There isn't anyone quite like Matt Seymour in Richmond. A wisecracking ace of a songwriter who practices DIY values that could seem outdated to outsiders, he has been a part of this musical community for more than a decade, and his dedication has never waned. He lives for moments spent in sweaty basements with a dozen kids screaming along to every word. He’s a romantic that sees the journey on the road as a testimonial to the reasons he picked up a guitar in the first place. In his role as the core of Pedals on Our Pirate Ships, he has never been more vital to this city’s scene.
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Seymour had been in several musical outfits previously, and those groups both provided lessons and acted as templates for the way he could shape his craft. In 2004, he began to play occasional solo outings, which soon led him to seek a title for the project. “I started playing solo shows under my own name until I got sick of seeing it on flyers all the time,” Seymour explains. “That’s when I decided to start playing under the name Pedals on Our Pirate Ships. And just so everybody knows, I had no idea at the time that the acronym spelled out POOPS. So you can stop asking about that now.” The name of the project came from a song that Seymour had been performing solo. An idyllic punk lullaby about camaraderie and always paying attention to what’s important to you, the song is a code of ethics for what Pedals On Our Pirate Ships would be about in the long run. It’s a song about self-discovery and comfort in one’s identity, and it established the foundation for the years to come.
When time came to do a proper release, Seymour found himself in a lucky predicament. “As a belated birthday gift, my friend Joe Mager offered to record my solo stuff,” he explains. “He was working with Lance Koehler at Minimum Wage Studios, and had the space for the whole weekend while Lance was out of town. It seemed like a whole weekend was a lot of time for just me, so we decided to make it into a community project that benefited [Richmond] Recycles [Bike Shop].” The roster that eventually made their way to Minimum Wage Studios was impressive, to say the least. It included everybody from Josh Small to Dave Hughes (The Hot Damns) to Tim Barry to Adam Thompson (The OK Bird) to future POOPS members Adrienne Brown and Casey Martin. The self-titled release is full of variety and offers Seymour’s material interpreted in the most imaginative ways possible. “The whole weekend was an exercise of seeing who would show up and how much of a fun time we could have,” Seymour says. “That was the first time I had met Matt, and I remember showing up not really knowing who anyone was,” says Adrienne Brown. “I had come up with a few harmonies that I wanted to work on and it really meshed well.” Brown’s contributions on that self-titled release can be heard on “Gather Ye Rosebuds” and “Social Segregation,” among others.
After the self-titled release, Seymour decided to relocate. With the connections that he started developing, Bloomington, Indiana seemed like a prime location. The home of Plan-It-X Records, it seemed to be a perfect place to interact with similar folk-punk musicians. However, it wasn't long before he returned to Richmond. “I don’t really want to get into too many details, but I’ll say this much,” Seymour explains. “I think I went there with these idealistic ideas of what was going to happen, and I can’t say that I was wrong doing that, [but] I think I was wrong in setting myself up for that level of disappointment.” Several of the songs that would eventually appear on the next POOPS release, Take Flight, were inspired by this experience.
After returning to Richmond, Seymour set out to find musicians with which to make Pedals On Our Pirate Ships a full band. Recruiting Jameson Price and Michael Otley, the band completed a short tour. But with a recording session approaching, Seymour still needed to round out the lineup. “After that tour, we had realized that one of the members didn’t work out,” Seymour says. “We were slated to return to Minimum Wage, and I figured, why not call back some of the people from the first album’s session? Adrienne and Casey came in and it worked out great. Thankfully, they were into the sound, and when I asked them to join permanently, they were into it.” This recording session would become Take Flight, and help set the stage for the band’s future. “Goodbye Optimism” encompassed Seymour’s experiences in Bloomington. Despite the very frank dissection of his psyche at the time, it’s easy to see that he derived a certain solace by being honest with himself. It may have acted as a saving grace when it counted the most. The undisputable standout track on Take Flight, though, is “The Ballad of Jonny Z.” A eulogy for a friend (Richmond musician/artist Jonathan Zanin) who passed too soon, the song describes the deep impact said friend had not only on Seymour, but on the community as a whole. “Jonny meant a tremendous amount to me, and that goes really without saying,” Seymour reflects. “What gets me to this day is how we go on the road and we meet people that knew him. They have their own stories about what he meant to them, and they have their own way of connecting to that song. It’s a telling way of showing how much of a legacy Jonny left behind.”
After the release of Take Flight, that lineup of the group slowly dwindled away. With Price eventually departing to go abroad with life partner Laney Sullivan (with whom he later formed Lobo Marino), Martin joining Landmines, and Otley deciding to focus on other aspects of his life, POOPS soon consisted solely of Brown and Seymour. Eventually, though, they found an appropriate counterpart in drummer Louis Cyrtmus. Not only did Cyrtmus have a knack for adding creative drum parts to Seymour’s pop-punk anthems, his sense of harmony fit wonderfully with Brown’s remarkable range. The two created a powerful foundation for Seymour’s dirty delivery, thus allowing the group to take their sound beyond folk-punk and incorporate other genres.
Cyrtmus joined the band at a very peculiar stage in their development. “At first, the biggest hurdle for me was learning how to play on the kit that Jameson had constructed,” he says. “With the kick pedal being inside of a trunk that required constant repairs, and the limbs extending from its body holding various other drum essentials, it was something else. It was also a cool point, because it was the time when Pedals was deciding on moving away from the acoustic sound of the earlier records, and really [becoming] a full-on pop-punk band.” “I think that is one of the bigger misconceptions about the band,” Seymour explains. “I know it started with just an acoustic [guitar]. To me, it was always me writing pop-punk songs on that instrument. As I started having more people join the band, the idea of what I always thought Pedals to be started to unveil itself more and more, whether that was through improved songwriting, developed harmonies, or just more instrumentation. It seemed to me that it was always that kind of band, just truncated.”
The first release with Cyrtmus was a split with Atlanta, Georgia’s The Wild, on which each participant covered a song by the other band. Pedals On Our Pirate Ships picked The Wild’s “We’ll Drive These Warlords Out,” for several reasons. “It was an easy song to figure out at first, but then once we got to thinking about it, it was a song that fit the attitude of the band,” Seymour recollects. “When we first met them and went on a tour with The Wild, it was this immediate sensation that we wanted to work with them on something down the road,” Brown adds. “We could have easily picked any song from their incredible catalog. Anything off of Set Ourselves Free would have been awesome, but after all was said and done, I’m happy with the song that we decided on.” Meanwhile, The Wild decided to do a rendition of “The Ballad Of Jonny Z,” thereby further adding to Jonny Z’s legacy in the regional community and beyond.
After the release of the split, the band finally decided they wanted to fully embrace an electric sound. This required one more component, which they found in bassist Richard Bollinger. “Matt and I were working together at 821 Café at the time, and I got a phone call to come meet him at a party late one night,” Bollinger recalls. “I had just played a show where I felt like the band got stiffed, and I was upset about that,” Seymour explains. “I needed to have a friend nearby, and I gave Richard a call. After sitting around and slugging a few beers, I told him that I needed him in Pedals. I thought that he would be the best one to help round out the lineup and help us get to where we needed to be.” The last acoustic release by the group was the six-song EP No Bad Blood, released in 2011 by Say-10 Records. The EP signified a proper send off from the acoustic sound; it has moments that you can imagine being louder, which was the band’s opinion as well.
The time had come to reveal to the world the newest incarnation of Pedals On Our Pirate Ships. This would be done through their third full-length album, A Place To Stay, recorded once again at their home base, Minimum Wage Studios. The pop-punk aesthetic that Seymour had felt was there all along was finally front and center. “Shoot The Hostage” and “Sweet Tragedies,” both first heard on No Bad Blood, found new life on this release. A Place To Stay is the most fully realized of the group’s releases to this point. Each member fits into the overall dynamic of the group, and there is a confidence to the songwriting. From the declarations found in “Knives” about what keeps everyone invested in their respective scenes, to personal sentiments like “Cupid Baby” and “Side By Side,” this is POOPS at their best. “I think this is the best thing we’ve ever done,” Seymour says. “The experience of recording this with Lance to working with the band and just feeling really comfortable and at home, it all felt great throughout the entire process.” As a reflection to their past, the group included their cover of deceased Richmond musician Nathan Joyce’s “On The Way Home.” Joyce had inspired the title of the previous Pedals album, Take Flight. “Nathan was always an inspiration to me, and we had recorded a cover of that song long ago after he had passed away,” Seymour says. “It felt right to bring that back and find a way to have that exist on a release of ours, considering the impact he had on me and the group in our early days.”
Having had a few opportunities to showcase the new record, the band’s future is both exciting and uncertain. “We decided to take the summer off from touring, for the sake of collecting our thoughts and figuring how to move on to the next step,” Seymour states. “I took last summer off to tour with Hold Tight!, and that was amazing, but upon returning my job basically told me that they weren't down with me doing that again,” Brown adds. Despite the small break, Seymour is optimistic about regrouping for the later months of the year. “What really excites me about right now is that we know we are capable of evolving into different ideas of Pedals,” he says. “It can be just me and Adrienne or me and Louis or Richard, Adrienne and me. I think the true nature and heart of POOPS will always be the four of us together, but in moments like this, I know we can keep performing despite any breaks that any of us might have to take.”
As a musician, Seymour has always drawn people towards him. There is a raw, contagious energy to his craft, and it’s why he has been beloved in the local scene for years. Pedals On Our Pirate Ships are no different. They’ve become a fundamental element of the local music scene; an example that many other bands strive for. Their evocation of yesteryear’s pop-punk sound keeps the past alive. At the same time, they provide a distinct voice that will always be quintessentially Seymour. This is why he has been a touring ambassador for Richmond for years, and what has enabled the bands he has been involved with to act as proper representation of our city and its continued history.