The Velvet Snakes are known for their fuzzed-out surf rock sound, their catchy lyrics, and fun vibe. A year or so back they had a lineup change, which changed the band forever. The Velvet Snakes’ new members, as well as their new sound, would like to tell us their story. The following is a conversation Rock in Detroit had with The Snakes at a recent show of theirs in Hamtramck. They jumped right into the specifics of how the new band formed, who the members are, and what they have to say. Here’s The Velvet Snake’s story.
RiD: Alright guys, tell me about the new Velvet Snakes.
Logan: Yeah man, so when we had that lineup change we kind of reformed underneath the band Beef Axe, which was originally supposed to be all Gage’s songs. They were kind of like, “Well, you know man you should do some of yours in there too,” and then at that point it just sort of felt like Velvet Snakes again, like, “Man, fuck it! We’ll reform it, man.” Thus the Velvet Snakes were born again. And then Noah had the idea to bring Tyler back in because Solar Drip and Velvet Snakes kinda both had like a stoppage – Solar Drip broke up and then Velvet Snakes hit a wall there for a second because of our lineup change.
Tyler: It’s hard to find drummers.
Logan: Not easy to find bass players! (laughing)
Gage: We’re all over the place. We’re like mosquitoes.
Noah (in Spinal Tap British accent): Well, it was real difficult when our last drummer spontaneously combusted…
Logan (continuing the Spinal Tap accent): Yeah, Andrew’s a real tender fellow, lot’s of tinder in his bones. It was a real hot day in January, didn’t see it coming.
Noah (as Noah): And then one day Gage got a hold of me and was like “Do you know that one time that Dave Grohl played with Tom Petty,” and I was like, “Yeah.” And they said, “Do you want to do that?” and I was like, “Sure.” And that’s how it started. That’s kind of been my philosophy, kind of playing like Dave Grohl playing for Tom Petty, you know? It’s worked out so far.
Logan: Gage is like Tom Petty for sure.
Noah: You’re more of like a fucked up John Lennon . . . .
Logan: John Lennon’s second try, man!
[Laughter]
Logan: Just try not to get shot.
Tyler: And, yeah, that’s us!
[Laughter]
Logan: That’s the most fucked up response!
RiD: Alright guys, tell me about your most controversial song.
Gage: When we first started, we had this tune called Ret****ed Pesticides.
Logan: It was like an okay riff, and then really just like a horrible song that we chose not to continue. It wasn’t good, and we butchered it over and over again. Currently, probably our most controversial song is called “Jacked White (I Could Fight Jack White If I’ve Had Enough Beers).” And it kind of started, we were just jamming at the studio space, and I was hitting a riff that just felt good.
Gage: Well, it’s the exact same riff as a Jack White song.
Logan: It’s “Fell In Love With A Girl” by the White Stripes, but I didn’t really realize it at the time, but we played the song differently, like it’s not the same song.
Gage: The chords are the same, the melody is different.
Tyler: It sounds like the song.
Logan: It’s definitely the same chords, it’s a total rip off and I won’t deny that. Listen, he’s like 50-something, sure he works out, but I’m young and limber, dude!
Tyler: You stretch.
Logan: Yeah, I stretch everyday. Well, I drink beers while I stretch, but I still stretch.
Noah: I don’t know, man, didn’t you get winded going to the bathroom earlier?
[Laughter]
Tyler: I think the reason the name and lyrics came along is that I commented at one point that Jack White’s gonna beat your ass if he hears you playing this, he’s gonna say you ripped off his song.
Gage: And then there’s a song called “Diagnose the Frog” and that’s about dissenting a frog and finding a tumorous cell inside it, but we haven’t released that one yet.
Logan: We figured PETA would probably get upset, you know.
Tyler: Well there was that other song, “Engorged Orange.”
Noah: Now you guys are just making shit up.
RiD: Gage, do you still do kick flips with your instrument?
Gage: Uh, I try not to. The bass? Well not a kick flip, but I still fuck ‘em up. The ones I have now are a little more expensive. so I try not to.
Tyler: I think you lost your Squire sponsorship last time you did that!
Gage: Yeah, it wasn’t good.
Logan: He was sponsored by Line 6 until he tossed one out into the crowd and said, “Catch this shitty amp.”
Tyler: And it hit that 6-year-old girl in the mouth, that didn’t go well.
Logan: Well, she shouldn’t have been there anyway, man. She should’ve been under her parents’ supervision.
Gage: She still had her baby teeth, so she’s fine. The only thing really with that (the kick flip thing) is, the last show I slammed my guitar on the ground and I ripped the strings out, but I don’t go to that extreme. I’ll put a few dents in it, but I don’t kick flip it.
Logan: Yeah, that was at Blind Pig for Tripsgiving. We did Tripsgiving at Blind Pig and they had a band drop out so they asked us to play an hour and 45 (min), which we did and we’re finishing off the last song, and he’s just on his knees ripping the guitar strings out of his guitar.
Noah: It was very rock ‘n’ roll.
Logan: I only threw like three beers at people. I feel pretty good about that. I feel like in two hours I probably would’ve done more.
Noah: At least you didn’t get body tracked by a goth babe.
Logan: Yeah, so that was a thing that happened, man. We played a gig at Ziggy’s opening for Melt. We had Simulation Detroit there as well. Simulation opened and we went on after them, and there was a mosh pit that started happening, and it was all pretty friendly, and I’ve jumped into every mosh pit I feel we’ve ever played – with the understanding that I’m able to gauge it. I’ve done it enough times, but . . . man, this one chick that none of us knew was like there and she was, like, going super hard, and there’s some footage of it. She just puts her whole body weight behind it and just fucking threw me like 20 feet man, into the stage. Ugh. I cracked my hip. It looked like a fucking car accident, man, I couldn’t stop watching the footage. Man, my hip was all swollen. I had a band around my arm and my leg. It ended up fucking up my guitar, blew the jack all the way through the hollow-body, and then took a big chip out of the side and part of the fret board as well. But all’s well that ends well, you know? I got back up and started playing like nothing happened, man, you gotta keep going. And you know I took it to Ypsi guitars, that guy’s a fucking wizard. He hooked me up and got that shit playing better than it ever has in its whole life, he fixed everything on the guitar, like it’s brand new. It’s got a few battle scars, but it’s a little like a relic now, so I kind of like it.
Tyler: I don’t know what it is with moshers being violent to guitarists, but I was just at No Rest Fest last weekend and there was this band called Paradise A and their guitarist jumped down into the pit and as soon as she got in there some dude just like shoved her super hard and like her lip was bleeding, and I was like, what is this phenomenon of people shoving people with guitars?
Logan: There’s crowd killing, and then there’s guitarist killing, I’m just letting all you rockers out there know . . . .
Gage: Keep doing it more and more, keep doing that.
Tyler: If you got a guitar in your hands in a crowd, you’re in danger.
Gage: And for all the people in the audience, keep doing it, it’s so fucking punk rock, keep doing it and doing it and doing it.
Logan: As fucked up as that shit is, like, I would agree Gage on that because here’s the thing man, like it’s rock ‘n’ roll and it comes with the territory.
Gage: No, I’m totally being sarcastic.
Logan: Well, I’m not against people fucking feeling the music and maybe that person was feeling it a little too much and didn’t recognize what was happening in that moment, but, it’s all rock ‘n’ roll, man, it’s all rock ‘n’ roll, you get what you ask for.
Rock in Detroit: Tell me about your songwriting process. How do you guys come up with a song? Are you guys jammin’ or are you like sitting down to write stuff?
Gage: A lot of the shit came from Logan writing stuff, and then I wrote stuff, like individually on our own. And you can really spot the difference between that and mine, and then you can really tell the difference when we’re all jamming, like. “Oh that’s something,” and then it comes together.
Noah: Once me and Tyler joined the band, we started jamming a lot more and kind of coming up with new songs.
Gage: We have more of a rhythm section. If you listen to a lot of different songs, you can really tell who’s who and what’s what, and if you can spot instruments and notes you can really tell who’s playing what and who’s doing what kind of shit.
Logan: Well and so like it’s really just kind of a group effort, man, I mean like some it comes from like pieces of us writing individually, and also some of it comes from, you know just like being together at the space and really like jamming stuff out because a lot of our practice involves like, “Yeah, we’ll work on some stuff,” but a lot of it’s just like, “You guys want to fuck around a little bit and see what happens?” and a lot of the time we end up with some cool stuff – a lot of it will just never see the light of day because we didn’t record it, you know? And then there’s also songs we’ve had established but, you know, a good example is the song “Odd Gorilla” that we wrote with our old drummer, Andrew, that had all these working parts and stuff and we were playing that, and kind of as the song was ending, Tyler came up with this bass riff that just kind of brought back the energy in this sort of slow doom kind of way, and we fucking loved it, and we’re like “Dude, that’s gotta stay!” and so then we used that riff and then we wrote a whole second half to the song just based on Tyler coming in with an idea. I’ve written songs, too, where there’s kind of been gaps in it, and then Noah will come in and be like, “Hey, man, I got a fucking idea, man.” And then he’s able to kind of add his piece to that puzzle. So, I mean a lot of it is a group effort. Sometimes it’s individual writing, but at the end of the day, it’s like – we don’t do anything in this band without everybody being fucking involved, man. Yeah. That’s kind of the point of it. If you’re gonna be in a band, man, why you gonna have only one person write all the shit?
Noah: And even when it is one person coming to the table with a song, we all write our own parts.
Logan: Exactly, exactly. I’m not telling you what to do on drums. I know you know what sounds good.
Gage: But the other aspect of that – like you have a song idea you have in your head, you can also lend it to the others, like, “Hey, try that,” and it’s not telling them what to do, if it comes out right.
Logan: Like, we have an idea, and then we just put it through the Velvet Snakes filter, for lack of a better explanation. It’s like everything we do, whether it’s one person writing something, or like, sometimes Gage and I get together and we write something and then bring it to the group. It all goes through the same filter of just like everybody being involved and having their own input.
Gage: It’s really spontaneous most of the time.
Logan: Writing together. Always.
Rock in Detroit: That’s the best way to do it.
Logan: Yeah, man.
[Whole band sings and air drums to “Good Times, Bad Times” by Led Zeppelin on the bar table.]
RiD: The bass drum in this song is the best.
Logan: Oh, dude, John Bonham is a king!
RiD: He’s got the rabbit foot.
Logan: Yeah, dude, he’s got that twitch, he’s got that autism twitch!
Noah: This is one of those songs that I learned with my drum teacher when I was taking drum lessons. I was probably around 14 or 15 when I was learning it, and I got most of the song, but there’s just a few measures of that solid Bonham triplet on the bass drum, and I couldn’t get my calves to work that fast, man. Like, I could play it a little slower, but . . . .
Logan: That’s why you gotta watch Andrew Del Russo drum and get those kick patterns down, you know? He’ll teach you the technique.
Noah: R.I.P. man.
Logan: R.I.P. dude – Spontaneously combusted. Loved the man, loved the man. Forever in our hearts. And we always have a philosophy at the Velvet Snakes too, I mean, I know we’ve had lineup changes, but like, it’s always been a thing where it’s like, dude — once a Snake, always a Snake. And there’s been people who hopped in on just one song – Velvet Snake for fucking life man. If you jam with us . . . that’s what it is.
Tyler: We’re basically a cult.
Logan: It’s a cult, yeah.
Noah: Well, I had to do an entire initiation ceremony when I joined.
Logan: Yeah, there was an initiation ceremony with all of the new members when Andrew passed the sticks.
Noah: I especially vividly remember having to stab a case of Busch Light.
Gage: I will say that the idea of a genre is redundant and just a good song is a good song, and that’s kind of all we try to do.
Logan: Yeah, yeah, I agree with that too, it’s just like, when trying to think about things in terms of a genre or a sound, it’s like – we’re all collectively making a sound regardless of what we do, so with everyone’s input, as long as we put it through the Velvet Snakes filter with everybody having their own input on it, man, it all comes out Velvet Snakes, you know? So, we never try and stick to something specific, or a certain kind of genre, or a certain kind of – you know? It’s just rock ‘n’ roll, that’s all we’re trying to do.
Rock in Detroit: When’s your next show?
Everyone: Winter Fuzz Fest! [The Blind Pig in Ann Arbor, Jan 2 2026]
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