleetwood Mac, minus the cocaine and plus a dose of multivitamins” story of Weakened Friends. You two got together after the band started, and Annie and Adam had previously dated. Your personal stories are so intertwined with the band, so I wonder where you draw the line with what you feel comfortable sharing. Has it ever felt like too much?
AH: Nobody’s crossed line. In fact, we don’t even get asked about it that much.
SS: I mean, I think we’re just oversharing queer people. We’re just gay. We’re here to tell you everything. There is no boundary.
I think about it more and more as the band grows. I think initially when you first start as a band, and especially in the age of social media, you’re like, “You’re all my friends! Know everything about me!” Your personal life and your personal self and your art are all interwoven, especially in the way people consume art now with TikTok and stuff. You are there. I’m the type of person who’s at the merch table. I’m hanging out. I’m in the crowd watching the opening band. I’m not trying to hide myself in a high tower from the fans who are there. I like to have a sense of community. When we’re at shows, I am in that community, and I think we’re at a level now where that is still very possible.
I understand that as artists grow and get bigger, it becomes a little bit more difficult to do that—just because fandom and the way that the brain works when someone is a fan can get a little weird. Honestly, we’ve always had great people surrounding our band, and so I’ve always tried to make myself accessible to people. My songs are my story, and that’s who I am. So I’ve always been willing to just share myself, but as things do grow, I sense even my own personal self being like, “Well, there are some things I want to keep a little bit closer to just me.”
But then again, as a queer person, if even 10, 15 years ago, whenever I was coming out, there wasn’t that much representation or visibility as there is now. I would’ve loved to find a band and know a little bit more about them personally and know that part of their journey to feel more accepted and be like, “Oh wow, there’s a good path for me.”
So yeah, it’s an interesting dance. I’m sure if you ask me a couple years from now, maybe the answer will change if the band grows. It might be a little bit harder to be as accessible. But while we still can, I feel like we’re all family at the Weakened Friends camp.
BNB: Something I also wanted to ask you about, Sonia, is you said you had bad writer’s block before Feels Like Hell. What shook you out of it?
SS: Yeah, when we made Quitter, I think we just got a little bit too in the weeds with it. It was during COVID. Then things opened back up, we went back out on tour, and we overdid it almost. I remember we played 52 shows in 61 days, and just low-level touring—no crew, just the three of us all crammed in one hotel room. It just really became not great. I built up this really toxic mental-health relationship with music.
We weren’t making a lot of money, and it was really stressful, and I think I just needed to work myself out of that toxic feeling towards it. This thing of, “This is sucking all my money. It’s getting all my energy. I’m just so tired. Making this record was a slog. I’m just depressed.” I had to get myself out of that and I did. I worked really hard on myself and on the band.
Then we got to a point last year where I’m like, “I’m ready.” Annie and I worked together, and we wrote these songs, and they came together pretty quickly. I think half this record wasn’t even written a year ago today.
AH: Yeah, we got on a really creative wave where the songs were just coming to us.
SS: Sometimes you write a song and you’re just like, “I don’t even know. I was just conduit to something.”
AH: The night we put “Tough Luck” together and we played it back, we’re like, “Wait, that’s us?! Where did it come from? It’s so cool.” [Laughs.]
BNB: It’s interesting how much you’ve talked about how fraught Quitter was. When I first wrote about you, you’d tweeted about making it. “There’s vocoder on our new record and I hope everyone fucking hates it.” “There’s banjo on our new record and I hope everyone fucking hates it.” And your Twitter bio said, “I hope you hate it.” It was funny, but hearing you talk about it now, I’m like, “Oh, that sounds rough.”
SS: No, yeah, it was fun to make that record.
AH: Was it? I feel like it got under your skin.
SS: Yeah, it was rough. I mean, there were cool moments, and I’m happy with the songs on it. It’s a cool record. It’s a learning record. I think now we’re a stronger band because we made that record, and we were able to make this record because we made that record. It’s all a creative journey. You just keep moving forward from one thing to the other, but they all kind of feed each other.
AH: You phrased it really well. We thought we had something to prove, and we had all this ample time because it was COVID, and that’s just not a good place to make art from.
SS: I mean, it can be. I feel like I’ve written songs from that mindset.
AH: I should make it more personal: I thought I had something to prove because I’m like, “Oh, people liked the first record.”
SS: More eyes on you.
AH: I’m the one engineering, and I need it to be good. I need everybody to like it. This one, I didn’t even think about anybody else. I’m like, “What does this song want? What is it calling for? That feels good. Let’s follow that.” Instead of my anxieties about what somebody I don’t even know might think. Why am I putting that lens in front of myself? It doesn’t make any sense.
BNB: Since then, Sonia, you’ve come out gender nonconforming. Did that also make this process a little easier?
SS: I think it made life easier. [Laughs.] It’s just nice to know who you are and not really feel like you have to subscribe to any sort of mannerism. Art is self-expression, right? So if you’re at peace with that, and you can not judge yourself anymore, you’re not going to judge your art as much, and you’re not going to judge what you’re doing as much. I think there’s a freedom to that. That was really nice to stumble upon. It helps the creative process tremendously to just be comfortable in your own skin.
AH: I was practicing something in advance of this tour, because we’re pulling out some stuff from the back catalog that we haven’t played in a while, and you came into the room and you’re like, “Wow, I can hear myself trying to feminize my voice for this recording.” I thought that was interesting.
SS: Yeah, all the walls are down. You don’t have those learned habits that are just there as self-preservation.
BNB: Another thing I wanted to ask about is the musical dynamic among the three of you. Both Annie and Adam went to the Berklee College of Music, and Sonia’s more self-taught. In some ways being untrained, you’re not getting in your head about theory or whatever. But I also think it could be intimidating working in a creative partnership with people who are trained.
AH: That was one of the lessons coming out of school. I immediately got a job in a recording studio, and I was like, “Oh man, a lot of the bands I’m working with at the studio do not have a technically trained background in music.” You have to develop a language to communicate ideas with people that might not know theory or what beat I’m talking about in a bar. So I had already developed a way of communicating.
[To Sonia.] You’re just so naturally talented. The music that comes from your brain, if I would ask you what it is, theoretically you wouldn’t be able to tell me, but that doesn’t matter. All theory is and notation and all of that, that’s just a way to take music that’s coming from your brain and be able to communicate it to others or write it out so someone else can play it. But the important thing is the generation of the art, and you have that.
SS: For me, the flip side is it’s rock ’n’ roll. I fell in love with music from an emotional place, and I fell in love with music from watching some of my favorite bands on stage and that raw energy.
I’m not saying if you’re a theoretical player, you don’t have that same connection to music. I actually went to an art school in high school. It was a dedicated music program. You had to audition to get in, and I played the baritone sax. I was okay with reading music a little bit for the sax, but generally speaking, I would take the time to learn things by ear and kind of fake it. I definitely did not do well with any of the written exams for musical notation and stuff.
Then when I was deciding to go to college, I auditioned for Berklee, and I actually got in. I got accepted to Berklee and I got accepted to Humber College, which was almost the Toronto, Canada, version of Berklee. I just was like, “I don’t want to play jazz. I don’t want to read charts.” I want to write songs and be creative in a way that these artists that I admire are creative onstage and do that. So I’m like, “I’m going to just start a band.” That’s when I started Box Tiger.
I got a scholarship, and I went to school with a history major and an English literature minor. So I just went and read books. It was great because I feel like that inspired me more to write songs than if I was just getting frustrated.
There is ego in being a creative, and if you’re in an environment where you feel like you’re just lesser than or you can’t keep up, you feel like shit, then you’re not going to want to stay in it. No matter how hard I tried in my big-ass dyslexic brain, I couldn’t read music notation. It wasn’t how I wanted to focus on music. So it would’ve been counterintuitive to put myself in an environment where that is the endgame. I’m not trying to write music to get a grade, you know what I mean?
BNB: I find that the people who judge things like, “That’s not technically very good,” it’s like, “Yeah, but does it sound good? Does it work?” There’s nothing more annoying than some technical music nerd.
AH: The shredder guitar guy being like, “Nirvana sucks! He can’t even play.” It makes you feel something!
SS: Everybody has their own opinions. If the shredder dude likes that, then that’s great, but I can’t stand it. Also, outside of just the music itself, in the music industry, and especially in the audio-engineering industry, there are these pedantic, know-it-all assholes—mostly always dudes—who are just like, [Nerdy voice.] “Well, this microphone is the better microphone, so this record sounds like shit because you didn’t use the microphone I like.” I’m like, fuck off, just listen to the record. Is the emotion there? I can’t stand that.
[To Annie.] You like cool gear. That’s why I liked working with you as an engineer before we were together. I remember getting to the studio with you, and you knew what everything was and you knew cool shit, but you didn’t do—for lack of a better word—that dick-swing thing, where you’re like, “I’m the studio guy.” I don’t want to yuck anyone’s yum, and I get that those people are probably just really excited about their craft, but...
AH: The artist doesn’t have bothered about all that. Just help facilitate the art. The technical stuff’s just happening in the background. That’s what it should be.
SS: Sometimes, honestly, it’s like you don’t even need it. Some of the best shit’s just recorded on crappy gear because musicians don’t have money, and the heart was there and the energy was there.
AH: Sometimes the limitations can generate really cool art. When we were recording part of the record, we recorded at the house. At the studio we have the Hammond, we got the grand piano, we got the upright piano, we got all these synths, we got every amp you could want, every guitar you could want. But then at home...
SS: We have a lot of stuff.
AH: Our stuff. But I remember when we were making Quitter, I was like, “I want something like a big timpani or a big orchestral bass drum.” We took a mallet, and we opened the oven and you hit the side of the oven, and it sounded fucking awesome!
SS: The song “Great Expectations” on the new record, that’s all mostly demo track.
BNB: Oh, really?
SS: That was me and Annie, just futzing. That guitar take is the first take of a demo track.
AH: The speakers were playing. You can hear the click track. I had to try to get some of that out.
SS: When we were sitting with it. I’m like, “I think if we go back and record it, it won’t have the correct energy.” There’s something so sad and real about that song, that flowy, almost riffing guitar part. It was almost like improv. I was like, “I think if I try to go recreate that, it’ll just sound sterile and weird.” And the tone was cool, so we kept it.
BNB: To talk about the shredders again, you have an unlikely friendship with Buckethead, who plays on “NPC.” He could very well have been that condescending nerd, but it doesn’t sound like he’s that way.
SS: No, not at all. He is so cool, and he’s just a champion of artists and musicians doing their thing. When he wrote that part for “NPC,” we were talking on the phone and I was like, “Dude, it is so cool. I definitely won’t be able to play it live. I would’ve had to start practicing 20 years ago.” He was laughing. He was like, “Yeah, but you don’t have to.”
He just loves emotion behind music. He obviously is this shredder, and I think the way he plays guitar, it is alchemy. It’s unbelievable. It’s so cool. But he is not projecting that on other people’s art at all. I think he’s just a champion of people who are in music for the right reasons and have their heart in the right place. He seems to really appreciate that.
In a world where it’s TikTok/viral/industry/numbers/Spotify just constantly berating you, it’s been nice to have someone who’s just like, “I did some collage crafting and listened to this record and wrote this guitar part I’m sharing with you.” I’m like, “This is so nice to have.” Someone who’s just not that at all. It’s an unlikely friendship.
AH: It’s one of those videos on the internet where a chicken and a monkey are friends.
BNB: I’ll close out by asking you the same thing I always ask in these interviews: Do you think it’s better to have a sort of vanilla name that isn’t necessarily memorable or a bad name that people remember?
SS: I think the bad name people remember. A classic example is Mannequin Pussy.5 That is a rough name. I like it. I love them, and it works for their energy, but I feel like in the last few years, they’ve just fully embraced it and honed in on it. But it’s a hard name to market. People just don’t like saying “pussy.”
AH: You probably can’t put ad spend on it.
SS: You can’t. They played at the venue I work at, and it’s like, an email blast. To be as huge as they’ve gotten with that name, it’s awesome. It’s a testament to how amazing they are. I just like their whole energy of just like, “This is who the fuck we are, and we don’t give a fuck. Say ‘pussy,’ you pussy!” I’d rather have a bad name that catches the eye and does well than just fade into the background.
BNB: Do you agree, Annie?
AH: Yeah, I do agree. Even when people ask me what my band name is, and then I have to explain it. I feel like it does crystallize with people after the explanation. They’ll walk away with it like, “Oh, okay.”
SS: I’m sick and tired of explaining it, but I’m happy. I’m happy.
POST-SCRIPTS
My favorite part of The Four Seasons on Netflix was when Mannequin Pussy came up. (Spoiler alert.)
Seriously, Feels Like Hell rules. Get it, and go see Weakened Friends live.
Coming in a couple weeks: the annual Band Name Bureau Thanks List.
Yup, it’s been claimed.
“Great Expectations”: “I was fun for a while, now this girl’s gone mild.”
The internet says “Her stage name is a combination of her first name ‘Zina’ and ‘Philadelphia,’ her hometown.” But Zinadelphia’s real name is Hannah McKenney, so who knows?
As featured in the Year in Band Names many years ago. I’d link it here, but I can’t find it on the avclub.com anymore, of course.