An interview with: Patent Pending (April 2017)


Rhys Haberfield caught up with Patent Pending's frontman Joe Ragosta on the London leg of their Spring UK Tour and talked about the band's upcoming new cover album, ‘Other People’s Greatest Hits’their experiences performing in the UK and one of life's eternal questions; to pineapple on pizza, or to not pineapple on pizza?
Patent Pending release‘Other People’s Greatest Hits’on 26th May via Rude Records available for pre-order in both digital, and physical formats.


So the first question I have written down here for you: UK Tour – how’s it been? Tonight’s the last night isn’t it?
Yeah it’s technically the last night, we play Teddy Rocks Festival Tomorrow but this is the last night of actual “tour”; every year we go home and we can’t believe what’s happened, how awesome it was, how great it was and we try to explain it to people in America and as we’re saying it, it sort of sounds embellished, like it’s fake up to the point where I’m like “Oh it can’t have been THAT great”… and then I come back the next year, worrying that I’ve hyped it too much and then it’s even better than I thought it would be. So yeah it’s incredible, the people over here are so supportive and awesome here and I love it, I really do.

Is it one of those cases that you get awestruck by the fact that there are people 4,000 miles away on the other side of the globe listening to your music and you know, coming out to see you play?
We do well in America, like we really do but to us the US is so gigantic that relatively speaking as far as the whole country goes, we don’t do as well there as we do over here. We don’t see what we see over here back there, I don’t know how to explain it any better; it’s really wild and cool.

So if you were to decide on one thing that sets UK shows aside from the shows in the US, what would it be?

*thoughtful sigh*... So in America, they’ll know our songs but they won’t know every song, in England they know –every- song and it’s really wild.

Wow; are there any UK festivals you really really want to play? Obviously you’ve got Teddy Rocks tomorrow….
We played Download Festival which was awesome, I’d REALLY like to do that again – it was a couple of years ago and it started pouring with rain the second we went on stage and we were under a cover in one of the tents, so half of England saw us by accident and that sort of set us off on our own here – like Bowling For Soup brought us over and helped us so much and then Download kicked it off for us over here.

Nice! Let’s talk about the new album; where did it come from? What made you all decide “We’re going to record a cover album”?

Ok *laughs* - so we’re a weird band as you may or may not know by now… but I used to love as a kid the New Found Glory album “From the Screen to Your Stereo” which is all covers; Less Than Jake did a cover album too – and I just love when bands take songs you wouldn’t normally hear them play and just go for it and so as a kid in this band growing up, we’ve always put covers into our sets so we were preparing for this tour what to do what to play blah blah blah, and since there’s so many good songs we thought why don’t we release a cover album? So we recorded one and now it’s here – and it’s awesome. We’ve released four of the tracks online so far it goes live May 26th and people have been able to buy it on this tour-

Have you been playing many of the covers on this last tour?

We only play one of them so we can play more originals; we just hope people have fun with it.

It that a part of your guys’ writing process: the fun factor?

Quite the opposite actually – so I’m actually a songwriter in my own right, I write a lot of country songs for other people, mostly from Nashville, it’s really funny actually, some of our fans will hear something else that I’ve written and they can tell that I wrote it: serious or funny you just know, it’s got that feel to it – but to me, Patent Pending is a band that can one minute talk about the pitfalls of depression and suicide and the next minute sing about pizza. The more I’ve thought about it, this band is my life so, you are never just one thing – there’s serious days, there’s funny days, there’s sad days there’s silly days and all that really shows in our songs. For me, when I’m writing Patent Pending songs I just want to make sure that there’s a connection, there’s parts where, be it silly and ridiculous or serious and sad, I want to make sure that there’s something to relate to – ‘cause everyone’s had a bad relationship, so we may as well write a song about splitting up the stuff between the two people, right?

Absolutely! I’ve got two last ones for you to wrap this up – I’m sure you’ve been asked them before but - even if you didn’t have a song called 'Hey Mario', Mario or Luigi??Mario, every day.

And since we’re in the world of pop punk: Pineapple on pizza – Yes or No?

Literally had it yesterday. Always pineapple!

A man after my own heart! Thanks you for your time, see you later! (Editor note: Rhys did see the band later, here's his live review from Patent Pending performing at O2 Islington Academy w/ Sweet Little Machine and Boy Jumps Ship.)