Photo by Emily Dubin.
Jordan Hudkins, the frontman for West Virginia band Rozwell Kid, is sitting at a lengthy wooden table, flanked by bassist Devin Donnelly, drummer Sean Hallock, and guitarist Adam Meisterhans. He’s been busy putting up a series of gig advertisements on his Instagram page. All of them are obnoxiously-watermarked photos of different dogs wearing headphones and looking at laptops, with the show details pasted crudely on top. “Do you want to see the picture I made for tonight’s show?” he asks me at one point. “This dog is reading a newspaper article he is not happy about,” he reasons. “‘The tax on dog bones is going up.’” His bandmates chuckle uncontrollably.
Meisterhans turns to me with a grin: “Are you enjoying the peek behind the curtain?”
The band has reason to be giddy. Their sophomore full-length, Precious Art, on California label SideOneDummy has been a long-time coming, and it’s tied up in a bit of personal history for Hudkins. The first rock show he ever attended was Suicide Machines on the tour for their album A Match And Some Gasoline—which was also released by SideOneDummy. The circularity is fitting; Precious Art is a record on which Hudkins often revisits and recontextualizes his childhood.
Lyrically, Precious Art addresses adolescent anxiety, growing up, friendship, displacement, and heartbreak, but it’s littered with references to MadTV, futons, boogers, and Michael Keaton’s turn as Batman in the 1989 film. Hudkins writes in relatable specifics; he repurposes unremarkable objects or pop culture touchstones as vehicles for conveying grand human emotion. At first pass, the songs scan as humorous, and while that’s not entirely untrue, they also highlight the fact that humans are socialized to express serious matters in self-deprecating ways. When we hear these goofy references as genuine, sincere sentiments, we open ourselves to understanding different ways of getting at emotional truths. Is it just a cute photo of a dog, or is he mad about the impending bone tax?
After we finish our coffees, we head over to Everybody Hits, a Girard Avenue institution. Though it’s mostly occupied by batting cages, Everybody Hits also hosts shows. (Hallock, who lives close by, says that he played bass in a No Doubt cover band here.) The owner’s dog is sprawled on a picnic table in front of the cages, and Hudkins asks his bandmates which bat he should use. He runs his fingers over the helmets hanging on the fence, and takes pictures of the guys at bat. Revisiting one’s childhood, indeed.
