2005: Johnny Hobo and The Freight Trains, Love Songs for the Apocalypse

By Gyasi Hall

Love Songs for the Apocalypse is an album about dying. It’s about the process of self-annihilation; it exists in a space that begins and ends with the choice to hurt yourself and revel in the pain. The songs, raw and gravely with titles like “Whisky is My Kind of Lullaby” and “I Want Cancer for Christmas”, are all nakedly about the degenerate lifestyle that the band’s front man, Pat “the Bunny” Schneeweis, was living at the time: the misadventures of being a homeless teenager hitchhiking from one shitty punk show to the next, perpetually drunk and strung out.

There is no nuance to anything being said, nothing to complicate the idea that the best way to fight the system is to burn bridges and shoot up in a parking lot, and this fact matches the grimy aesthetic. It narrows the listener’s focus down to the same fine point Pat’s vision is always at, nothing but void past the next pill, the next line, the next beer: on “New Mexico Song”, when Pat screams “And in my dreams / I am dirty, broke, beautiful, and free” with all the jagged edge of razor wire and round consonants made sharp, it’s not just the only truth that matters, but the only truth that exists at all.

Despite the fact that there were technically other members of the band, every song just sounds like Pat, one guy screaming and pounding away at various beat up guitars. He would often tour alone, inviting local kids to play the harmonica or the trumpet with him on stage. It added to the image he projected: a nihilistic young vagabond, wise in his celebration of his own pathetic tendencies, a prophet of self-destruction guiding those who needed his words.  

I stumbled upon the album through YouTube recommendations over a decade after it was first released, huffing and puffing on a treadmill at my local Planet Fitness in my latest attempt to self-flagellate in a way that looked productive. This happened fairly early on in my exploration of folk punk, and my relationship to the genre would be forever defined by these two things, for better or for worse: self-harm and eternal tardiness. Like all forms of art steeped in DIY principles, folk punk is built on a kind of scrappy spontaneity, a beautiful I-have-an-idea-let’s-just-get-some-folks-together-and-make-it-happen impulse. It’s not about preservation, but shared intimacy. If you weren’t there, you weren’t there.

This is especially true of mid-to-late 2000s folk punk, music from an era defined by the seemingly endless formation and transformation of new artists and bands brought on by the early stages of the modern internet. Websites like Myspace, YouTube, Bandcamp, even stuff like MediaFire and Megaupload, allowed virtually anybody to make and share their work on an unprecedented scale. Producers and labels were always apart of the equation for some groups, as were homemade CDs and cassettes for merch, but so much of this music was just made, kept in the fractured state the local nobodies first created it in. Muffled demos, noisy snippets of live performances, staticky one-take MP3s posted on now-defunct pages or lost at the end of dead links. Pat the Bunny is one of the biggest artists of that era, and even Johnny Hobo doesn’t have a clean discography: their songs are all scraped together from an assortment of demos, EPs, Self-releases, live albums, and compilations, almost none of which exist now in their original form.

Listening to this kind of folk punk is to sift through ashes, to admire the rubble and piece together a brief image of what once was. Doing your research and following the algorithmic spiral is, in many ways, a trip to a cemetery, a digital séance. The original run of Love Songs for the Apocalypse consisted only of 1,000 CDs. At this point, given time and exposure, most people have come to love Johnny Hobo through online bootlegs totally detached from the band’s original context, myself included.

This sort of fandom doppler effect does, of course, happen constantly with all music, but that time and distance have more weight when you make the kind of urgent and semi-radical self-harm anthems that Pat did when he was 18. That time and distance can mean space for overdose, for death, for prison, for sobriety, for a change in politics and lifestyle. That time and distance has the power to render the music a mere phase or prove it a true manifesto.

When I first heard the album, I was the same age as Pat, a sluggish and twitchy ball of masochistic yearning. I was drowning in a constant atmosphere of unbearable suicidal ideation while also being paralyzed by anxiousness so acute that I was not only unable to act on these urges, but also unable to act on any feeling beyond panic total enough to scare me into the specific actions that would make my failing look like swimming to the people around me. This lead to self-loathing so complete that it put me in physically pain, which only exacerbated my issues. 

Love Songs for the Apocalypse didn’t help me. If anything, lines like “I would spend a lifetime trying to figure out / how to make my heart stop beating” and “I’d trade in my hope for a hangover and a headache / I’m contemplating rope, but I can’t tie knots that great” actively stoked my desire for self-immolation. What the album did do was let me dream, imagine a world outside my torment. Not one that was better, but, rather, one that was much worse, lightened only by the fact that I was in control. Pat was a rough blueprint: I’d nurse my eating disorder, my current reps of binging and purging, into increasingly elaborate forms of self-harm before finally acquiring a drug addiction and becoming a disappointment to my friends and family. I’d delight not in their disgust, but in my ability to not care about their disgust. I’d finally be dying, instead of just constantly feeling like I was dying.

None of this came to be. As juvenile and fucked up as it is, this was the kind of self-possession I needed in that moment, the only kind I was willing to embrace. It wasn’t the key to getting better, or even the key to finding a way to get better, but it was a bit of relief, however counterintuitive.

Pat the Bunny would go on to have one of the all-time great punk careers. If you listen to his entire discography, everything he’s done across 13 years and 3 bands, plus a prolific solo career, you can see his relationship with politics, with drugs, with himself, change and evolve, songs marking phases, like the rings in a tree stump. This kind of personal growth provided a natural end: he got sober at the end of the aughts and retired in 2016.

So yeah: maybe it’s a phase, but Johnny Hobo fucking rocks. I can’t recommend it to anyone, can’t endorse such pointless and violent self-hate, but for my own part, it’s a time capsule for something necessary. This album is where I saw my insides reflected back in a very specific moment, and I can’t deny that. I’m alive and no longer in a place where I need this album, but I must give thanks for whatever small part it played in my arrival here. If I had a dollar for every time I screamed along to “New Mexico Song” while driving aimlessly, I might not have enough money to buy much of anything, but they’d be vintage coins, dollars made more valuable because of their history. Here’s to the rubble.

Gyasi Hall is an essayist and poet from Columbus, Ohio. His work has been published and produced by Thoughtcrime press, Get Lit, Z Publishing, and MabLab Theater, among others. His debut poetry chapbook, Flight of the Mothman: An Autobiography, was published by The Operating System in spring 2019. He currently resides in Iowa City where he is pursuing his MFA in creative nonfiction.