Two tickets to Wheatus, baby _{by Madelaine Empson}

While Wheatus have visited Australia many times, “we’ve not yet been to beautiful NZ,” lead vocalist and guitarist Brendan B. Brown tells me. That’s all about to change when the New York pop rock band brings their 25 Year Anniversary Tour to our shores.

Released in 2000 as the lead single from their eponymous debut album, Teenage Dirtbag is a timeless anthem that’s arguably the biggest it’s ever been thanks to a resurgence on social media. The hashtag #teenagedirtbag has been viewed over two billion times worldwide. Some six self-released studio albums after the song first started storming the globe, we caught up with Brown about Wheatus: the past, present, and future.

Did you foresee any of the global domination – then and now – that Teenage Dirtbag might have?

Absolutely not. I’d written it off as a single, thinking it was too long for radio.

In the 25 years since, what have been the most notable changes for the band and on the music scene? It’s been a heck of a quarter of a century!

It has been! I’ve been happy to see guitar music become more diverse and more technically progressive... a lot of the cool bands are les-bi progressive or heavy-hitting musical women and LBGTQIA+... Panic Shack, St. Vincent, and Amyl and The Sniffers come to mind. For us it’s been easier to find touring partners than it was in the past. I think our biggest musical change was adding Brandi Ticer on keys and three backing vocals. We’ve been able to explore more challenging ideas on the recent records as a result.

Looking back at your debut to your more recent work – and I’d imagine this would’ve been particularly poignant when you did the expanded re-record in 2023 – how do you think your music has evolved? What do you make that music about now versus then?  

I think we’ve become far more mathy... Some of the stuff on The Valentine LP is insanely tricky, in spite of trying to keep it all very singalong. The lyrics these days could never have been a thought back then because we weren’t facing a return of overt fascism in the late 90s-2000s, as we are now. I wrote a song called Tipsy which was inspired by a convo I had with Liam Payne... but generally songs still come from everywhere: dreams, conversations, relationships, etc. 

What kind of gig can Wellingtonians expect when you play San Fran on the 28^th of January?

They can expect to call the entire set themselves. We don’t do setlists... years ago we started asking the audience to call the set and that’s how it goes now. We learn 60 or so tunes which is about 80 percent of our total repertoire. While we’re setting up, you’ll see me asking the front row what the first few songs are and we go from there... much better than a boring old setlist. We also have a few covers. See ya soon!