We Came From Celluloid

Nicky P
  • 5.0 (1)
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  • Updated Weekly

At the intersection of music and movies, there is a band from Ohio. These are their conversations on life, music, and more.

  1. What Does "Heavy" Actually Mean? Architects, Orchestras, and Calculated Loudness ft. TJ Costanza of Neighbor Dan | We Came From Celluloid 017-G

    1d ago ·  Video

    What Does "Heavy" Actually Mean? Architects, Orchestras, and Calculated Loudness ft. TJ Costanza of Neighbor Dan | We Came From Celluloid 017-G

    Welcome back to We Came From Celluloid, the podcast where two musicians who think too hard about movies talk to other musicians who think too hard about everything else. I'm Nicky P., Brian Pritchard is here doing his thing, and today we've got TJ Costanza from Neighbor Dan, a band out of the Youngstown/Mercer, PA area that plays what one very smart show attendee once described as "calculated loudness." That description is doing a lot of work and I love it. Neighbor Dan plays in a space that's genuinely hard to define. They came up through heavy music, they've got melodic vocals, they've got riffs that hit like slow-motion freight trains, and they categorically refuse to be pinned down to a genre. Brian picked up Baroness comparisons. I went Boys Night Out. They got Alien Ant Farm once, which they were weirdly okay with. The point is: this is a band worth figuring out. What we get into: What "heavy" actually means, and why thrash doesn't qualify, classical sometimes does, and piano pieces can make you feel like someone's demolishing the room you're standing in. TJ headbangs to orchestral music and I respect that more than I probably should. The writing dynamic inside Neighbor Dan, a Beatles-style split where whoever brings the song writes the lyrics, with room for group input. They call it collaborative. I call it the only system that actually works long-term. Building a scene in Youngstown: Westside Bowl, Cedars, Penguin City Brewery, and the value of having at least a few people in your city who just show up to see whoever's playing. TJ says those people skew young and that gives him hope. Same, man. How they linked up with Joe Petrick (Ten Thousand Rambos, The Family Riot) through a Cleveland fest, and why having a boots-on-the-ground person in every city is the whole secret to making touring work. Being dads in a band, and the surprisingly liberating answer of "the band isn't too serious." TJ's daughter is 17 and mostly does her own thing. He's in five bands, plays drums for money, plays guitar in this one. The friendship is the infrastructure. The That Thing You Do! tangent that turned into a musicology rant. Tom Hanks wrote one of the catchiest songs in fictional music history and people tried to sue him over it. I have strong feelings. Brian has yet to see the movie. Also: Ween's country album is a masterpiece, three of the four people in Neighbor Dan are actually drummers (yes really), and we spend a solid few minutes figuring out why STRFKR had drums everywhere on stage when they were technically a synth band. Come see Neighbor Dan with us on June 19th (Juneteenth, as my wife would say... actually, she wouldn't say that) at the show in Cleveland. Their big closing track "Until the Shaking Stops" from Compositions from God's Gray Earth is the one. Watch for new single "Jet Speed Geometries" dropping soon. Subscribe, rate, and review wherever you get your podcasts. If you know somebody who thinks thrash counts as heavy, send them this episode and let them learn.

    37 min
  2. Three Table Legs, Tour Prep, and Kevin Smith's Hired Gun Problem | We Came From Celluloid 017

    Jun 7 ·  Video

    Three Table Legs, Tour Prep, and Kevin Smith's Hired Gun Problem | We Came From Celluloid 017

    Welcome back to We Came From Celluloid, where Brian and I have started filming ourselves just vibing about music and film until something catches fire. This week is one of those episodes where we don't have a film on the docket, just two guys in Ohio who are currently overwhelmed and somehow still talking into microphones about it.   Here's the deal: Brian has this thing he calls the three table legs of his life, music, work, personal, and he's trying to keep all three from wobbling simultaneously while generating what he calls "a flurry of activity." I, meanwhile, am violating my number one personal rule, never be good at anything you don't want to do, because I know too much about podcasting and promotion and now I can't escape it. This is basically our creative therapy session.   We also get deep into a Kevin Smith rabbit hole that was absolutely necessary. The Cop Out discourse has been 25 years in the making, and Brian's passionate defense of Mallrats might be the realest thing he's ever said on this show. We talk about what happens to artists who abandon their personal statement to become hired guns, and why Red State happening after Cop Out actually makes a lot of sense.   Physical media nostalgia alert: Reel Big Fish's enhanced CD from 1995, 240p video for "Sellout," Kevin Smith's bizarre four-hour interactive Cop Out Blu-ray feature that Warner Brothers was trying to make happen, we somehow land on the idea that bonus features are their own mini art form, and I stand by that.   Also in this one: Puma Thurman tour updates, acoustic recording plans for The Outsiders EP, the tragedy of Reel Big Fish reuniting with Scott Klopstein while we're out of town, DoHm band practice sounding genuinely good, and Brian's ongoing fantasy of someone asking him to walk through the DoHm discography song by song. (Brian, I'm asking. Let's do the commentary album.)   This is a short one, we're dropping it to make room for our next musician interview. But sometimes a twenty-minute check-in between two creatives trying to keep the plates spinning is exactly the episode you need.   Subscribe wherever you get podcasts.

    23 min
  3. Joe Petrich of IREWYRM on Creative Survival, the Art of Instinctual Writing, and the Modern Minstrel | We Came From Celluloid Episode 016-G

    May 25 ·  Video

    Joe Petrich of IREWYRM on Creative Survival, the Art of Instinctual Writing, and the Modern Minstrel | We Came From Celluloid Episode 016-G

    There's a moment somewhere in the middle of this episode where Joe Petrich says he was "truly, truly miserable," and the word he uses, twice, lands differently than you'd expect from a guy who's been in bands for thirty years and toured with Trans-Siberian Orchestra and done the Eyehategod run and opened for Cannibal Corpse with a band that had a trombone player. He wasn't being dramatic. He was just saying: I stopped creating, and I couldn't function. That's what this episode is actually about. Joe is our tour mate, a Cleveland original, and the guy behind Ten Thousand Rambos, The Family Riot, Happy Rainbow Death, and whatever comes next. He came in and just talked, honestly, directly, the way people who've been doing this a long time tend to. We got into stage presence and why being memorably awful is infinitely better than being forgettable. We got into the weird geography of the Cleveland music scene and how the East Side/West Side divide shaped a generation of bands that never quite found each other until later. We got into the moment when Joe stepped back from writing for the first time in his life and how bad that got. Brian had this thing he's been working through about art for art's sake, the idea that even on a desert island with no audience, he'd still wanna make stuff, just because creative expression is part of what it means to be alive. Joe heard that and matched it, talking about how he and Scott built Ten Thousand Rambos deliberately without a plan, just throwing riffs and instincts at each other to see what stuck. And how that leftover song they didn't finish in time for the first album sat around until Scott figured out the perfect thing to say, and now it's one of Joe's favorites they play. There's also a detour through John Waters, mystery bands from the Southern Tier of New York, what the Dave Brockie quote about true artists and unprofitable music actually means, and why anyone who posts a dramatic "I'm retiring from music" announcement on Facebook will absolutely be back within six months. We're three lifers in a room. That much is obvious. And maybe that's the only thing worth saying about this one.

    1h 1m
  4. Staying in the Game, Niche Audiences, and How We Actually Met | We Came From Celluloid 016

    May 25 ·  Video

    Staying in the Game, Niche Audiences, and How We Actually Met | We Came From Celluloid 016

    There's a voice memo I've never sent anyone. It's from a parking lot outside a venue in Columbus, some year that doesn't matter, and it's just me going "I think I just met my guy." I don't know why I'm telling you this. I just know that this episode ends with how Brian and I actually met, buried at the back like an Easter egg for people who made it all the way through, and it felt like the right way to open this thing. Episode 016 starts, as many of our episodes do, with us arguing about a band you've probably never heard of. Brian got turned onto an artist named Echo Vandal by our guy Connor, who might be the only reason Brian has heard a new song in the last decade, and I mean that lovingly. I deep dived on her, did not emerge a fan, and we disagreed about whether the problem was her range or my taste. (It was her range. Brian is wrong.) This somehow became a conversation about artist identity, brand consistency, and the trap of being too many things to too many people, which is a real thing, and also a convenient excuse for why I'm picky about female vocalists, and I stand by both. Then Brian pulls out the whole "mile wide versus inch deep" framework, which, credit where it's due, is actually a good framework, and we end up talking about the 1,000 true fans model. Do you want 100,000 people who are lukewarm on you, or 1,000 people who would drive four hours to a show and already bought the shirt? The math on that one's not complicated. And if you've ever cleaned your email list and felt weirdly great about deleting people, you already know what we're talking about. We also go somewhere this show hasn't gone before: a real conversation about institutional abuse of power. Brian brings up Hollywood's history and we end up in a full conversation about the Louis CK situation, Brendan Fraser, Terry Crews, and the way that power, not just the entertainment industry, not just the church, not just the Scouts, but power itself, acts as a magnet for the exact kind of people who will break the people around them. I have an opinion about this that Brian pushed back on, which I appreciated, and we somehow ended up more aligned than we started. It's a real conversation. Not a hot take. And then, because this is us, we buried the origin story at the very end. How Brian and I met. How a busted gig, a last-minute acoustic trio, and Kevin Farley doing us a favor by foisting us off on each other changed both of our lives. I'll let Brian tell it. He tells it better. Subscribe, rate, and review We Came From Celluloid wherever you listen. Follow us for more of the conversations that happen when two guys from Ohio take film and music too seriously.

    38 min
  5. Total Recall, Point Break, The Saddest Ending in Cinema History, and "Four Levels of Inception" | We Came From Celluloid 015

    May 13 ·  Video

    Total Recall, Point Break, The Saddest Ending in Cinema History, and "Four Levels of Inception" | We Came From Celluloid 015

    Brian mentioned to me at practice the other day, that he had something to tell me but he was gonna wait until the show. Brian doesn't do that. Brian is not a "wait until the show" guy. So naturally I spent the whole drive home running through scenarios. The reality: Connor wrote a song, and wanted it to be about Total Recall. Specifically the "See you at the party, Richter" moment where Arnold rips off Ironside's arms. Good instinct, honestly. But Brian, being Brian, couldn't just do the obvious thing. He found his way in through the fat suit. If you've seen Total Recall, and if you haven't, I genuinely don't know what you've been doing, there's a sequence where Arnold goes undercover as a vacationing woman in a lifelike body suit. It's his big plan. He loves this plan. He is extremely confident in this plan. And Brian, sitting with that image, wrote the line: "Yellow dress, two weeks, it's exactly what a man needs. Red wig, what a dream. Ironside will never find me." That's when I pointed out that we have a character who is: a construction worker who believes he might be a super spy, who is confirmed to be a super spy, who is now trapped inside a woman's body, and who is panicking and can only say "two weeks," which is the only phrase the body suit knows. We are going four levels of Inception deep on a 1990 Paul Verhoeven movie, and somehow that's where the profound stuff lives. We also get into Brian's pitch for a Point Break song, specifically the moment Keanu throws his badge in the sand and walks away. His description of it as "a hollowed out shell of a man in a jean jacket in the rain" is genuinely one of the better things said on this show, immediately followed by us spending five minutes arguing about what to name the song. Current frontrunner: "Wet Jeans." There's also a detour through the Puma Thurman production queue, Three of a Kind is taking shape as the next record, Brown Coat Man is close, Mr. Hand is confirmed and weirder than you think, and Brian discovered that you can do basic multi-tracking inside the iPhone Voice Memos app and is extremely excited about it. Meanwhile I'm dealing with Google Drive autonomously deleting terabytes of my life, so. If you ever wondered how songs actually get made, or what two middle-aged rock dudes in Ohio think about Total Recall at length, this is your episode. New Puma Thurman EP The Outsiders is out now everywhere. Summer tour announced. More at wecamefromcelluloid.com.

    29 min
  6. Imperil's Corey Azok on Songwriting, Peabody's Nostalgia, and the Horror of Wanting Attention | We Came From Celluloid 014-G

    May 8

    Imperil's Corey Azok on Songwriting, Peabody's Nostalgia, and the Horror of Wanting Attention | We Came From Celluloid 014-G

    Welcome back to We Came From Celluloid. I'm Nicky P, here as always with Brian, and this week we went and made it a tripod. Corey, vocalist from Imperil, a Cleveland-area band we shared a stage with a couple weeks back, joined us, and what started as a get-to-know-you conversation about local music turned into something I wasn't expecting: a pretty honest conversation about what it actually takes to build something that matters. Corey found his band the way most good things happen, accidentally, through the internet, and because someone saw him doing a solo acoustic set at the Garford Arts Fest in Elyria and thought, 'yeah, that voice could work.' He spent the first year of the band not gigging, just writing and practicing until they were ready, which is the kind of discipline I respect even while admitting I've performed songs I don't have full lyrics for. We're all doing our best out here. The conversation found its center early when Brian and I started talking about what Maple Grove has started to feel like, a place where bands that don't know each other keep ending up on the same bill, and why that matters. I went on what I'll acknowledge was probably a little bit of a rant about music scenes, how Seattle wasn't just a sound, it was a group of friends. How Coheed and MCR didn't come out of nowhere; they came out of a very specific New Jersey and New York orbit that included Glassjaw. How the early '90s Chapel Hill indie scene was basically a dozen people who cared about each other's work. And how the Cleveland scene, for all its talent, has a bad habit of eating itself. I'd like to see that change. I think Corey would too. On the film side of things, Corey had just gone to see New Faces of Death, the new movie built around the mythology of the original Faces of Death snuff films. His description of the central twist, that the killer starts out targeting influencers and ends up becoming one, telling himself he has to give his fans what they want, is genuinely the most interesting horror premise I've heard summarized in a while. We went from there to Hostel, Human Centipede (both the one you think it is and the one it actually is), and Martyrs, which I am once again recommending to everyone. And then somehow we landed on Bo Burnham's Inside, specifically the way it interrogates whether anything any of us is putting out into the world actually needs to be there. Brian closed it the way Brian closes things, with something you didn't realize you needed to hear. The idea that even something temporary, even something that doesn't last, even a conversation that no one records, the act of creating it is worthwhile. The footprints in the sand before the tide comes in. And then Imperil played us out with '4 Days Alone In Alaska,' which you can hear at the end of the episode. Give it a listen. These guys are worth your time. Subscribe, rate, and review We Came From Celluloid wherever you get your podcasts. And go check out Imperil.

    53 min
  7. CD Baby Drama, Robert Frost, and Two Guys Trying to Etch Their Work in Stone | We Came From Celluloid 014

    May 8 ·  Video

    CD Baby Drama, Robert Frost, and Two Guys Trying to Etch Their Work in Stone | We Came From Celluloid 014

    Welcome back to We Came From Celluloid, where two middle-aged musicians from Ohio sit down with absolutely no agenda and end up somehow solving problems they didn't know they had. I'm Nicky P, here with Brian Pritchard, and this week we went in with nothing and came out with an actual business idea that I am legally not supposed to talk about, and then talked about it anyway.   Here's how it went: Brian picked up a physical media copy of The Outsiders complete novel cut, the one mixed by our guy Michael Seifert, which is its own weird little piece of synergy, and got excited about a commentary track featuring Patrick Swayze, Ralph Macchio, Diane Lane, C. Thomas Howell, Matt Dillon, and Rob Lowe. That's not a commentary track, that's a reunion. Naturally we started talking about commentary tracks in general, which pulled me into a Venture Brothers rabbit hole, which somehow connected back to the Robert Frost poem at the heart of The Outsiders, which led to me admitting that Ben Folds wrote one of the most meaningful lyrics of my life, which led to a genuine reckoning with the small town I've spent most of my adult life trying to pretend I'm not from.   Somewhere in the middle of all of this, Brian started talking about graveside QR codes.   That's where things got interesting. The idea is simple and kind of beautiful: what if you could scan a headstone and hear a person's story? What if funeral homes offered a narrated slideshow, you come in, bring your photos, talk about your life, and that became part of your legacy? It's the kind of idea that sounds obvious the second you hear it and then you can't believe nobody's doing it at scale. And then we went further, because we always go further: the problem isn't the idea. The problem is the link goes dead. The company hosting it folds. The cloud evaporates. And suddenly your legacy project is a 404 error.   Which brought us to cave paintings. Thirty-five, forty thousand years old. Somebody drew a bear on a wall. Nobody told them to. There was no art gallery, no streaming platform, no CD Baby distribution delay. They just etched it in stone. And here we are in 2024, talking about it on a podcast. That's the thing neither of us knows how to do with our music. How do you etch it in stone when everything lives in the cloud?   We also talk about the tour prep grind, the merch situation (Puma Thurman in the P***y Wagon font from Kill Bill — yes, we're doing it), DistroKid vs. CD Baby, road trip philosophy, why I have never once in my life wanted to go on a road trip without a destination, and what it means to have never spent a single night away from your wife since the day you met her and now you're about to go on tour.   It's one of those episodes. No plan, no guest, no guardrails. Just two guys who've been in a band together long enough to start finishing each other's philosophical spirals.   Subscribe and rate wherever you listen. If you know someone who still buys physical media and has opinions about commentary tracks, this is their episode.

    32 min
  8. Jug Band Bass, Buke & Gase's Final Show, and the Dad Band Backlog Nobody Warned Us About | We Came From Celluloid 013

    May 1

    Jug Band Bass, Buke & Gase's Final Show, and the Dad Band Backlog Nobody Warned Us About | We Came From Celluloid 013

    Welcome back to We Came From Celluloid. I'm Nicky P, here with Brian Pritchard, and this week's episode was supposed to be a casual check-in. Instead it turned into a full-on rabbit hole about how instruments actually work, why two of the weirdest bassists in rock history happened to be roommates, and the ongoing soap opera that is trying to finish a Puma Thurman record while also, you know, being alive. We open with some genuine excitement, Brian sent over tracks, things are starting to sound like something, and there is a light at the end of a tunnel we have been walking through for a very long time. We're talking about the process of recording music when you're a working band with jobs and kids and other obligations, and how the backlog of material just kind of accumulates until one day you look up and realize you've got multiple EPs in various states of done-ness and zero of them are out. Classic dad band problem. The emotional center of the episode, though, is New Soul, a Puma Thurman track with a history. The whole EP it lives on was recorded once, destroyed when Nicky P's daughter poured a soda on his laptop, and then recorded again entirely from scratch. The version they have now is getting closer to where it needs to be, and hearing Brian break down the actual guitar discovery behind those opening chords, fingers on the fifth fret sliding to the first, stumbling into something that reminded him of the Neverending Story score, is the kind of moment that reminds you why these guys started making music in the first place. From there, the conversation goes exactly where you'd expect from two guys who grew up on this stuff: Jack White's two-by-four pickup stunt in It Might Get Loud, cigar box guitars, jug band bass (which is exactly what it sounds like, one string, a broom handle, a wash basin, and your whole soul), and somehow, inevitably, the banjo. Brian's discovery of Buke & Gase, a two-piece that built their own instruments and whose final-ever show was this past weekend in Hudson, New York, is genuinely moving in the way only music people talking about music can be. He bought tickets. He couldn't justify the drive. The show sold out anyway and he gave his spots away to someone who needed them more. And then the roommate thing. Mark Sandman of Morphine, the guy who took the frets off his bass, set it up for a slide and decided a saxophone was a better rhythm section than a guitarist happened to live with Chris Ballew of The Presidents of the United States of America, who was also pulling strings off guitars and playing with the physics of the instrument. Two people, in the same apartment, separately deciding that the rules were optional. Make of that what you will. This one ends with tour news and the kind of cautious optimism that comes with having six dates on a shirt that looks like it belongs on a shirt. Midwest, summer, Puma Thurman is coming. Stay tuned. Subscribe, rate, and review We Came From Celluloid wherever you listen. Follow along for tour updates, new music, and the ongoing saga of getting all these songs out of a hard drive and into the world.

    31 min
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About

At the intersection of music and movies, there is a band from Ohio. These are their conversations on life, music, and more.

Information

  • Creator
    Nicky P
  • Years Active
    2025 - 2026
  • Episodes
    20
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © 2025
  • Show Website
    We Came From Celluloid