This past week I was able to schedule a Zoom call with Kristopher Roe of The Ataris to discuss the band’s great returning single, “Car Song.” The song is from the band’s forthcoming LP that is tentatively scheduled for a March 2026 release. In this interview, Kristopher shared key insights behind how the new album is shaping up, his life experiences that led to several of the key songs on the new record, as well as his planned release of a cover of “Summer of ’69”. The Ataris will be releasing several new singles and 7″ records leading up to the band’s new album.
So first of all, thank you so much for your time today, Kristopher, and congrats on the release of The Atari’s well-received single, called “Car Song,” that I know is near and dear to your heart. I’m sure a lot of emotions went into this tribute to your father, who passed away in 2014. Can you walk me through the process of releasing this key single from the new LP that I’m looking forward to hearing?
Yeah, of course! So it kind of started out, I remember there was an in-flight magazine I saw where you could press a loved one’s ashes into vinyl. And my dad was always the biggest supporter of the band. When we used to have a message board and the MySpace page back in the day, he would reach out to fans and send them VHS tapes of shows. He would always wish others a happy birthday. The outpouring of people after the release of “Car Song” just said, “Your father always took time out of his day to send me nice messages.” I knew he was somebody that was kind of beloved on the message board. He was, you know, even had a message board handle of “The Atari Super Dad,” much to my embarrassment at the time, but in hindsight, what more could you want than your dad to be that proud of you? And so I digress.
So basically, I saw the ad that said you can press a loved one’s ashes into vinyl. I reached out, and it was way expensive, because you get ten records per family where you could put a message of their voice or something. And so fast forward many years later, and the catalyst that kind of brought it all about is I got the opportunity to buy the Volvo from the final episode of Breaking Bad. The one Walter White steals in New Hampshire and drives back to take his revenge on the Nazis!
Excellent show!
Yeah, it’s so good. My favorite episode of my favorite Breaking Bad car, and my drummer in the studio and best friend forever and studio owner, Bob Hogue, it was offered to him by Herbie his car collector friends working on the new series with Vince Gilligan. And he got offered to buy it, and he’s like, my wife will kill me…but you should buy this! I said yes, without batting an eye. So I bought the car. We drove to Albuquerque and picked it up. The ad was the nicest dude. We actually showed up in cosplay as Mike Urban Troutman on a tour of the Better Call Saul / Breaking Bad museum! I drove it back, and then one week later, I kid you not, my actual car I drove to all of our shows died. Perfect timing…so I had no vehicle, and I spent money to buy this. So the concise version is basically I had to finance a new car, and I’m like, “Okay, I got to get rid of this car. And I was told, like, Look, don’t flip it. Don’t sell it.” That was the only wish. I went, Bob, can I trade you this car for studio time that I was gonna pay him for anyway? And he was like, hell yeah! And so that car was essentially the thing that got me into the studio, got me motivated, lit a fire underneath me, and I started recording. I recorded “Car Song” first, and I’m like, oh my god, I can do this. I’ve always been writing, but I needed some motivation. And also we just toured too damn much. We were always in this grind of two or three months then came back home for a month…then repeat. It was that get in the van, DIY ethos, we always believed in.
Then when 2020 happened, I got COVID really bad. For six weeks, I ended up in the hospital, and I almost died….
Oh, my god. I had no idea…
That was so traumatizing. There were days I couldn’t breathe, and I thought I wasn’t going to wake up. I had eight months of recovery with long-COVID, and that led to me knowing that when I get back to playing shows again, I want to do it in a way where it’s not that kind of grind. I want to do shows that are important, impactful. And whenever I’m playing I like, I want it to be something that’s like, has purpose. We’ll go out, we’ll play a weekend now with MxPx, or a show with Sublime, or a festival like that. That’s why I really did that. It wasn’t preconceived, but it allowed me, accidentally, time to write and record. And I’m like, “Oh, my god, this is what I should have done all along!” And not only that, but it creates more demand when I see MxPx doing that. I’m like, “That’s really smart.” I really loved getting the van for three months at a time because I love traveling. But I realize at a certain point it also kind of hurts the brand of a band. I mean, the best quote I ever heard was when the Pixies got back together, Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth said, “The worst thing we ever did was not break up,” <laughter> because the Pixies came back and they were playing amphitheaters, and Sonic Youth were still, rightfully so, playing these great theaters. But still it was funny, because it was like they were from the same world as us. I mean, I was happy playing The Roxy over The Palladium or The Knitting Factory versus Irving Plaza. And we used to play those big venues, but since I did that, our rooms doubled, our guarantees quadrupled, and we’re getting all these festivals. It was smart. And then we got a great management team who also managed Sublime, that is the greatest bunch of artist-oriented people. And the only thing I did was back it up with an album that I’m really proud of.
I feel these new group of songs without sounding derivative, it just came out as a rock and roll album that feels like something that fans who were always yearning for the So Long, Astoria follow-up that they didn’t get. This is what this album is. It sounds like a grown up version of So Long, Astoria 20 years later. There are some cool surprises and a lot of layers and depths. Even with Jawbreaker, if you look at those songs, they were rock songs, but they had these big, textural, ambient breakdowns. We’ve done that, and we’ve had songs that do that, too. <The new record> is not a basic album. I mean, you look at those great rock albums, like Jimmy Eat World’s Clarity or Bleed American, or Weezer’s Pinkerton. All these albums, they had peaks and valleys, and layers. So this has that, but it definitely is more akin to So Long, Astoria than any of our records.
There are a couple songs that I actually never recorded that are from the Blue Skies era, or even prior to our first album that I revisited and and fell to the wayside, that in a sort of Descendants fashion where they re-recorded, the pre-Milo Goes To College one no one ever heard. I recorded one song that will make the record, that was, I thought, the best Ataris’ song from the early 90s era that no one ever got to hear, because for some reason, it didn’t get recorded or finished. I wrote a bridge for it, recorded it, but most of the new songs were written in the last year. There were a couple songs from the early sessions of when All Soul’s Day was written, when the album was still going to be called The Graveyard of the Atlantic. It’s not called that.
Yeah, I think I saw somewhere on Instagram where you posted that it wasn’t going to be called that.
So, yeah, I wanted it to be looked at as…these are new songs. Some of those songs exist and will be used for something. But in this session, I’ve recorded over 30 songs. 14 will make the record. I’m 75% done with that. I’ve got three more songs of vocals and a few guitars, and then one more song of just vocals. So, I’m almost done! The cool thing is, it won’t be another 10 years for the follow-up with the second one…<Laughter>
That’s really good to hear!!
And then the last thing I’ll say is that this record will likely be done in the next month or two. I’d say that I’m 95% sure of what’s gonna happen. And the only downside is that with the way vinyl turnaround works, it likely will be a release in March of next year. We’re going to continue releasing new music all year, this year. We’ve already had one single come out. We’re going to do a couple more. Maybe there will be an EP, but probably a couple more singles, and seven inches, and that will all lead up to the record. Because like with Blue Skies and So Long, Astoria, those albums were summer records. This album feels like a summer record. It needs to be the soundtrack to people’s summer, and that’s why I think they both came out in March. It’s an omen, because it’s more akin to those two records.
That sounds like an excellent plan and a great birthday present for myself next March!
<Laughter> Awesome!
Also, I think I saw somewhere that you were considering a plan to re-record more of So Long, Astoria for potentially a vinyl release? I know you did the re-record of “In This Diary” to go along with “Car Song”….but are there other plans?
Yeah, you’re right. I re-recorded “In This Diary.” There was an acoustic version as a bonus for Spotify pre-saves, or whatever, and then there was the full band version as well. And my reasoning for doing “In This Diary” for the B-side was that it was the first song where my father saw his son on TV, and it was one of his favorite songs. And so, it was more just a tribute to him. But also there’s that sort of the Taylor Swift, “Taylor’s Version” thing where, yeah, I would like to have the rights to that album, but I don’t want to re-record the entire thing. There are a couple songs in our lives that have really evolved in a great way, where I love the compliment when somebody says, “You really captured the feeling of what these songs were in the record, but these songs sound so much more alive now” And I think, when I record now, all of our records were always on analog tape. I like for there to be a human element. I like them to feel really real. I don’t like when people take the heart out of songs. To me, I have nothing to do with the process of auto-tuned, nasally vocal stuff…it’s not for me. Pop-punk, to me, was The Descendants. I love stuff from that world. And I’d like to think that these songs are more akin to storytellers, singer-songwriter stuff than that. But the point being, is that, yeah, I did have maybe one other surprise or two down the line as, like a fun B-side or something of an older song that I re-recorded, or am re-recording, but I don’t have any intention to re-record a full record or anything…Maybe just a song or two that I feel live now would have a cool, big breakdown or ending.
Kinda like when we play “Your Boyfriend Sucks” live. If you find the live versions from the last five or ten years, or so, we do this big, epic breakdown that’s kind of more akin to post-rock bands like Mogwai and Godspeed, You Black Emperor, and then it ramps down really quietly. That’s what Jawbreaker did. I love that, and I wanted to have a studio version of those just to document them. Whether people will hear them, I don’t know. 95% of <the new LP> is new songs, plus “Car Song”, and whatever other songs like “All Souls Day” will make the record, but it’ll also be a re-recorded version that has a little bit more urgency. It’s a little faster, and part of that was, we don’t have the rights to put the other version on. It’s a perfect version the way it is, yeah, but I’m like, “You know what? This song deserves to be on the record…I’m just going to record it, make it sound like it did, but I think it needs to sound a little faster, since that’s how we play it live.
The re-record of “In This Diary” really does sound like a nice, beefed-up version of what the Ataris are at today.
I really appreciate that! Well, we are trying really hard to get the rights to re-release those albums properly in the future. Luckily, our old label, Kung Fu records that we were on, was run by The Vandals, was sold to a label, and they keep some of the records in print. We’ve been trying to get the record from Columbia to re-release it on vinyl. We’re still working on that. But no promises for now, people are just gonna have to go on Discogs to find it…The focus now is on just finishing this new album, and putting out some singles until it comes out. Plus, then we have a lot of really cool, special shows we’re gonna announce really soon. I can’t wait to share one like where I think we’re announcing next week, and then some other stuff on the east coast with another big band and more festivals. Yeah, it’s really shaping up to be a cool year. So many great radio outlets added “Car Song” too!
I know! You guys were on Rolling Stone and stuff like that too. So you’ve got your publicist doing good work these days!
Our management, they manage Sublime, and they do an amazing job for them. And that’s actually Joe from The Vandals who signed The Ataris. He’s the one who works for that management company who was like, “You should really take The Ataris on!” And these people are punk rockers and artists who want to help bands that are just a bunch of derelicts that don’t know how to do social media, like me, dude. I just like to get in the van and go play a show. And they’re like no, you need to learn how to utilize these tools. And I’m ready to learn. So yeah, it’s been great.
And I saw you also recorded a cover song of “Summer of ‘69” by Bryan Adams, too. Is that going to be on the new record, or is that going to be part of the single series?
I’m so proud of how that turned out! It’s funny, we used to have people that would come to our shows and they would yell, “Play Summer ‘69” and I’m like, that’s not the song we covered…But yeah, I love that song.
At least with “Summer ‘79” on So Long, Astoria they would be a little closer… <Laughter>
<Laughter> Yeah, I love the feeling of what that song kind of felt like to me as a kid here, with “Summer of ‘69”. So I actually talked to Jim Valance, who wrote the song, and he’s heard our version. He wrote it with Bryan Adams, and he’s like, “Your cover was great.” He even loved “The Boys of Summer” cover. He’s like, “Man, I’m flattered you covered it. All the elements are there.” All I did was take an already perfect song, just like I did with “Boys of Summer,” and just recorded verbatim with rocking guitars, not changing anything, because it’s a perfect song the way it is…. And I can’t wait for people to hear it. It’s up to other people to say this, but it’s definitely right up there with “The Boys of Summer” cover. I hope Bryan Adams likes it, too! And Jim Valance liked it so, yeah, I’m honored. I can’t wait to share that. That’ll definitely be on the record for sure.
That’s awesome. Do you have a working title for the record, or is that too early in the process? Also, you mentioned it’s coming out in March, so you’ve got time there…
I’ve had the cover photo of the record for ages. I took this great photo of this old sign that I do for a lot of our records. And so I love old signage. I love the broken down beauty of beautiful, sad scenes that tell a story of a former time that was once more bustling. And so in Martha, Texas, I saw this old sign of a motel. It’s like Stardust, and it was all decaying. And I’m like, “I love this photo!”, and I always meant to use it for the record. So now finally I get to do that. But the cover of the album itself is the actual title. I always write down wordplay and that’s how The End Is Forever came about. Broken Hearts Next 12 Exits starts with wordplay, whether it ends up being titles of songs or whatever. And I’ve got a few I’m toying with, but nothing I can mention yet. I think kind of the overall theme of the record, like I mentioned what I went through in like, 2020 and everything, I went through that way. And I went through a really difficult breakup with my partner of seven years just completely out of left field. Right after I recovered with COVID, the world stopped, and I ended up being isolated, living in a small town of Truth or Consequences, New Mexico. I only ended up there because it was, I couldn’t go back to LA as my ex-wife worked in healthcare, and we, at the time, we didn’t know if it was safe. We were trying to feel it out like everyone else was. And then, while I was there, I was like, “Okay, I found a little Airbnb for dirt cheap in a tiny town, very picturesque, kind of a desert town and 10,000 people.” And while I was there, I had COVID recovered, and then I went through this breakup. And so the album kind of starts with the title track, and that song is “Truth or Consequences”, and that’s the theme of the album. Here I am in this small town, kind of going through all these life changing events, having to start my life over from scratch, not knowing what’s next. And I remember driving out to Alamogordo, New Mexico, because it was the only dentist open at that time because I had an abscess that I got during the beginning of the pandemic. And I saw this eagle pushed up high on the top of a light pole, and I remember feeling like it was such a hard time, and I felt so alone, just broken from everything I went through. But all I remember is this like a beacon of hope, it felt like, sort of a spiritual thing. Like, this is my father or somebody watching over me. There is beauty in this darkness. You’ve got to just pull through and just don’t give up. And know that there are better days ahead. You can get through this. And I just remember feeling this sort of sense of calm. And I wrote this line about, I saw an eagle perched up high. He said, “Don’t be afraid of this darkened world. There is beauty in the darkness. You just have to set it free.” And so that kind of started this whole thought of this song, “The Truth of Consequences.” And so the album basically starts with me there in 2020 and my life just changing completely, and all this uncertainty.
And then the other album track I have kind of starts back in the beginning of the 10 years prior, when I met my partner that I had split with, and kind of the first day of our relationship, I wrote this song called “Some Notes on Bach and Hayden,” which is the name of a Bucha poem. That song is all about how when you meet somebody new, or you get into a new relationship with somebody…they have this kind of beautiful power of vanquishing the hurt you have from the previous relationship that I’ve gone through. So I remember feeling the sense of calm when me and her met and or when we started talking. And so that song is how it ends, and it’s kind of bookends, but opposite. And the last line of the song says, “Let us say one last farewell to our hardest goodbyes.” Is how the song used to end in the demo version of it I wrote back then. So now the song has a double entendre. It turns around and says, “You were my hardest goodbye,” and then it says, “You are my hardest goodbye.” And now basically ends with the part of you that has become the thing, sadly enough, that you once entered my life and vanquished this hurt of another person. So it’s kind of the opposite bookends of my relationship, the beginning of my relationship, not an entirely original idea, but still a cool way of tying the two things together. I mean, sure. I mean, that’s a good completionist statement at that point, so I’m really proud of that.
Plus there’s also this little cool tie in to So Long, Astoria. That album starts with me in the middle of the street in front of my old house in Anderson, Indiana, at age 14. My girlfriend, my parents were really cool. Always like let her hang out till the wee hours of the morning, and they knew her family, and we just stayed up all night watching REM, and They Might Be Giants videos on VHS. And I remember, in the morning, and she got picked up as the sun was coming up. It was like a November morning, and the snow fell, and we kissed for the first time in the middle of this empty street. And it was in the twilight of the morning, and so I wrote that into the song, “So Long, Astoria.” So fast forward to 2013 when my father passed away. I remember I was on stage at a show in Tempe, Arizona, playing an acoustic show opening for, I believe the Gin Blossoms, I think. And my mom texted me and said, “Your father, I think he’s gonna pass. You better get home quick.” He’s been in and out of bad health because of his alcoholism. He’d been sober, but he was definitely not doing well. So I immediately got in my car and I drove straight to Indiana without sleep or anything, just caffeine. I’m a sober human. It was just, you know, pounding the Coke Zeros. When I got there, I was able to hold his hand one last time, say farewell to him, and I definitely could sense he knew I was there, even though he was kind of in his hospice state of passing away and he was still alive. I remember going back to my Motel 6 and going to sleep and because I hadn’t slept for two days of driving because I was on purpose to get to Indiana to see my father one last time. I woke up at 9am to like 20 missed calls. My mom was saying, “You gotta get over here now. Your father’s passing away.” And so I rushed over there, and I remember pulling up to the ambulance in the middle of the street and then wheeling my father out on a stretcher. And I remember the song that was playing is what is written in the run out group of the seven inch there are two songs. There is Bob Dylan’s “Queen Jane” approximately, and then on the other side in the red hot groove, is “Half a Person,” The Smith’s song, and that was what was playing. And there’s two songs, because I couldn’t bring myself to get out of the car and face reality. So in that moment, as I say my last goodbyes to my father in the middle of that empty street, I had this epiphany that that many years later, of So Long, Astoria started with me in the same spot in the middle of an empty street, kissing this girl that I had feelings for for the first time, and having that moment begin So Long, Astoria. So I knew at that moment that no matter what that has to be a tie-in to this new record.
In this new record, there is a sort of call and response to So Long, Astoria, lyrically a little bit about me now introspective at, I don’t know, I was 10 years ago so I was like 38 I think, so in the middle of that same empty street, but now questioning how life is not the eternal thing we think it is in our 20s and 30s, and how this is the first time I felt loss of this giant magnitude. What does life all mean? And it was just one of those moments. And so that’s definitely a big part of this album, too.
Yeah, I can’t wait to hear it! You’ll have to send me the advance at some point, too. You also have a cool relationship with your fans. Through Bandcamp, you’ve released several different demos and stuff like that too. You mentioned putting out some singles also leading up to the new record? What is your intention for that promotional process?
Yeah, I imagine it’ll be like those things, just like the “Car Song” release. It’ll be special, cool variants on seven inch and also on all the streaming platforms, Bandcamp included, but not exclusively Bandcamp. Because, as I can tell in the back there, you’re a vinyl nerd, too!
Yep!
Oh, I’ll show you the variant of that “Car Song” 7”. One sec…These are not shipped. Only me and Jeff have these, and my mom, but not this variant. And there’s me and my dad on the back in a little Radio Flyer wagon. And then there’s this dedication I wrote to my father inside that I posted on our social media. But yeah, it talks about when my mother and I lived separate from him. Other side <of the insert> has the lyrics. And then the vinyl. You see the ashes there? It’s pretty rad. There’s a photo of it better on our, on our social media that I took. But yeah, I’m really grateful that finally I was able to bring this to life. And it’s honestly the coolest thing to be able to let my dad be a part of the music, absolutely.
And he lives on forever in that and that vinyl, too. Any last words for fans or ways they can continue to connect with you leading up to the release of the new Ataris’ record?
Yeah, TheAtarisBand.com is the website. We actually have a working website now, and because we waited so long, TheAtaris.com got sold to some person again. Now, @TheAtaris is our social media on all the platforms, like Instagram, Facebook, Twitter…etc. And we have The Atari’s Bandcamp page, and then obviously Spotify. And yeah, we have a lot of festivals, like Riot Fest, Aftershock, some other big ones in the UK and Europe. We are mainland, Europe, SBAM and Slam Dunk. A lot of other ones on the horizon. We got one big show with Sublime announced right now, maybe some more in the future, hopefully. And we have also some shows with MxPx, definitely some more of those in the future. And then a bunch of other surprises. I think this week we’re gonna announce a couple of So Long, Astoria shows where we play the entire record on the East Coast for the first time. So that’ll be in Boston, and I’m looking forward to that. And then one in Florida, in Orlando. We will see if we do any more of those. Right now, it’s mostly focused on the new record, but in the meantime, we’re like, let’s go out and play a couple of fun surprise shows for the fans too.
Absolutely, that’s awesome! Thanks again for your time, and I can’t wait to hear the new record once it’s finished.
Thanks, Adam!