Welcome back to We Came From Celluloid, where Brian and I talk about the movies and music that keep us sane, and occasionally stumble into conversations that remind us why we started playing in the first place. I'm Nicky P., here with Brian Pritchard, and this week we're joined by Dennis of PsyDefects out of Sioux Falls, South Dakota. Here's how this episode came to exist: Puma Thurman is going on tour, Brian posted into a local Facebook group trying to find bands and venues in Sioux Falls, and approximately nobody responded. Then Dennis raised his hand. One guy. Out of hundreds. And that's how we ended up with a genuinely great conversation about what it actually means to keep making original music when the world mostly just wants you to play Creep. Dennis plays bass and handles a lot of vocal duty for PsyDefects, a band that's been through the full arc of lineup changes, cover sets, six-year hiatuses, and finally, an album. Mr. Nothing dropped in October with 12 or 13 tracks. The origin story involves a mutual friend, a funeral where Dennis and his best friend from high school looked at each other and said "why aren't we playing together," and a lead guitarist named Terry who can hear a riff once and play it like he's been doing it his whole life. Dennis is a lyricist first, he's got 20 songs' worth of words written with no music yet, and the whole episode is a pretty honest conversation about what that creative process looks like when you're a full-time worker, a family person, and someone who genuinely can't not make music. We go deep on the covers vs. originals debate, the tension between wanting to play your own stuff and knowing that a three-chord banger gets the crowd when a 10-minute prog epic gets one guy in the corner nodding. We talk about Leonard Cohen, Pump Up the Volume, Kuffs, and the moment Brian's future daughter-in-law saw Christian Slater on Curb Your Enthusiasm and said "isn't that the guy from Kuffs?", which is maybe the proudest Brian has ever been in his life. We talk about art inspiring art, what Hollywood is missing when its writers haven't lived enough life to have a lens, and why sometimes the most honest place a song comes from is grief. Dennis also tells the story behind a song called "Olive Juice," which I will let him explain himself, but I will say it is the best etymology of a song title I've heard in a while. What We Cover:

• How Brian cold-called his way into a Sioux Falls tour date and Dennis was the only person who answered
• Side Effects, Mr. Nothing, and what it takes to finally get an album out
• Lyric-first vs. music-first songwriting and why having a notebook full of phrases is the best collaborator's superpower
• The Creep argument, covers, crowdpleasing, and when the "artistic integrity" position costs you the room
• Leonard Cohen, Pump Up the Volume, and a year-and-a-half hunt for a song that wasn't on the soundtrack
• Art inspires art, the Tom Savini documentary that made Brian want to go make something immediately
• Writing songs about grief and why sometimes catharsis cuts out mid-chorus
• Olive Juice, the friend zone, and a brother who wanted the song to sound sadder
• Why it's worth going on tour even when it's objectively a terrible financial decision

If you're a musician who has ever had to argue that playing a song the crowd actually knows is not a moral failure, this episode is for you. Subscribe, rate, and review We Came From Celluloid wherever you listen. And if you're in Sioux Falls, come out and see us.

Welcome back to We Came From Celluloid, I'm Nicky P, here with Brian Pritchard, and this one's a little different. This is the last episode we recorded before Puma Thurman hit the road for our first real tour. And I don't say that as a throwaway detail. By the time you hear this, we're already different people. Whatever version of us is in this recording, that's the old guys. The pre-tour guys. So what do two guys talk about when they're on the edge of something they've never done before? Apparently a lot. We start with the practical stuff: tour prep, backup gear, why I insist everyone bring two guitars so nobody has to retune mid-set in a city where we don't know a single person. Brian bought drum cases for the first time in his life, and the conversation about why, about how the stakes feel different when you're away from home base, away from your tribe, turns into something bigger pretty fast. That something bigger is the idea Brian dropped about the best-band-in-the-world feeling. That moment on stage when you're locked in and you just know it. Not arrogance. Not competition. Just execution. Brian felt it at the Dome show. I felt it last Friday when Joe Petrick and the rest of those guys apparently had to follow us and knew it. And the thing is, when you play like that as an opening act, you make it better for everybody. You set a bar the whole room has to reach for. That's not ego. That's craft. From there we go deep on what actually creates that feeling, and it's not talent, it's pressure. Brian tells the story of being tapped to play in Third World Leader, being a drummer who'd put out records and played hundreds of shows, and suddenly being the weakest person in the room. He almost backed out. Instead, he had what he now calls the greatest creative achievement of his life. I've been doing the same thing my whole career, seeking out bands better than me on purpose, because I love the feeling of having to earn my spot. Hot City Symphony, progressive rock tribute, me learning time signature music I had no business attempting. That's where the growth is. Which leads to maybe the best back-and-forth of the episode: Brian making the case for pleasure for its own sake, and me explaining that for me, the effort is the pleasure. The dopamine isn't in the Starburst jelly beans. It's in finishing something. Pushing to the next level. Breaking through. Brian calling this philosophy a bummer before eventually admitting it resonates more than he wanted to. We also get into substances and touring (neither of us exactly party animals at this point), travel personalities (Brian's a Manhattan-seven-times guy, I don't understand vacations as a concept), and pat Smear's decision to leave the Foo Fighters to spend time with his kids, what it looks like when someone at the big show decides a traditional life sounds better. And then we sign off. "This is the old me," Brian says. "The old me signing off." By the time you're listening to this, we've either figured out what we're made of out there on the road, or we've got some interesting stories. Either way, come find us at a show. We'll be the band that already played by the time you get there. Subscribe, rate, and review We Came From Celluloid wherever you listen.

Welcome back to We Came From Celluloid. I'm Nicky P, here with Brian, and this week we've got our Milwaukee connection on the pod, Tlalok Rodriguez, the guy who single-handedly made our Wisconsin tour stop possible by doing something apparently rare in this business: seeing a post and actually doing something about it. Tlaloc is a Milwaukee-based multi-instrumentalist operating under the band name Tlaloc (spelled T-L-A-L-O-K, because his mom wanted to be hip), and the guy has his hands in more projects than most of us have had opinions about music. There's his original material, somewhere in the R&B/trip hop/indie bossa nova zone, a Latin band called Los Mipoteros, a Bee Gees tribute called Night Fever MKE that's actively searching for a better name, a Sublime tribute, a Grateful Dead tribute, a Nirvana vs. Green Day situation, and something he does with a saxophone player in his mid-60s that honestly sounds like the vibe I've been chasing for years. He also bartends, books music at a venue, runs a farmers market operation, and apparently has the entire Milwaukee musician Facebook group infrastructure memorized. The man contains multitudes. What starts as logistics for our upcoming Milwaukee show, Who's playing? Where are we crashing? Is there a jam session at the end? turns into a real conversation about what it actually takes to build a music life from the inside out. We talk about the difference between being a hired gun and having a project you're trying to push. We talk about the grind of recording, the album that's been "coming out" for a couple years, the Christmas record that got used even though the vocals were peaking because sometimes you just gotta use it. We talk about how the best musicians Brian knows approached recording the same way Tlaloc does: just show up and be the talent. Let the engineer do their job. There's a detour into imposter syndrome when I admit I ghosted a perfectly good Craigslist sax player because he had actual pedigree and I panicked. Brian tells the story of a classical trumpet-and-violin guy who just wanted to rock out with some dudes and found exactly what he was missing. Tlaloc assures me the jazz community is more reachable than I think. He's already offered to find me a sax player in Cleveland. I'm choosing to believe him. We also cover: the Blues Brothers defense (the strategy of playing whatever three country songs you know when you accidentally book a gig at the wrong bar), genre snobbery in jazz versus metal and why the most dedicated practitioners of any craft become the most opinionated about it, and the name "Big Salty Tear," which is now the only Sublime tribute concept that matters. At the end, Tlalok plays us an original , a live recording under his Burns to the Soul-adjacent sound, and it's a good reminder of why we do this whole thing. The music is real, the scene-building is real, and the people who hold it together are usually the ones you find through a Facebook post at midnight. tlalok.com. Go find the man.

Welcome back to We Came From Celluloid, the show where we start talking about a Michael Bolton tour shirt and end up at the uncanny valley. I'm Nicky P., here with Brian Pritchard, and this week we accidentally made an episode about one of the defining questions of the moment: why does everything fake feel worse, and why does everything real feel better? We open where any great conversation opens, Brian's XL shirt that he keeps as a motivational object, Michael Bolton's Samson-era hair, and a detour into the Hall & Oates hotline that may or may not still be operational (someone should check). From there, we talk aging rock voices, which ones hold up, which ones don't, and why I made the very deliberate choice not to watch Hall & Oates live once Daryl's voice started going. There is something genuinely heartbreaking about watching a vocalist you love get confronted with obsolescence. Even over ten years of Puma Thurman, my own voice has shifted in ways that required some creative rewrites. You evolve, or you fake it, and faking it doesn't work in the long run. That idea, real things aging well, fake things aging badly, threads straight into the special effects conversation, which is the meat of this one. Here's the argument: CGI in movies right now is objectively worse than it was in 2008. Not subjectively. Objectively. The VFX pipeline is overburdened, the artists are underpaid, and Hollywood keeps greenlighting more and more content without the capacity to do it well. You get Ant-Man: Quantumania looking like a PlayStation cutscene when '70s Star Wars still holds up. Brian clocked it perfectly, we haven't just plateaued, we're rolling backwards. Meanwhile, Jon Favreau brought stop-motion into The Mandalorian and reminded everyone that practical effects work because practical effects work. Full stop. Brian takes it further, and this is where the episode gets interesting. He makes the case that the broader cultural drift toward AI and artificiality is triggering a counter-reaction, that the hunger for authenticity isn't just nostalgia, it's biology. He bought VHS tapes again last year. Major label artists are releasing new records on cassette. The 4K-to-8K upgrade cycle died before it started. People aren't chasing better resolution; they're chasing realness. The Backrooms movie, which made $82 million in its opening weekend for A24, works precisely because it plays with the uncanny valley on a global scale, every scene feels, in the words of a musician friend of mine, like a song that refuses to resolve. That unsettled feeling is the point. We're wired to distrust the almost-real. Which brings us to Hollywood learning the wrong lesson, as Hollywood always does. The same weekend Backrooms and Obsession both hit $100 million, a movie Disney spent hundreds of millions on landed in third place behind them. Obsession was made for something like $300,000. A YouTuber made a feature that out-earned a Star Wars production. Does Hollywood look at that and think "we need to invest in scrappy, authentic storytelling"? No. They're going to throw that same money at other YouTubers and wonder why it doesn't work when they try to replicate it at scale. The lesson is always the wrong lesson. We also get into the Boondock Saints documentary, delusional self-belief as a career strategy, and Brian's unironic acknowledgment that the egocentric prick who kicks doors down is also sometimes the one who breaks through. Not the only road map. But a road map. Real recognize real, as I helpfully remind him at the end. It's a grab bag, always is, but there's a real thread running through all of it. The real things last. The fingerprint of a voice, practical effects, indie films made by people who had something to say, that's what we keep coming back to. Tune in, and head to pumarocks.com to stay in the loop.

Welcome back to We Came From Celluloid, where two dads from Ohio prove weekly that the most interesting conversations happen when musicians decide they also care about movies. I'm Nicky P, here with Brian Pritchard, and today we've got Nico Cellz from Bag of Humans sitting across from us, which, if you're just tuning in, is not a band name I made up.

Here's the thing about Nico: we're sharing a stage with Bag of Humans in about a month, so this whole episode was supposed to be marketing content. And it kind of is. But then we actually started talking, and it turns out Nico is the exact kind of human this show exists to find, someone who watches Goodfellas and immediately clocks the oner, someone who buys the Shout! Factory Blu-ray of a movie he doesn't even like and watches the commentary track anyway, someone who caught Baron Samedi energy in a Bag of Humans video and couldn't tell us if it was intentional.

It was not entirely intentional. The stew knows what it's doing.

What We Cover:

• Bag of Humans' new single and music video drop, and whether the Easter egg version is now the canonical version

• The music video cut vs. the album cut: why MTV editing Soundgarden solos actually produced different art

• Oner shots, from Goodfellas to 1917 to whatever Bag of Humans is doing on a sidewalk in Baltimore

• The horror DNA in Bag of Humans' visual universe: Night of the Living Dead, Friday the 13th Part 2's bag-head Jason, and a vampire with mind-control powers

• Nu-metal's legacy: what holds up, what caved under its own excess, and why Cypress Hill's nu-metal album is an unsolvable mystery

• The Limp Bizkit jump-the-shark moment, with Nico providing the autopsy

• El Mariachi, The Faculty, and the 90s foreign film to action movie pipeline

• Why Nico's kids got to watch The Faculty before freshman year (correct parenting)

• The Bordello of Blood problem: when you love a movie enough to own the commentary-track Blu-ray of something you hate

• Takashi Miike and Audition, which starts like Asian Sleepless in Seattle and ends like nothing you've seen

• "I make music so I don't kill you, motherfucker" Bag of Humans mission statement, not mine

• Why we're old men going on tour and what we'd be teaching our kids if we stopped

• Baltimore as a surrogate Harvard in The Social Network, David Fincher lying to everyone with locations

• Venue recs for when Puma Thurman eventually makes it out to Baltimore

The Real Talk: Every few episodes, we stumble into a conversation that makes the whole project feel worth it. Not because it's polished or prepared, but because you can feel two people discovering that they're wired the same weird way. That's what happened here. Nico walks in on the night before his video drops, casually drops a Baron Samedi reference, tells us our song sounds like what the Beastie Boys would sound like with instruments, and then helps us autopsy nu-metal for fifteen minutes. We're making content for an upcoming show, yes. But this is actually just what happens when you find your people.

Subscribe, rate, and review We Came From Celluloid wherever you get podcasts. We'll be back next week doing this again because apparently we can't stop.

Welcome back to We Came From Celluloid, the podcast where two guys from a band in Ohio overthink movies until something useful falls out. I'm Nicky P, here with Brian Pritchard, and this week we went somewhere I genuinely wasn't expecting.

We started the way we always do: talking about nothing in particular. GPS disasters, MapQuest horror stories, the existential terror of 80-degree weather. And then somehow, the way it always does on this show — it cracked open into something bigger.

The episode ended up being about one question: what happens to art when the artists stop living real lives?

Tarantino worked at a video store. Kevin Smith worked a register. The guys who made Talk to Me built their chops on YouTube with no safety net and no famous parents. And now those YouTube kids are the only ones making movies that actually feel like they came from a human being. There's a reason for that.

Along the way we got into:

• Film scoring from the outside, and why my entire Sweetmint score accidentally played at half speed

• The Terminator theme and why it doesn't land on any real meter (and a Nine Inch Nails song that did the same thing intentionally)

• Crispin Glover's Rashomon-style Letterman appearance, was it performance art or was it chaos? (His version: totally intentional. Letterman's version: get this guy out of my building.)

• Brian's signed copy of Glover's blacked-out-text book Oak Mott, and the snail murder film Glover made with Fairuza Balk

• Joaquin Phoenix's bearded rapper phase as a direct descendant of the Glover tradition

• Why Crispin Glover asking for equal pay on Back to the Future 2 nearly destroyed his career, and why that story is actually kind of heartbreaking

• The cinematographer Bob Richardson threading a visual identity from Natural Born Killers directly into Casino, and what it means to watch an artist's fingerprint across two different directors' work

• Why pop culture fandom is just Dungeons & Dragons with different stat tables

• The new wave of YouTuber-to-filmmaker pipeline (Talk to Me, Obsession, Markiplier, etc.) and what their success says about everyone else's failure

• Nepo babies, lived experience, and why the product suffers when the people making it have never done anything except be near Hollywood

No guests today, just two dads with an hour and a lot of thoughts about who gets to make art and why it matters that they've actually done something first.

We Came From Celluloid is the podcast arm of the Puma Thurman universe. New episodes drop weekly. Subscribe wherever you get podcasts, and if this one hits right, share it with someone who still argues about whether Tarantino is overrated. (He's not.)

Welcome back to We Came From Celluloid, the podcast where two musicians who think too hard about movies talk to other musicians who think too hard about everything else. I'm Nicky P., Brian Pritchard is here doing his thing, and today we've got TJ Costanza from Neighbor Dan, a band out of the Youngstown/Mercer, PA area that plays what one very smart show attendee once described as "calculated loudness." That description is doing a lot of work and I love it.

Neighbor Dan plays in a space that's genuinely hard to define. They came up through heavy music, they've got melodic vocals, they've got riffs that hit like slow-motion freight trains, and they categorically refuse to be pinned down to a genre. Brian picked up Baroness comparisons. I went Boys Night Out. They got Alien Ant Farm once, which they were weirdly okay with. The point is: this is a band worth figuring out.

What we get into:

What "heavy" actually means, and why thrash doesn't qualify, classical sometimes does, and piano pieces can make you feel like someone's demolishing the room you're standing in. TJ headbangs to orchestral music and I respect that more than I probably should.

The writing dynamic inside Neighbor Dan, a Beatles-style split where whoever brings the song writes the lyrics, with room for group input. They call it collaborative. I call it the only system that actually works long-term.

Building a scene in Youngstown: Westside Bowl, Cedars, Penguin City Brewery, and the value of having at least a few people in your city who just show up to see whoever's playing. TJ says those people skew young and that gives him hope. Same, man.

How they linked up with Joe Petrick (Ten Thousand Rambos, The Family Riot) through a Cleveland fest, and why having a boots-on-the-ground person in every city is the whole secret to making touring work.

Being dads in a band, and the surprisingly liberating answer of "the band isn't too serious." TJ's daughter is 17 and mostly does her own thing. He's in five bands, plays drums for money, plays guitar in this one. The friendship is the infrastructure.

The That Thing You Do! tangent that turned into a musicology rant. Tom Hanks wrote one of the catchiest songs in fictional music history and people tried to sue him over it. I have strong feelings. Brian has yet to see the movie.

Also: Ween's country album is a masterpiece, three of the four people in Neighbor Dan are actually drummers (yes really), and we spend a solid few minutes figuring out why STRFKR had drums everywhere on stage when they were technically a synth band.

Come see Neighbor Dan with us on June 19th (Juneteenth, as my wife would say... actually, she wouldn't say that) at the show in Cleveland. Their big closing track "Until the Shaking Stops" from Compositions from God's Gray Earth is the one. Watch for new single "Jet Speed Geometries" dropping soon.

Subscribe, rate, and review wherever you get your podcasts. If you know somebody who thinks thrash counts as heavy, send them this episode and let them learn.

Welcome back to We Came From Celluloid, where Brian and I have started filming ourselves just vibing about music and film until something catches fire. This week is one of those episodes where we don't have a film on the docket, just two guys in Ohio who are currently overwhelmed and somehow still talking into microphones about it. Here's the deal: Brian has this thing he calls the three table legs of his life, music, work, personal, and he's trying to keep all three from wobbling simultaneously while generating what he calls "a flurry of activity." I, meanwhile, am violating my number one personal rule, never be good at anything you don't want to do, because I know too much about podcasting and promotion and now I can't escape it. This is basically our creative therapy session. We also get deep into a Kevin Smith rabbit hole that was absolutely necessary. The Cop Out discourse has been 25 years in the making, and Brian's passionate defense of Mallrats might be the realest thing he's ever said on this show. We talk about what happens to artists who abandon their personal statement to become hired guns, and why Red State happening after Cop Out actually makes a lot of sense. Physical media nostalgia alert: Reel Big Fish's enhanced CD from 1995, 240p video for "Sellout," Kevin Smith's bizarre four-hour interactive Cop Out Blu-ray feature that Warner Brothers was trying to make happen, we somehow land on the idea that bonus features are their own mini art form, and I stand by that. Also in this one: Puma Thurman tour updates, acoustic recording plans for The Outsiders EP, the tragedy of Reel Big Fish reuniting with Scott Klopstein while we're out of town, DoHm band practice sounding genuinely good, and Brian's ongoing fantasy of someone asking him to walk through the DoHm discography song by song. (Brian, I'm asking. Let's do the commentary album.) This is a short one, we're dropping it to make room for our next musician interview. But sometimes a twenty-minute check-in between two creatives trying to keep the plates spinning is exactly the episode you need. Subscribe wherever you get podcasts.

There's a moment somewhere in the middle of this episode where Joe Petrich says he was "truly, truly miserable," and the word he uses, twice, lands differently than you'd expect from a guy who's been in bands for thirty years and toured with Trans-Siberian Orchestra and done the Eyehategod run and opened for Cannibal Corpse with a band that had a trombone player. He wasn't being dramatic. He was just saying: I stopped creating, and I couldn't function. That's what this episode is actually about.

Joe is our tour mate, a Cleveland original, and the guy behind Ten Thousand Rambos, The Family Riot, Happy Rainbow Death, and whatever comes next. He came in and just talked, honestly, directly, the way people who've been doing this a long time tend to. We got into stage presence and why being memorably awful is infinitely better than being forgettable. We got into the weird geography of the Cleveland music scene and how the East Side/West Side divide shaped a generation of bands that never quite found each other until later. We got into the moment when Joe stepped back from writing for the first time in his life and how bad that got.

Brian had this thing he's been working through about art for art's sake, the idea that even on a desert island with no audience, he'd still wanna make stuff, just because creative expression is part of what it means to be alive. Joe heard that and matched it, talking about how he and Scott built Ten Thousand Rambos deliberately without a plan, just throwing riffs and instincts at each other to see what stuck. And how that leftover song they didn't finish in time for the first album sat around until Scott figured out the perfect thing to say, and now it's one of Joe's favorites they play.

There's also a detour through John Waters, mystery bands from the Southern Tier of New York, what the Dave Brockie quote about true artists and unprofitable music actually means, and why anyone who posts a dramatic "I'm retiring from music" announcement on Facebook will absolutely be back within six months.

We're three lifers in a room. That much is obvious. And maybe that's the only thing worth saying about this one.

There's a voice memo I've never sent anyone. It's from a parking lot outside a venue in Columbus, some year that doesn't matter, and it's just me going "I think I just met my guy." I don't know why I'm telling you this. I just know that this episode ends with how Brian and I actually met, buried at the back like an Easter egg for people who made it all the way through, and it felt like the right way to open this thing.

Episode 016 starts, as many of our episodes do, with us arguing about a band you've probably never heard of. Brian got turned onto an artist named Echo Vandal by our guy Connor, who might be the only reason Brian has heard a new song in the last decade, and I mean that lovingly. I deep dived on her, did not emerge a fan, and we disagreed about whether the problem was her range or my taste. (It was her range. Brian is wrong.) This somehow became a conversation about artist identity, brand consistency, and the trap of being too many things to too many people, which is a real thing, and also a convenient excuse for why I'm picky about female vocalists, and I stand by both.

Then Brian pulls out the whole "mile wide versus inch deep" framework, which, credit where it's due, is actually a good framework, and we end up talking about the 1,000 true fans model. Do you want 100,000 people who are lukewarm on you, or 1,000 people who would drive four hours to a show and already bought the shirt? The math on that one's not complicated. And if you've ever cleaned your email list and felt weirdly great about deleting people, you already know what we're talking about.

We also go somewhere this show hasn't gone before: a real conversation about institutional abuse of power. Brian brings up Hollywood's history and we end up in a full conversation about the Louis CK situation, Brendan Fraser, Terry Crews, and the way that power, not just the entertainment industry, not just the church, not just the Scouts, but power itself, acts as a magnet for the exact kind of people who will break the people around them. I have an opinion about this that Brian pushed back on, which I appreciated, and we somehow ended up more aligned than we started. It's a real conversation. Not a hot take.

And then, because this is us, we buried the origin story at the very end. How Brian and I met. How a busted gig, a last-minute acoustic trio, and Kevin Farley doing us a favor by foisting us off on each other changed both of our lives. I'll let Brian tell it. He tells it better.

Subscribe, rate, and review We Came From Celluloid wherever you listen. Follow us for more of the conversations that happen when two guys from Ohio take film and music too seriously.