Queer Emo Band Everyone Asked About You is Back Together 23 Years Later

“Queer” and “emo” aren’t two words that have gone together very often. Throughout all the various, disparate subtypes of emo—from the original Washington, D.C. emocore scene of the mid-1980s where bands like Rites of Spring and Embrace poured their hearts out over raging hardcore punk, to the Midwest emo bands like Promise Ring, the Get Up Kids, or Appleseed Cast that blended folk, post-rock, and pop elements into something profoundly gut-wrenching, to the pop-punk emo bands from the 2000s to beyond like Alkaline Trio or Saves the Day who serenade you with slickly produced power chords and tales of revenge and inebriation—One thing that remains consistent is that it’s almost always from the perspective of cishet men. And then there was Everyone Asked About You.

Little Rock, Arkansas’ Midwest-style emo band (that wasn’t from the Midwest) Everyone Asked About You existed for a brief moment from 1996-2000 and never publicly identified as a queer band, but behind the scenes, primary songwriter Chris Sheppard wrote songs that were secretly about coming to terms with his sexuality and identity as a gay man. With the dual guitars of Sheppard and Collins Kilgore, the dream-like drumming of Lee Buford, and the twee pop vocal stylings of Hannah Vogan, the band recorded an LP called Let’s Be Enemies and a few EPs before calling it quits, and very few copies of these lost gems were ever even made. Now, 23 years later, the band is reuniting for the biggest shows of their career and a huge re-release of all their collected material on a new anthology called Paper Airplanes, Paper Hearts from Numero Group.

Sheppard took the time to sit down with OFM to talk about the band, the reunion, the re-release, and what the future may or may not hold for this revived missing link in emo history.

It’s been 23 years since Everyone Asked About You broke up. What made you want to reunite for these shows and this rerelease? And how excited are you to be back playing these shows?

When we signed with Numero (Group) for the rerelease, about a week afterwards, the label asked us if we’d be willing to play their 20th anniversary festival. And initially, I was very reluctant because I sold all of my musical equipment in 2001 to be able to afford to move to Boston and hadn’t picked up a guitar since. But we had a band meeting and all agreed that we were in the middle of this really interesting, cool story of us being this unknown, small band from Little Rock, Arkansas that’s been rediscovered by a younger generation, and it would be a really bad end to the story to say we got invited to play these shows and said no.

And so we got to work. I went and bought a guitar; I had to completely relearn how to play. And then it’s just been a blast to be able to get back together with my old bandmates, many of whom I hadn’t seen in several years, and to get back on the stage. We’re not really used to playing stages; we used to play in living rooms and in basements. And so to play a theater in LA to 3,000 people was just wild to us.

What exactly were you up to for those 23 years, then, while the band was broken up?

I moved to Boston with our drummer, Lee (Buford). He moved up to Boston to go to art school. And I was looking for a change from Arkansas. I had just come out and was doing a little bit of activism work in Little Rock and thought that Boston might be a good place to relocate to have more of a potential social life and more professional opportunities. And when I moved to Boston, I started working with BAGLY, the Boston Alliance of Gay and Lesbian Youth. And I was with them for several years while also waiting tables. Then about six years after I moved to Boston that transitioned into my current career. I’m the head coach of a competitive swim team for kids age six through college. And so I’ve been doing that for 16 years now.

So that’s a bit of a bit of an adjustment getting back into the band then?

Yes, quite a bit. Music has always been a huge part of my life since I was young. My parents thought it was important that I learned how to play musical instruments. I had always wanted to play the guitar, but they made me learn more classical instruments first. I had to learn how to play the piano and the cello, and the saxophone. And then once I finished with all of that, then I finally picked up a guitar.

But my other passion all through my middle school and high school years was swimming; I was a competitive swimmer. And so when I moved to Boston and was working with BAGLY doing youth leadership development work, and then had an opportunity to move into the aquatics sphere, I thought that was a great way to meld two of my passions, which was youth leadership development and swimming, and found that it was a great way to teach those youth leadership skills. (We) have a team environment, help build community, and teach these young kids the amount of power they actually possess, both physically and socially and emotionally.

So Everyone Asked About You broke up just a few years before emo exploded into the mainstream. Do you ever regret missing out on that?

Regret is a funny word. I don’t really regret any choices that I’ve made in my life because I really like where I’m at, and I wouldn’t be where I’m at if I hadn’t made those choices getting here. However, I always wish we could have played more shows. I always wish that we could have released the album when we were still a band and had an opportunity to play outside of Arkansas more than just our one tour that we did in ’99. And do I wish that we had gotten caught up in that early 2000s–as I have called it—”mall emo” swell? Not particularly, especially looking back on it.

Now, I’ve made the joke to the rest of the band that we got to skip the hard parts. We never really had to grind to get this opportunity, which we feel really lucky about. But music was always really important. So I do wish that I had continued to pursue playing music. During all of that time, our other band members went on to continue to play music in other bands. And when we broke up, we were just at an inflection point where all of us were just at that starting college age. We were a band in high school, so some of them had to go away for school and start that next chapter of their lives. And music wasn’t necessarily a thing that they had in their long term plan.

You’re described as a queer emo band, which is very rare. And you talk about these songs as being about coming to terms with your sexuality and coming out as gay. Can you talk a little bit about how queerness is reflected in the music?

I’ve done a little bit of reflecting on this, and I’m glad that that we’re getting to tell this story now after I’ve lived a lifetime because we would not have identified ourselves as a queer band at the time because I was still in the closet. I came out as soon as the band broke up. But the writing of, particularly our Let’s Be Enemies LP, came from the perspective of my internal struggles of coming to terms with being gay and also just trying to navigate my relationships with my friends and family.

And I had a girlfriend at the time as well. So much of the subject matter is being young and being queer and trying to reconcile that within myself but also not wanting to break my girlfriend’s heart while also needing to follow mine. And I (didn’t) want to disrupt my friendships. What if people think of me differently? There’s a lot of themes of miscommunication and an inability to communicate properly.

And that’s because during that time, I was hiding a lot of myself, and being able to look back on all of that now, I can now draw a narrative thread through everything that we did, when, at the time, it was just me trying to find ways to express what I was feeling without exposing myself, which I think a lot of young queer people experience. How does one express themselves and who they really are without necessarily exposing themselves to ostracization or, at the time and now still, physical violence?

I was looking on your Bandcamp page. And there it says the release is going to include a lot of things like flyers and photos and “an extensive essay on this crucial missing link between Midwest emo and the Moog synthesizer.” Why did that become an important part of this?

Well, the formation of the band was (guitarist) Collins (Kilgore) and I had an art class together in high school, and Lee and I were in another band prior to Everyone Asked About You, and Collins and Lee also happened to be neighbors. So we would hang out all the time and listen to records and play video games. And I had lived down the street from a musical instrument store and had one day just decided to splurge and spend some money on a Moog synthesizer. And around that time, The Rentals first album (Return of the Rentals) came out.

We loved Stereolab. And there were a number of bands who were starting to incorporate synthesizer into their sound. So we decided originally that we were going to try to make a Rentals knockoff band. We were just playing some music at Lee’s house, and I had this synthesizer, Collins had his guitar, I had my guitar, and Lee was playing drums. We were just messing around. We’re like, “Oh, we should start a band and try to make it sound like the Rentals.” And, of course, none of us really knew how to do that.

The music scene in Little Rock was very diverse, but it was all punk and emo, at least the shows that we would go to, and so that strongly influenced the way that we played the guitar. Collins and I essentially learned how to play guitar within this band, and so, when we started writing songs, we were trying to incorporate the synthesizer as much as possible. Braid and Rainer Maria and Promise Ring all came through Little Rock all the time because we were right between where they are from and Texas, so that was a big influence.

And that was really popular in Little Rock at the time. That really fed our musical, tastes so that came out in the music. We ended up being a Midwest emo band. We thought we were more of a pop band, but we had this emo thread through it, and we used the keyboards as well. And then, during the first 10 songs that were recorded that were all released on seven-inch singles, it was just me, Collins, Lee, and Hannah playing together, and so all of the synthesizer that you hear on all of that was stuff that we had to figure out how to play. And we’d always slot the synthesizer when one of us wouldn’t be playing the guitar. When we started recording the album, that’s when we added in Matt on bass and John on keyboards so that we could flesh that sound out a little bit more.

You’ve got a couple of shows that are planned for next month. Other than that, is there anything else that is going to be in the future for the band?

Our band’s philosophy right now is: If it’s fun, and it fits in our schedule, we will do it. Lee is in, like, three other bands that are constantly touring. The reason we’re able to play these upcoming shows is because his band is going to be on tour coming through the East Coast and then taking a break. So he’ll be able to be here, and we’ll be able to play Brooklyn. We’ve talked about possibly going back into the studio. We’ve talked about playing more shows. But we’re just seeing what moves us. We are all lucky enough to be successful in our lives outside of the band, and so we’re not relying on the band to be anything more than a celebration of what we did in the past and what we might want to do in the future. So if it’s fun, and we can fit in our schedules, then we absolutely will. We’re open to whatever.

Paper Airplanes, Paper Hearts comes out September 8 from Numero Group. The band are playing playing two nights for their record release celebration at the legendary St. Vitus Bar in Brooklyn, New York September 8 and September 9. Follow Everyone Asked About You on Instagram @lets.be.enemies.

Photo courtesy of Everyone Asked About You