Wassup Foolie are two cool dudes named Andy Richardson and Taylor Kohl and together they make a strangely unique brand of humorous, lo-fi art pop. There is something very particular about their sound that I can’t quite pinpoint, but it reminds me of Coma Cinema/Elvis Depressedly, or one of Sam Ray‘s many musical projects (Teen Suicide, cute boy kissing booth). The two tracks currently resting on their SoundCloud page, “I drove past the cop’s house” and “God make it rain girl juice” are definitely deserving of some proper attention.

Stream both below & peep the official video for “I drove past the cop’s house”:

Brett Yale is the founder of BMORE MUSIC, a music blog dedicated to supporting the ever-changing multi-faceted music scene of Baltimore. He also is the co-founder of Friends Records and regularly contributes to Impose Magazine. Today he brings us an in depth visual aided interview with one half of Teen Suicide, Sam Ray:

Growing up in between Baltimore and Washington, it’s weird that I haven’t encountered that many Baltimore musicians that grew up where I did. But, when I started chatting with Sam Ray, it soon became clear that this would be one of those rare occurrences.

The thing is, I already somehow knew Sam grew up in my hometown. And if he hadn’t, he would probably have grown up somewhere exactly the same somewhere else. Sam’s new band, Teen Suicide, provides an infectiously raw blend of angst-filled pop music– the kind that bottles every relatable emotion indicative of growing up in the suburbs in the United States of America.

In addition to his music projects Teen Suicide and Ricky Eat Acid, Sam’s also a photographer. I asked Sam to pass along a collection of photos from where we both grew up in Howard County, Maryland. After that, Sam and I talked about the photos, his band, growing up, ghosts, bouncy bridges, and skateboarding.

 …

Brett Yale: Sam, tell us about Teen Suicide.

Sam Ray: Teen suicide is a pop band. we have a million influences – we flail around like a punk band, we grew up listening to Rites of Spring and other emo bands and it shows. We love garage, doo wop, a million other genres, but it all comes down to pop music for me.

Growing up I started writing songs that were really lyric-focused, the typical teenage sort of thing. But in high school I totally fell in love with pop music. A lot of my friends had this incredible knack for pop songwriting where they could take the simplest lyrics and the simplest music and turn it into something absolutely timeless, affecting, and sometimes haunting that stuck with me forever. I hope one day I can do the same thing, even if it’s sometimes covered in a thick layer of noise.

As for the band itself, it’s currently me and my friend Eric, who I’ve known for years. He plays drums and contributes more than he realizes probably, as I wouldn’t be doing this at all if it wasn’t for him. He pushes me to write and improve constantly. If he doesn’t like a song I write, I won’t record it. So he’s a big part of this and I’m really glad he’s committed to it.

Brett: You and I both grew up in Columbia, Maryland, founded as one of the first “planned communities” by James Rouse. Describe your suburban upbringing.

Sam: It was definitely very interesting. Columbia’s a pretty nice area, but it’s got a lot of seedy things going on at the same time. I was kind of between those worlds, and I feel like I experienced more in middle school and high school than I did later in college. Still, most of our free time was spent hanging out in parking lots, skating, exploring abandoned places, hanging out in rivers, driving around aimlessly, playing pool in basements, and singing songs in my living room. We used to have ten or twenty people come to my house and just smoke hookah and sing songs, play board games, video games, do whatever. it was really cool, and something I definitely miss.

Brett: The photo above brought me back to the times when just hanging out in an anonymous parking lot, doing just about anything, was the norm. Was this at a pool? Convenience store? Roller rink? Gas station?  Describe this visit to the anonymous parking lot.

Sam: You got it, that photo’s from Dorsey Hall pool in Dorsey Search. A ton of my friends lived walking distance from it and I would go hang out all day in the summer there – after I turned sixteen I’d drive over and we’d hang out at night. There was never anything to do at the pool, and we never actually went inside, but we almost always met up there and spent about two or three hours trying to decide what to do before actually doing anything productive with our days or nights.

That particular day was like any of those days, where a group of kids, some with skateboards and some just hanging out, were milling around that parking lot and the basketball court, not doing anything in particular. I think it thunder-stormed shortly after I took this photo and we all drove to someone’s house. But really all those days blur together (and it’s only been like four years).

Brett: Much like this photo could be any establishment’s parking lot, I feel like the music of Teen Suicide could apply to a whole variety of emotions we’ve all felt growing up. Where do the lyrics and feelings behind this songs stem from?

Sam: The lyrics for our songs come from a variety of places. A lot of it is that aimless, almost hopeless feeling from growing up where you don’t have any clue what’s going to happen. It’s definitely post-teen and there’s no nostalgia trip going on. I know I should be going to school and doing something with my life like society expects, but all I want to do is hang out, work menial jobs, make music, and see my friends for as long as I can. Some of the songs are an attempt to figure out which choice is “right” or “wrong”, since I can’t really do both. But at the same time they deal heavily with girls, drugs, totally pointless days spent driving around, and just general apathy.

Brett: Old Ellicott City is an old mill town, and was such a weird place to me growing up. I remember having nightmares when I was super young about the crazy historic floods that happened there. It’s also where I first learned how to drink underage at a bar. What were your experiences down there?

Sam: Man, I only saw it flood once and that was pretty recently, after the last hurricane we had. I don’t think it was even because of the hurricane, it was just sometime after that when it rained a lot. It was pretty intense. Growing up, we’d go there to eat at the little hole in the wall restaurants and shop at the bookstores. My favorite bookstore is gone now, since when I was a kid one of the restaurants caught fire and the store was next door to it. I remember I could see the smoke from my house.

When I was older, Ellicott city was more a place we’d go to hang out and generally do nothing in. It was close enough that we could drive to hell house/river road and hang out in the river/go rope swinging if it was hot, or if it was cold we’d just get coffee at one of the overpriced (but locally run!) coffee shops. It has this weird charm but I could totally see it being nightmarish too, especially considering how haunted it’s supposed to be.

Brett: This feels like a common journey to one of those places in the woods where you’d explore and hang out. Those were the outings that kids went on with their friends to escape the rest of the world. Did moments like those somehow shape your music?

Sam: Definitely, without a doubt. This picture is a picture of my friend Blinka walking into a place we called “the valley” on July 4. Atholton High kids called it “paradise” but we all knew that wasn’t its name. If you went one way in the valley, you ended up on this path that took you all around through the woods. if you went another way, you ended up in “hell” which was this burned out old playground no one used. From hell you could walk across a bunch of rocks and fallen trees into the river, and we’d hang out on those rocks in the river all day, playing instruments and painting. I had some of the most defining experiences of my life there, and I’ve written a million songs trying to capture that feeling of just hanging out in the valley and doing nothing. There’s a song literally called “hanging out in the valley” on the last Ricky Eat Acid album that attempts just that.

Brett: There were always weird giant storm drains somewhere along the outskirts of the neighborhoods, but this picture makes it look sort of foreign/militaristic – almost like there was a presence there all along that we as kids didn’t know about.

Sam: Well, one time a friend of mine went jogging in the valley at night and ended up in hell along the river, where he said he saw a huge foreign looking creature beating on the rocks. He had no clue what it was, but it looked up at him and he ran away. This is most likely completely made up, but that’s part of the fun. Other kids said they would see nooses appear on the trees, or on the playground. Which is more plausible, as a seedy crowd definitely ran through there from time to time. still, the supernatural aspect of it is a lot of fun, and a big part of growing up somewhere like this. I definitely get the weird presence vibe though in a militaristic way, but it always comes back to ghosts for some reason.

Brett: This is your house, there appears to be a drum set in the kitchen? Do tell.

Sam: Yeah! For about a year my friend Aaron lent me his drum set and we kept it in my kitchen, since no one ate at the table anyway. We recorded songs with that set, my piano, and a bunch of other throwaway instruments people gave me. I learned to play drums and also to arrange songs much better in that year, before Aaron took the drum set back.

Brett: This photo is labeled “West Hoco,” which implies its from my neck of the woods. One of my friend’s lived in this old house with ghosts that once fed her cats for her. Do you have any old farm house stories?

 Sam: We used to just drive forever around these random roads and I actually remember where I took this – just not how to get there. It’s a random dirt side road off of another random side road, and at the end of the dirt road was a farm and the woman who lived there had a lot of deaf dogs. I’m not sure if they were all deaf, but she warned me not to run them over because at least one of them was, I guess. She was really nice and let me take this picture of my friend Steph from outside her house.

I don’t have any ghost stories from that day in particular, but my friend Koch, his family had a sweet, awesome farm house that we explored sometimes for fun. We took photos in it and generally just looked through all this really cool, creepy old stuff seeing what we could find.

Brett: You friend has mad ups. If Teen Suicide were a basketball team, how confident would you be in it’s success?

 Sam: We played basketball almost every single day after high school my senior year. Me, Ricky, Koch, Dan, Luagh, and sometimes other kids. We were all pretty terrible – except Koch. Koch played on the basketball team. One time he had his right arm broken and in a cast and he still beat us all at a game of fifty – shooting only left-handed all day. That said, I love playing basketball and I’m not as bad at it as I make myself out to be, haha. I still go shoot around at the end of my street whenever it’s nice outside.

Brett: This is the roof at Henryton. What do you know about Henryton’s history, and what were your experiences there?

Sam: Oh my god I have so many Henryton stories I don’t even know where to start. This roof was from one of the housing buildings where the employees/caretakers lived. We were on the top floor of it, overlooking one of the more industrial, terrifying, patient buildings. It was a really beautiful day – it had rained so much the day before and there was a reservoir of water still on this roof in the shade.

More so than anything else, going to Henryton defined my adolescence. I went there almost every chance I got. probably hundreds of times. Before the auditorium burned down and after. I went there with a ton of people – best friends, girls I had crushes on (that never amounted to anything). I filmed a short film for a class there, I went at night and hung out in the train tunnel. To get to Henryton, you had to either walk 20 minutes up the train tracks, or cross a river.

One time we were walking up the tracks at 3 am when a train came and we were stuck in the tunnel. We hid in the alcoves and when it came through the whole tunnel turned bright gold. It was beautiful. We had a banjo with us. There was a group of kids playing with air soft guns there that night and we snuck up on them and played the song from Deliverance. They were thoroughly unamused.

There were tons of ghosts. One time we were in the basement and it was pitch black but we came to a room that was inexplicably very bright. While we were trying to figure out where the light source was, we heard a loud crashing sound like someone throwing a heavy piece of machinery down a staircase, right next to the room we were in. We ran outside and as soon as we got outside – at dusk, mind you – a woman in the building behind us started screaming hysterically. We never saw anyone else there that day. Very strange. Tons of fun things like that happened at Henryton.

Brett: This reminded me of the skate park in Harper’s Choice where I once flooded a few of the holes on the mini golf course by messing with a waterfall fountain. But, it’s actually taken at a newer park at Centennial Lake. What kinds of dumb things did you do in middle/high school?

 Sam: [Laughs] I actually had friends that worked at the skate park/mini golf course you’re talking about and we’d get in for free and then spend the day hitting golf balls from the highest hill we could find into the parking lot, until we got kicked out. I did all kinds of dumb things – the usual stuff, mostly. Except, I was always really environmentally conscious, so I didn’t like to smash/break things and cause a lot of damage. The dumb things I did were more just practical jokes on my friends, stuff like that. I wasn’t as much of a law-breaking kid, beyond harmless high school things like trespassing and sneaking out.

Brett: You mentioned your friend started this skate park,  how’d that come about?

Sam: Well that’s a park in Centennial that my friend Dan got built his senior year. It was his mentorship project, to get a skate park built, and he spent about two years petitioning the county/state and meeting with executives, holding meetings, stuff like that, before they started listening to him. Seeing that a ton of people were supporting him, they decided to look into it. He helped design it, with a ton of local skater kids (and my friends) going to the meetings and giving their input. Parents got involved too. The park is free. All the local kids take care of it. It’s a total community project.

Brett: Do you remember the old floating bridge at Centennial Lake? When I was little I used to call it the “bouncy bridge.”

Sam: Oh oh yeah, without a doubt! I used to bike around the lake, first as a tiny kid with my mom or dad, and then later on my own. Later I’d just walk around it with friends. I definitely know the bridge you’re talking about. [Laughs] It was certainly bouncy.

Teen Suicide – “everything is fine”  from DC Snuff Film available on Bandcamp.