Ian Shelton has some thoughts on whoever might be upstairs.
“I think the idea of the omnipotent god that concerns himself with the success of a random white guy is a legitimately stupid concept.”
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He, meaning Shelton, has no illusion that any god is there to save him, or even concern him or herself with what Shelton has been doing here on Earth. That means it’s up to Shelton to right his own wrongs. He’s kept his own score and is acutely aware of all of his shortcomings and flaws on his cosmic report card, as it were. If no one is there to save him, he’ll have to handle matters himself.
To see him draped in a white robe, eyes shut but face turned upward to the sky, palms open to receive the light, hands of fellow believers around him, with a fresh bruise on his cheek from a hard (and recent) right hook, is to see Shelton the way he wants you to understand him on God Save the Gun, his band Militarie Gun’s second full-length LP. And that depiction is someone who has, to put it plainly, fucked around and found out and now is ready to try to make up for all of it, even while the swelling on that shiner is still dying down.
At first glance, the way Shelton’s framed on the album cover gives off a cult leader vibe. He’s the center of the frame, and if you look at it the right way, it looks like he might be leading the followers and basking in the adoration. The bruise plays into that, too. Often those who want power over others are compensating for some other metaphysical blemish and trying to make up for their own harmful behavior—insert whichever religious figure or cult leader rock star you want. Shelton didn’t see himself as the cult leader or messiah figure. He saw the cover and the title God Save the Gun a little more literally: He was just another person asking for help.
Sometimes he got it, sometimes he got punched in the face.
“I felt like what I wanted more than anything was to be able to put my hands to the sky and have the burden lifted from me,” Shelton says. “My reading of the image was someone needing salvation.”
Salvation is the central theme of God Save the Gun. Shelton grapples with his own flaws and missteps from the jump, with the lead single “B A D I D E A,” as the overture of what could be considered a concept album in the company of an album like Titus Andronicus’s The Monitor.
“B A D I D E A” is a sleight-of-hand trick of a song with its carefree romp of an instrumental and joyous chorus that Shelton likens to a cheerleader chant. But if you pay even the slightest attention, you’ll hear that it starts with “I’ve been slipping up.”
The metaphorical loan sharks that Shelton has bargained with are coming to collect, and he doesn’t have the money. That might explain the bruise on his cheek. Throughout the album, this idea of debt to others switches perspective. In one song, Shelton is the one who’s short, and in others it’s Shelton directing the blame to others or even the universe for his misfortune. Man versus man, man versus society, man versus god.
This oscillation between owes and owed is clearest on “God Owes Me Money,” where Shelton switches from his own moral fumblings to pointing the finger at the one who has shortchanged him in another instance. It’s a little more concise than when Jesus asked God on the cross, “My God, why hast thou forsaken me?”
“‘God Owes Me Money’ is a song saying, ‘You fucked me, man. A debt is owed here for everything that I’ve had to experience and go through. And I want something out of that,’” Shelton explains.
It’s one of the album’s richest sonically, too. A late-night driving scene of synths over heavy distorted guitars. It’s a bit like if the Killers scored a horror movie. Shelton, defiant on the mic, airs it all out at whoever’s turn it is to feel some blame.
Things you’ll never remember, I’ll never get to forget / Things you’ll never remember, I’ve lived through again and again and again / Say the worst thing that you can / Again and again and again
But the magic trick, the miracle, of the songs on God Save the Gun is that even when it seems like he’s at his angriest, it all comes back to grace and forgiveness. Perhaps he’s not turning the other cheek that we don’t see on the album cover, but at least taking his licks and learning a lesson.
“What I view that I get out of it is, by taking these things, these traumatic images that play in my head on a loop, I’m making them a benefit to my life,” Shelton says. “It gave me perspective, it gave me the brain that I have. I wouldn’t trade a single thing away. The same with all of my mistakes. I wouldn’t trade them. As much as I would have loved to not hurt people, I also wouldn’t be the same person had I not.”
Also, Shelton says, the song is about him in some regards anyway.
“‘God Owes Me Money,’ at the same time, as much as it seems like it’s just talking about someone else, saying ‘The things you’ll never remember I’ll never get to forget’ is as applicable to me,” he says. “It’s applicable to any human being. The fact that we exist means that we act out of carelessness at times. And what you say and do, someone else might live with the rest of their life. You think about the things you say as a child where you offhandedly mention, ‘Oh, you look funny’ or something. It could be as minimal as that, and someone carries that with them the rest of their life as the thing that they’re self conscious about. All of it is meant to be as applicable to myself as it is applicable to the person that I’m directly addressing in the song.”
God Save the Gun finds Shelton in a particularly vulnerable headspace. He quit drinking during the recording session, giving him a newfound clarity in life, but this came after the writing process. The songs were written by a guy who had not found any light yet, sung by the same guy but with a little more perspective of feeling like a different person than the one who wrote it, but still having the scars and bruises to remind him how it felt to be that person.
“All of that, what I needed to say and what I needed to express without inhibition had already been said, and so it was about seeing it through to the finish line rather than creating it, which was an easier space to be in had I been before, trying to say some of these things,” he says. “I remember how fucked up I was when I came up with the lyric ‘How are you gonna say sorry to the person that discovers your body?’ I don’t know if I could’ve come up with something so blunt that said exactly what I needed to say without that inhibition, but I guess that’s a problem for the future me to deal with as far as the songwriting goes.”
God Save the Gun is far from a sobriety album. There is no preaching to be found. It’s just that if Shelton was going to get up and tell his story, he’d want the bruises included.
“I felt for the record to have any meaning, I had to change my own life,” he says. “I didn’t want to release a record that was ironic addressing the things that are negative about myself and just being like, ‘Haha, I suck,’ you know? Instead, it has to be truthful. And I’m very concerned with the songs being truthful. So, if I make mistakes, I make the songs reflect those mistakes. I think it would be very evil for me to talk about things as if I were a perfect person when I’m not. And that’s just a very important part of the process to me. Looking at the total of the record, it’s a record about addiction and not a record about recovery, but it was like, for this record that has so much to do with addiction, the only way for me to truthfully go out and sing it was to change my own behavior.”
Songs like “Kick” sound familiar to those who have been close to someone struggling with addiction or substance abuse, or who have struggled with it themselves, where Shelton admits that, “If I kicked you in the face, I’m sorry, but I will do it again.”
“Kick,” with its deceptive catchiness, was written with frequent collaborator James Goodson of Dazy. Militarie Gun and Dazy had first collaborated a few years back with a one-off single “Pressure Cooker,” which perked a lot of people’s ears up to the fledgling band at a time where anything resembling hardcore stretching its legs into other genres was very en vogue. A handful of songs off of God Save the Gun were written with Goodson with the hopes of making a full split album, but ended up here instead. Fun fact: “B A D I D E A” started in a writing session for Doja Cat, who wanted to go in a more hardcore-influenced direction, but Shelton kept the song for himself.
“It feels like they’re making the music that Ian always wanted to make, but now they’re really bringing it to life in a very fully realized way,” Goodson says. “When I was in the studio with them working on the songs I co-wrote, it just seemed like everyone was just so focused on making the song the best thing it can possibly be—no one trying to make their part the star, just a group effort to make the coolest song possible.”
Goodson saw the transformation in Shelton as a person, too, over this period and from his beginnings of Militarie Gun following his time with Seattle hardcore band Regional Justice Center.
“It’s funny, because I do sort of compartmentalize him as my friend and as the frontman of a band I’m a real fan of,” he says. “Sometimes it is a little strange to find yourself enjoying a song about some fucked up situation or feelings or event that happened to someone you actually know and care about in real life. But obviously part of what makes his music resonate, both with MG and even with Regional Justice Center, too, is that he’s very sincere and puts himself out there in a way that isn’t contrived. He just kind of presents his feelings matter-of-factly in his lyrics, sometimes with a bit of humor, and that’s pretty much what it’s like to be friends with him, too. He’s the type of person that actually opens up and makes you want to open up too, and I think he’s been able to tap into that more and more with MG’s music.”
Militarie Gun never saw themselves as a hardcore band. They saw themselves as an indie rock band that might not have had the chops to pull that off just yet musically. But, fair or not, they were lumped in with the crowd after what Shelton calls the “Turnstile moment” and subsequent hardcore gold rush. With that, there’s the natural inclination to hear moments on an album like Shelton choking up at the microphone or a spoken-word dressing-down of the album’s central protagonist for his wrongdoings, and think, “Wow, this is really something for a hardcore band to be this vulnerable,” or hear the showstopper moment of “I Won’t Murder Your Friend” and think, “Wow, they’re doing a rock opera.”
The indie rock influences abound on God Save the Gun with a very Casablancas-esque vocal prechorus melody on “Laugh At Me” that might’ve been subconsciously influenced by Shelton’s days driving around L.A. for eight to 16 hours a day delivering weed listening to The New Abnormal when it came out. There’s the not-so-subtle vocal nod to Modest Mouse in “Thought You Were Waving” right after a literal Modest Mouse moment with “Isaac’s song,” an interlude sung by Isaac Brock himself.
When asked who his dream collaboration would be, Shelton answers immediately that he wants to be on a Gorillaz song, with the British cartoon band being what first cracked his head open and showed him that the possibilities in music and art and self expression were endless.
But again, Shelton never saw them as a hardcore band, despite his roots with Regional Justice Center, so all of these supposed “turns” are just the moves he had always wanted to make but might not have had the muscles for just yet. Time spent working with Goodson certainly helped him hone those skills, but Shelton and Militarie Gun have found some new stability in their lineup after a few roster changes over the years, too.
There’s established trust to take “swings” like trading distortion and aggression for the acoustic, orchestral, hushed, meditative, and therapeutic, Gallagher-tinged “Daydream,” and you remember that the bluster of someone puffing up their chest and making a lot of noise is the mark of a scared animal defending itself, and suddenly you connect with what Shelton has been trying to say the whole time even more.
“It’s the process of iteration and growth and expanding your musical palate, and sometimes it’s just like, ‘Start all the way over and try that one again,’” Shelton says. “Or you were just going at it the wrong way, where you wanted it to be a loud song, but really it’s a quiet song. Or it’s a quiet song and really it’s a loud song. And really it’s just those moments of trying and being comfortable failing. More importantly, it’s just knowing that you don’t have it, that you don’t have it all figured out.”
He’s talking about the instrumentation, but it fits in nicely with the album’s ethos, too.
Shelton still doesn’t have it all figured out, and that’s the point. Life is a constant struggle with one’s self and a quest for enlightenment through maturation, personal growth, and forgiveness. He hasn’t mastered any of it, nor does he pretend to. The one thing he feels like he has figured out, though, is how to vocalize all of this in his head.
“These were just the things gnawing at me that I had to talk about,” he says. “I had to externalize all of these issues in a way that I could further understand them.”
Shelton says God Save the Gun is the “definitive statement” he’s always wanted to make musically. And if he can’t top that, then he’s at peace with that.
“Ultimately, if we can’t write a better record than this, then this will be the final Militarie Gun album,” he says. “We’re not rushing to make a commercial product just so we can get back out on tour. We care about making songs that we love, and that’s the most important part to us, that the songs are something truly that we love and that we can stand behind.”
And then, after the Zoom call ended, he headed out to a writing session.
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