If you are new to the music of The Blendours, you will be surprised by the purity, directness, and sharpness of the melodies and the lyrics that Trevor Treiber writes.

Let this be it. (Power) Pop (Punk) in its purest form.

You make songwriting look easy. Would you take that as a compliment or as a misunderstanding?

Most definitely a compliment. I find that melodies and hooks come to me relatively easily, but lyrics are another story. I have hundreds of demos on my phone that are just me strumming chords and singing gibberish just so I can get the general song structure down.

Turning those phone demos into actual finished songs is a very slow process for me most of the time. I am very careful about not rushing into finishing a song. Sometimes I’ll even rewrite the lyrics multiple times and the song will end up being about a completely different subject than how it originally started.

For instance, my song Anime Destroys American TV was originally going to be a very depressing song about getting old, feeling isolated, and losing touch with your friends. But then I woke up a few days later with the idea of rewriting all the lyrics and making the song be about how I think Anime is much better than American television. I sure am glad I rewrote the lyrics to that song haha! That would’ve been a big missed opportunity for me if I had decided to release that bummer of a first draft.

I read a comment of someone comparing you to Buddy Holly. Somehow that made sense to me. To you?

I think Buddy Holly might be the musician I rip off the most. To me, nobody else comes close to Buddy. The purest rock n roll voice that there will ever be. Hearing songs like Rave On and True Love Ways were life-changing for me. I used to be a snotty little punk rock dude, but after discovering Buddy, all I wanted to do was be a 50s rocker and sing and write songs like Buddy. He is the greatest of all time. When someone compares the two of us, I take that as the highest compliment someone could give me.

Is it just your vocals and your guitar?

Most Blendours albums are just one or two acoustic guitars and vocals. We do have a few full-band releases though, like a split LP with the amazing pop-punk band the Old Wives. In 2017, we did our first full-band, full-length record called No Respect, which was kind of just a huge tribute to the Ramones. The most recent Blendours release, Guzzlin’ Pop, is actually all 16-bit video game songs made up of Super Nintendo samples. So it’s not always just guitar and vocals, but a lot of times it is.

How did Country Grandpa come together?

I’m not sure if it’s bad luck or maybe I just live in the wrong part of the world, but I always had trouble finding other people to play in a band with. It got to the point where I just stopped looking for bandmates and decided to record stuff on my own. Country Grandpa was the first Blendours album I recorded. Not a lot of thought was put into that album at all. I would write maybe 2 or 3 songs in a day, and then record them all as fast as I possibly could with just me and my acoustic guitar. I had absolutely no idea what I was doing. I had a very primitive idea of how to write songs and how to do harmonies. I didn’t care about censoring myself. I lived pretty much in the middle of nowhere. I was just a young, immature kid with an acoustic guitar and a burning desire to have my short pop-punk songs heard by my friends on Myspace and Facebook. Come to think of it, not much has changed since Country Grandpa ROFL

What’s up for 2021?

I’m currently working on a new full-band Blendours album that should hopefully be out sometime in Spring of 2021. I have 25 songs to record, and I’ve only finished 5. Plus, I’m recording them by myself, so it’ll be a while! I also write and play bass in an instrumental Surf Rock band called Surf Zombies, and we actually just finished recording our 6th album. We’re hoping to have that out sometime in early 2021.

Besides that, I’m sure I’m not alone in hoping that the world gets back to normal so I can start playing some in-person shows again. Doing Facebook Live gigs has been pretty fun, but there’s nothing like playing in front of actual human beings.