Few bands from the 90s underground rock scene carved a path as unique as Karate. Formed in Boston in 1993, the group quickly set themselves apart with an innovative fusion of slowcore and post-hardcore that elevates each and every track on their self-titled debut and their sophomore record, In Place of Real Insight. By the time Karate transitioned into a trio, the band’s sound underwent a subtle, but profound overhaul. If The Bed Is in the Ocean (1998) epitomized their jazz-inflected style, Unsolved (2000) and Some Boots (2002) further highlighted their distinctive blend of intricate musicianship and emotional depth. After disbanding in 2005, the band’s music became increasingly difficult to access, prompting archival label Numero Group to reissue their entire catalog in 2020, reintroducing Karate’s timeless work to a wider audience and reigniting the trio’s creative spark as they returned to the stage for the following reunion tours.
20 years after their last release, Geoff Farina (vocals and guitar), Gavin McCarthy (drums) and Jeff Goddard (bass) returned with Make It Fit, an album that celebrates their legacy while continuing to explore new creative territories. Recorded with longtime producer Andy Hong, Make It Fit reflects the trio’s collective ethos with pride. It’s the result of a band having fun in the studio, entirely at peace with repurposing old habits to lay down new paths. We caught up with Geoff Farina over Zoom, from his home in Chicago, to reflect on the creative process behind Make It Fit, what prompted the band’s triumphant return and the experiences that continue to shape Karate’s remarkable journey moving forward.
____________________________________________________
How does it feel to release new music after such a long hiatus? It has been 20 years since Karate last released an album, after all. How quickly did that creative energy come back?
The creative energy was always there. As soon as we got in the basement together in 2022 before our first reunion show, it just felt like we're meant to play together. We've always clicked musically and we didn't play together for many years, but when we did, it felt completely natural right away. It's very different putting out a record now than it was during the 2000s. I lost interest in the business side of things when it all became internet stuff, essentially. That's not what I grew up in and it's not the way we would travel around, meet in person, booking tours on the phone. When everything started revolving around going on the internet and social media to talk about yourself, I just kind of lost interest in it. Now, we're really trying to do things the way that we've always done it. We're really fortunate, because our record label [Numero Group] knows a lot about the digital side of things. We don't know anything about and don't care that much about it. We wanted to make an LP and that's essentially what we did from our end, in the way that we always have done it. It's a different world, but people seem to want to hear us and we really want to play. We're having a really good time playing and recording, so it seems to be working, even though it feels really different in some ways.
You've already touched on Numero as a label and I think your relationship with them makes a lot of sense. They do work their digital side very well and they've been so fundamental at bringing back numerous catalogs of different bands over the last few years. How has your relationship with the label evolved over time, especially now with the release of new material?
It's a great relationship. We got really lucky and we deserve it, because we had a terrible label for too long. At the beginning, they were great, but we couldn't get them to put our records back out for more than 10 years and they wouldn't let anybody else do it. That experience was just miserable, so it's been like a dream come true with Numero. Ken [Shipley] found us right around the time that we were sort of getting the contracts set up to get our music back. They're really smart and interesting people. It's run by two guys that are very different from each other, who have done really fascinating things and surround themselves with young, creative people around Chicago and LA who are really into the music. We work with a team of people who are really on top of things, they're friendly and let us be grumpy sometimes or have demands and they're very good at appeasing things that we think we need sometimes. It's just been a great experience. We've never worked with a label like this. They say yes to everything and are just helpful in all the right ways. Plus, we go and play a festival and they show up with a truckload of records and t-shirts [laughs]. That's great, because we hate to do that too.
Speaking of festivals, did the reunion tour play a role in reigniting the creative fire? You even played at Primavera Sound in Porto, Barcelona and Madrid. Did it have any effect on Make It Fit and the whole recording process?
Certainly. We did our first reunion during the spring and summer of 2022. When we got out there, saw how many people there were and how much fun it was, every one of these shows was what one out of 10 used to be back in the day. You'd play a week of shows and one of them is really great, a couple are okay and then there were a couple bad ones, but every show is a lot of fun now. Everyone who shows up knows our music and lyrics. I think I personally took it for granted. I'm a little bit of an introvert, I like to be at home and I don't like to travel very much. I just didn't understand, 25 years ago, how short life is and how lucky I am to be able to stand on stage, do what I do and have people listen to us play, so we're having such a fun time. When we did the tour, saw how much fun we were having and how many people were coming to the shows, I just said to my bandmates: “look, I want to write some more songs. Let's make a record”. The logistics were tricky, but I wanted to write more songs and people wanted to hear more from us. That's why we did it.
You also played in Porto during the nineties, correct?
Yeah, a couple of times. It was in a really beautiful club, there's these buildings nearby that are really low to the water - they must be 200 years old. It was a really fun show.
I imagine that the recording schedule around Make It Fit was quite challenging, given you all live in different places now. How did you manage to find the right time and place to just make the record happen?
That was the first kind of resistance. How are we going to do this? Is it going to work? We’ve never done it this way before, but we really found a way to work together effectively. I did something I'd never done before, which is making demos of all the songs, just guitar and vocals for Gavin and Jeff, and I sent it to them. Since 2022, we've been getting together a lot. We've been playing four or five trips a year, if not more than that. Every time we take a trip, we try to add a day or two to rehearse. When we played Primavera Sound, we had a few days off in Madrid and some friends lent us a studio where we practiced and just worked on the songs. What we used to do is play for a couple hours in an afternoon, maybe twice a week for a couple of months, but now it's two ten-hour days in a row and then we record what we did, make a new set of demos and then, two months later, we meet in Iceland or something and do a 10 or an eight-hour day just to get the new material ready. By the time we got into the studio, I think we had spent the equal amount of hours as we would have in any other scenario, had we lived in the same city together. It felt like we were ready when we got in there, even if it’s a different world from what we were used to. We want to practice in the same room as each other and be together - that's the way we make music, sitting in somebody's basement for hours, just hashing it out. That's still really important to us and we found ways to do it. It's exciting, because we have a new way of doing things, even if we still do it the old way of being in a room together.
Do you think the album reflects the scheduling chaos and the multiculturalism that shaped those recordings?
Yeah, in some sense. I remember when I wrote a lot of the lyrics to our third album (The Bed is in the Ocean), we were playing in Europe for the first time. That record has a lot of European feeling on it and some little references. My wife is Italian, I'm always in Europe and traveling, so I think it certainly reflects it. I'm not sure if it's multicultural, but it’s certainly reflective of Western culture. There’s a lot of different influences and moods that come from different places and different groups of people, so I think, in that sense, it certainly does.
It occurred to me when I listened to the record. The title itself – Make It Fit – feels intentionally tied to the chaos of just trying to fit in those recording sessions. Was the title actually related to that experience?
Certainly, and it’s not just the recording. The idea of Make It Fit comes from the closer, Silent Sound. That song is about picking yourself back up, doing the things that you know how to do and recommit to something, to make it work no matter what. One thing about being in a band and doing what we do is that everybody does it their own way and if you don't make things happen, they're not going to. Making something fit is part of our ethos in some way. I think it captures the spirit of the band and the way that we do different things. Sometimes your attitude has to be that this result is going to happen. I might not know how, but it's got to and we're going to make it happen. The whole record kind of feels that way to me.
Speaking of parallels, do you find yourself drawing similarities between the current state of the band and your time in the Boston music scene?
The real parallel that I feel now is that it’s so easy to write songs now, because I feel the same way that I felt in the 80s. It really feels like an era of very rapid change, with a lot of nefarious things going on. In the eighties, we were high school punks on the run. You couldn't walk down the street in my town without getting a beer bottle thrown at you or cops hassling you. You really felt like you were on the margin. I’m a very privileged person, so I'm using the word in the literal sense, not in the sense of not having means. Culturally, we felt very much on the run and it really feels like that all over again. There's a lot to say currently, I'm writing songs right now and really thinking a lot about songwriting. I'm doing it more now than I have done in 20 or 30 years, because I just have a lot to say. There's also a lot of things that are happening, especially in America, in front of our eyes and we all see it, but it is not given an adequate language. I think that, to understand what is going on, but also how to fix it and move forward, you have to be able to articulate things and give them form, language - that's what art does. I think it can take something and express it in a way that the people who hear it or see it can feel seen by it and make more sense of everything, now that there's a coherent statement that reflects it. I look at that as part of what I'm trying to do, not so much about politics, but with interpersonal relations, the moods and feelings of the people around me and that I come into contact with.
Speaking of incorporating expressing different things through music, I feel like Karate’s sound has always dabbled with a lot of genre interplay, between the early, slowcore-heavy album and the jazz rock sound that followed them. Would you describe Karate’s journey as one of conscious and hybrid evolution – always trying to express and adapt to your environment, in the best way you can find - or more of a series of creative experiments that ultimately found their own cohesion?
I think it's both, but it's not so calculated. I think that album by album, the sounds of the songs have a lot to do with what I'm interested in at the time. I've gone through periods where I'm listening to 50s and 60s free jazz, improvised music or a lot of Led Zeppelin. I think the three of us really have broad musical tastes in general, so whenever I bring something to them, they also have the same influence. That's kind of what's cool about it. Sometimes I'll just get really obsessed with something and it comes out in the songs. We just played this festival in Vegas [Best Friends Forever] and, during the whole weekend, I just listened to Elvis Costello. I got home and all my songs sounded terrible, because they weren't Elvis Costello songs [laughs]. The brilliance of his lyrics on those first few albums are like poetry of the streets, they're such perfect albums. So, you know, if I wrote an album now, there would be that. It really is random, to be honest. I just follow what inspires me, because we sound like a weird band. We’ve our own weird sound and when we copy other bands, it usually just sounds like us anyway.
You were speaking earlier about the fact that Karate's catalog was stuck in a limbo for such a long time. What was it like being unable to control your own masters for so many years? I’d say the demand for both physical media and the release of your music through streaming platforms was always there – even before the release of the Reader article, I imagine. Now that Karate’s music is more widely available due to streaming and reissues, how do you reflect on this newfound accessibility?
The timing was right. What essentially happened is our music got popular through the internet. Younger people started finding it and tried to buy the records, but they couldn't buy them - they were selling for 150 bucks on Discogs or something like that. There was this pent-up demand for it. The other cool thing about the timing is we started these reissues and signed the contracts right when COVID started. Everybody else I know that's a musician worked way less during COVID, but we worked way more. All of a sudden, we had this giant project that fell in our lap of curating our own catalog of records. We got really lucky in that sense, but [the limbo] was heartbreaking. It was a source of constant depression for years. Imagine something that you work so hard on for so many years and it's in somebody's closet, they won't even talk to you about it. It's really upsetting to go a decade without having access to something that you built yourself, something that's part of your identity.
Now that the music more widely available, have you noticed any generational differences in how both new and older fans relate to your work?
I'm not sure about differences between them. I haven't read a record review of Karate since 1998, I don't read reviews, I don't listen to interviews, I don't use Spotify or digital music. I just listen to the records that I own, so I don't know what's happening on the Internet - it's not the real world of music to me. What's really cool is seeing multi-generations of people at our shows. Very frequently, we meet people who are like father and daughter that say to us: “I turned my father onto this” or “my father turned me onto this when I was like nine years old”. That happens quite often and it’s a wonderful feeling. There are a lot of young people at our shows, that was a huge surprise. We had no idea what was going to happen. We started when there was only 1500 people in the country who bought every indie rock record that came out, you know what I mean? It was a really small scene and we were never very popular. A lot of other bands in the nineties, like Unwound and Codeine, were much more popular than we were. I'm really skeptical of all everything nowadays. If it all ends tomorrow, I still feel very lucky that I've been able to have these last three years, but we want to keep going and play for people. We want to go find the people who want to see us or who never got to see us play. The tour we're doing in Europe is not a big festival thing, we're playing in small clubs and trying to go like we used to while we're still young enough to do it. That's the thing we're trying to preserve: getting a whole bunch of people together, not to film or record it, not to talk about it later, just to be together and to have this experience that a rock show can give you. It's a very special thing and many people don't understand how special it is. My students don't understand: they say they're in a band, but they're just sending stuff through the Internet and watching each other on YouTube. They don't get what it is and how life-altering it can be, so we're trying to preserve that, be shakers, do it the way we did it in the 90s (and the way that people did it before us).
You’re currently teaching at DePaul University in Chicago, as an Adjunct Lecturer in Musicianship. How do the academic and the music sides of your life intersect? Has teaching influenced your own creative process, as well as your overall understanding of music, past and present?
Yeah, teaching has just kind of saved my career in a lot of ways. When Karate broke up in 2005 and I moved back to Boston, all my friends were getting married and having kids, nobody liked indie rock anymore. I tried to start these bands and I couldn't get anybody who could go on tour for more than a weekend. There was a really long period where I never stopped doing what I do. I still started bands like Glorytellers and Exit Verse and we did a few records and tours, so I've always kept doing it. But when it comes to teaching, it’s such a wonderful experience. I just had my last class of ‘Introduction to Lyric Writing’ and it was a really good class, with an equally good group of students. They're exactly like I was and am. I'm just a big kid, I'm exactly like I was when I was 18 years old. I just want to, have my [Fender] Stratocaster in my hand and do all the wonderful things that I have always done. I've just learned over the years to give structure to it and be able to quantify it, talk about it and understand the history of it more. My students are really talented, a lot of them are out there in bands, they're going to each other's shows and they send me their demos. I've really tried to be a part of their musical lives as well and they're certainly a part of mine. When I had to go to Vegas to play Best Friends Forever, they all know and say: “good luck Professor Farina, we can't wait to see it on the internet” - they really get into it. A handful of them know the kind of music that karate makes and other ones don't, but I have students who come into my class and Taylor Swift is the center of their world. For 15 years, I've had students write papers about Taylor Swift every quarter and what I've learned is Taylor Swift is actually a very talented lyricist and really tuned into what's going on around her, with all of these different sorts of trends in popular culture, into her own emotional intelligence and how to articulate it. She’s incredibly talented - here I am on an interview talking about how great Taylor Swift is, right [laughs]? - and I've learned that from my students. The difference now is I don't really care anymore, what’s supposed to be good or cool and what's not. I don't like listening to Taylor Swift's music, but I really understand it, how it's meaningful to a whole new generation of people and that she's actually saying these things that are very positive, meaningful, influential and have values that I agree with in many cases. [Teaching and music] really do intersect a lot. The more I teach and now that we're doing Karate again, it's all kind of turning into one big thing. My days are long and I interact with a lot of interesting people, but it's all music related. I'm really lucky to be able to do that.
Has there been an artist or live show you've been to recently that really caught your attention?
I mostly study old music and I really don't follow what's going on. I just don't have time, all my musical heroes are from the 20th century and there's still so much that I don't know. There are so many albums that are from the 60s, 70s and 80s that I'm just learning about now. When I hear music from that period, it's like my music, it really feels like me. With the way the internet has kind of destroyed geographical artistic communities in all these different ways, I’ve retreated back into 20th century music, so I have no idea what's going on now. I only hear stuff through my students, but I'm not a curmudgeon [laughs]. They bring in incredibly wonderful music. A few years ago, somebody brought in this song from Anaïs Mitchell and I became really into her music. I also teach some of the 19th century, early 20th century folk songs that she plays, so I discover little things like that. Another student came in and played me 6 Foot, 7 Foot [by Lil Wayne] before class and I just was obsessed with it - it's such a great track to play loud. I'll stumble over little things like that, but I really don't know what's going on with music now at all.
Earlier in the conversation, you were talking about how your current musical process feels just as natural as it was in your earlier days. Since this is a new phase for Karate as a band, how do you navigate the familiarity of Karate’s past releases while allowing both the band’s past and current identities to coexist?
That's a really good question, and it's tricky. I think Gavin [McCarthy] and Jeff [Goddard] are better at it than I am. We were just in São Paulo playing a show and, when we were out drinking for dinner, they cornered me and they're like: “Farina, you got to learn some new old songs, because we just played these songs and you have to go back and learn these other ones.” They kind of set me straight, because if it were up to me, I would play whatever the fuck I want to play. And we do that, we pissed off a lot of audiences in the past [laughs]. If a record will come out and we're writing a new one, we want to tour on the new songs, because we want to get them tight and ready to record. Nobody wants to hear songs that they don't know though, people want to hear stuff that’s familiar to them, so now we try to have a balance. There are also many other different elements at hand. There's a lot of stuff I can't sing or play anymore, because I'm too old [laughs] - either the voice is too high or the guitar is too fast. Some of the old stuff is tricky to pull off again, but we try to think of it now. I think we're more conscientious now about trying to give a broad overview at every show we play, but it's hard. When you play a festival for 45 minutes and you have seven albums, most people are not going hear what they expect to. It's hard to please everybody, but we try to.
Now that you’ve released Make It Fit, what does the future of Karate look like? Are there any plans to continue writing and recording new music?
Well, I hope so. The record just came out, we're all happy and excited about that, it seems other people like it as well and it was a lot of fun to make. We talk about it, but it's too early to say. We’ve a really big touring schedule coming up next year, so that's what we're thinking of now. It's just a daily work, trying to get those tours ready, and we also have to deal with the business side of things right now. That's keeping us busy, so there hasn't been time to talk about what we're going to do in the future. But we're going to be on tour together for months next year and I'm sure the subject will come up. The other thing is, you know, families. Gavin and Jeff have kids and it's hard to get together and get away. I don't know how much tolerance everybody has for that. Jeff's family in particular has been quite patient with us, letting us borrow him for long periods of time, so we'll see.
Words: Rui Cunha // Photo credit: Daniel Bergeron // Make it Fit is out now on Numero Group