Big Plans, Bad Planning
Meet Alex, Jack, Aaron, and Miles, the up-and-comers behind the band with a brand of rock all its own. Listen to just one of Bad Planning’s epic singles and you’ll hear the echoes of punk legends both past and present. Read on in this interview with lead guitarist Jack Coombs to find out why Bad Planning will undoubtedly be joining the ranks.
Claire: I want to know from the start, how did Bad Planning come to be?
Jack: Right, so the year was 2013. I was a sophomore; Alex was a freshman. Years prior, we had done the same rockstar 101 program at a local music shop, and from that we had some mutual friends. So, come 2013, one of those mutual friends was like “Hey, I want to start an actual band. I’ve got this guy Alex that I know, I’ve got you. Let’s try this thing.” So we show up to practice for the first time and we start jamming, the four of us, throwing around some covers, and ultimately we decided to do it! And then the guy that connected us suddenly just ghosted us, he wasn’t at school and we don’t know what happened to him.
C: Sounds very mysterious…
J: Yeah, and while he wasn’t responding the other three of us that he had introduced were still like, “Yeah we want to keep doing this.” And that’s how Bad Planning was formed. The name Bad Planning actually came from one of the bands in that program we did in middle school. So we just started playing Blink-182 and Green Day covers at the local skate shop. Then we started writing our own music. By the time we were juniors and seniors, we were writing and recording our own songs. As I mentioned, Alex is a year younger than me so I went away to college, and he stuck around the hometown. He’s really good at networking, and they had been releasing more music and doing more shows while I was away. So four years goes by, and it came to the point where Alex was looking for a really consistent group of musicians and I had moved back home so he was like, “Hey Jack, why don’t you rejoin the band?”
C: Nice, perfect timing!
J: Yeah, so then we jumped right into recording a month after I rejoined the band. We recorded this album that’s going to be released May 6th, it’s called Et Fortes. We recorded the guitars and vocals in two days and drums in one day. The songs, Alex had written for a number of years so he knew exactly what we needed to do, what all the lyrics were going to be, with a few new ones sprinkled in here and there. We wanted to get our money’s worth and get the thing out to labels, and this was around February 2021. It was like our Covid project.
C: Fantastic, you guys definitely did get your money’s worth cranking that thing out in three days.
J: Definitely. Around February or March, we teamed up with a label called Jump Start Records. They’re an indie/punk label that’s put out a bunch of well-known names in the punk scene so we were super psyched to be part of their team as well. So, yeah! We’ve been pushing the album, playing shows with a lot of friends, a lot of really big names, too – we played a show with this band called Lagwagon in December. We’ve got shows coming up, too, with a lot of other big names so a lot of really exciting stuff. It all started when we were these little freakin’ kids and it’s still going, we’re still listening to most of the same music and having the same amount of fun.
C: Yeah, it’s insane to think that you guys have been doing this for almost a decade now. It’s cool to see that you were joining the ranks as all the Midwest emo bands were really taking off. And even before then, you guys were growing up when punk rock was kind of in its heyday. When I listen to your music, I definitely hear both but I wanted to get the down-low on your main influences and the integral bands that you came to love and even incorporate stylistically.
J: It can change by the day. Back in the early days, we had grown up in middle and elementary school listening to that prime age of pop punk. Blink-182 and Green Day, they were kind of like the first bands you listen to where you’re like “Oh, this is awesome, we can play it on our guitars and it sounded good as 12-year-olds.” And then I think what happens is you find the gateway band into a genre, and then you start listening to that band’s favorite bands which led us to get into a heavier, more emo tone. We were really into a lot of 90s punk rock when we first started out, and that’s bands like Lagwagon, Alkaline Trio, MXPX, No Use for a Name, No FX. We also listen to a lot of standard emo stuff, like Alex and I both grew up loving My Chemical Romance, Taking Back Sunday, New Found Glory, all that stuff. Then in the 2010s, you had that reenergized emo sound with bands—a lot of Chicago bands like Real Friends and Knuckle Puck. There’s a whole easycore/hardcore side to what the band does, too, that’s where we get a lot of the breakdowns and chugs, screaming, etc. Yeah, so like a heavier tone, mixed in with 90s skate punk, early 2000s pop-punk, 2010s pop-punk... throw it all together, you get Bad Planning.
C: I definitely think that makes for an insanely well-rounded sound, too. Like anybody who’s ever loved any part of emo or punk rock music can find something they know in your music. So going from taking in these influences to putting the pen to the paper, what are some of your favorite Bad Planning tracks?
J: I think my favorite tracks are yet to be released – this upcoming album is definitely the best music and the best quality of recording we’ve ever had, too. But there’s a song that’s on a split with A Semester Abroad that came out in 2019 called Be Brave. That one hits hard. It’s everything I love in punk music: it’s really fast, it’s emotional, it’s got a really catchy chorus, good guitar licks. And it has a breakdown, too at the end so you get a nice “Ugh!” you know? Like some good head bangs in there. A Year Without Sleep is one Alex wrote about his one-year-old daughter, writing about that process during Covid. Those are my favorites to do live, I like to listen to them on my own as well [laughs].
Claire: I’m glad to hear that, what’s the fun if you don’t give them a listen on your own? So, I know you mentioned you’re working with Jump Start now, how has that experience been?
Jack: Absolutely, so Jump Start came on after we sent them over the masters for this album. They’ve been great, they teamed us up with Earshot Media which is a media company that connects us with various podcasts, different websites and articles and such. So being able to be in that network with Earshot Media and also having the support of Jump Start to create content has been great. We’re actually able to press our album to vinyl through Jump Start, too. It’s been huge! You know, it hasn’t really impacted our songwriting process at all, we’re still the same band and they respect that, too. It’s a big step for a band to sign with a label and having Jump Start has just been like adding another member to the Bad Planning team, so it’s been great to have their support.
C: Well congratulations, I’m glad to hear that’s working out as well as it is! I’m pumped to hear this album, it sounds like it’s going to be amazing. There are so many questions I want to ask you about it but the main thing I wanted to know – as far as your writing process goes, what do you think about how you guys grew as a band and how you progressed into this album?
J: Definitely, so I think as we got a little older as people during the year that was Covid, our sound definitely matured as well. It got heavier, it got more refined, and it definitely got more collaborative. Back in the early days, we had simpler music on our releases. With Et Fortes, we had support from all members of the band. We had Alex on the lyrics, our drummer Miles absolutely kicked butt on this album, he came up with drum beats we never could have imagined. Our bass player Aaron, there was one moment in the studio – I’m not going to say which song – but we had this big break in the song and nothing to put there. So we said, “Hey Aaron, why don’t you do a bass solo here?” And so he’s like, “Alright!” and just rips out, on his first try, something really sick! And it’s one of our favorite parts of the whole album. I also helped with guitar licks and melodies. So it all added up to a much more refined sound and a much bigger sound. Everyone in the band is really happy with it, it shows a lot of growth for the band and for us as people.
C: Well your sound is already so infectious, I have no doubt that this album is going to be big. When you think of your listeners, is there any specific message you’re trying to get across?
J: Well of course we want as many people as possible to hear it, but I don’t know that there’s a specific message that we want. But, you know, if it just kind of exists on Spotify for a million years, if we don’t ever become big that’s fine, too. It was really rewarding for us. We wanted the album to be a piece of work that people could relate to, that they could jam out to. A lot of the album’s content came out during Covid, so a lot of those feelings of isolation and anger when it comes to politics or family life definitely came out in this album. It’s very evident and when you hear it, you’ll know. We want people to know they’re loved, know that they have sound they can turn on and vent to, and rock out to with their friends.
C: For sure, and I know Covid messed up touring for quite a while but now that things are getting back to where they were I’ve gotta know – what‘s coming up for you guys? I’m sure you’ve got some pretty cool things coming down the pipe.
J: So, historically Bad Planning has been a local band, and it’s really with this release that we’re starting to get out there more. On the horizon even just next month, we’re heading out to Indianapolis playing Hoosier Dome for the first time with The Day After, Crunkasaurus Rex, and Action/Adventure. A lot of really big, talented bands and we could not be more excited. Once we hit Indy, I think that’ll be the farthest we’ve been away from Chicago but this summer we’ll be on the road a little bit longer than that. We can’t wait to actually play some of these songs off Et Fortes to people, we’ve been sitting on these songs for a year and we want to play the new stuff!
C: Awesome, well I can’t wait to see where those summer shows take you next. In terms of past tours, do you have any favorite memories?
J: Yeah, in terms of favorite shows I’ve played, I mentioned Lagwagon – Lagwagon was this huge skate punk band in the 90s that Alex and I listened to when we first started listening to punk rock music back in our high school days. So they were coming to Chicago and they got Covid and had to cancel tour dates. They were going to do two shows back to back and play a full album at each show, but since they had to cancel the dates they just combined those two shows into one night. We got to be a part of that one at Bottom Lounge in December, and it was by far the most amount of people we played in front of. It was really unforgettable. Even now when we’re just sitting around as a band once in a while we’ll be like, ”Did that happen? Did we really play in front of 700 people with Lagwagon?” We’re hoping more of those shows come around in the future, we think that they will.
C: Absolutely. So between all the touring, writing, and promoting, what do you guys get up to?
J: We are busy in a million other ways outside of Bad Planning. Alex is a dad of two kids now, he’s a full-time firefighter/EMT. All the members of the band work full time, actually. Bad Planning is the side project. We put our heart and soul into it, but we have to be able to support ourselves. So yeah, what do we do outside of the band? We have jobs [laughs].
C: I don’t know, I’d argue that the jobs are the real side hustles here!
J: Yeah, the heart and soul definitely go into the “side hustle,” but the job is the real side gig. We’re just trying to support what we’re trying to do here.
C: One last question for you – you guys have been at this for almost 10 years, and you’ve been able to work up to this point where everything is really coming together. Where do you see Bad Planning going from here?
J: That’s a great question. I think we would be comfortable even if it went nowhere. We’re not basing a lot of our self-validation on the fact that Bad Planning is going to be a huge band one day. We don’t even know if we want it to be, we just know that we love this music and for us, it’s all about writing the music. So where I can see it going is definitely us releasing more complicated, heavier, better music one day. And we’ve already started—we’re already writing our next release even though our previous release hasn’t come out yet, and we know that the songs on the next one are going to be even better than the ones we love on Et Fortes. We’re just looking forward to writing better music. Playing shows with big bands is super fun, too, we’d love to travel as much as we can. But of course having a job makes that tough. So yeah, Bad Planning could be huge one day, but it also could just be our pride and joy and I think we’d be fine with it either way.
New single Throw now streaming on Spotify.
Pre-order Et Fortes merch and vinyl available now!
Get your tickets for Hoosier Dome here.
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Instagram: @badplanningband
Twitter: @badplanningil
Facebook: @badplanning
