Big Stir Records never ceases to amaze with their innovative compilations, whether this one for Halloween, the wonderful Flashcubes tribute, the Generation Blue comp from last year spotlighting geek rock, or their tribute to the year 1970, We All Shine On. I thoroughly enjoy this latest one, perfect for the upcoming holiday.
Rex and Christina from Big Stir were kind enough to answer a few questions for me.
Andrea Weiss: How did the project come together?
Big Stir Records (Rex Broome & Christina Bulbenko): We’ve always been fans of Halloween, and we had noticed over the years that a lot of our artists would tend to deliver “spooky” songs that were always fresh and creative. We suspected that there would be some pretty widespread enthusiasm for this idea if we threw it out there to our roster. We’d done a sort of “proof of concept” digital collection of back catalog songs from our artists for Halloween in 2023, and it went really well. For 2025, we were looking for a way for BSR to get back to its roots as a real community of musicians, having fun collaborating, and “Various Artist” compilations are nice, but in some senses overdone. There are a lot of tribute albums, and having just done one (Make Something Happen! A Tribute To The Flashcubes) we wanted to explore a different kind of themed record. To be honest, we’d almost initiated a Halloween collection several times in the past, and this year, we sort of felt, it’s now or never, let’s see if this works. And it did, even better than we expected!
AW: Am I right, from the way the songs sound, that everyone was really enthusiastic?
BSR: Very much so! We know our artists pretty well, and the other thing is that they know us as artists too – The Armoires are a well-established band at this point. And in talking to them on that artist-to-artist level, we’ve found a lot of them to be interested in exploring these sorts of supernatural, witchy, or horror-humor subjects. The Corner Laughers and The Armoires have always used a lot of similar imagery, lots of ghosts and crows and autumnal vibes; Hungrytown works with “folk horror” themes a lot, and The Jack Rubies, Dolph Chaney, and The Incurables have all literally released Halloween singles with Big Stir. What’s funny is how much Splitsville, who are relatively new to our roster, were into the whole Haunted Mansion and midcentury “scary LPs for kids” culture that we, and co-producer Michael Simmons, were using as the lynchpin for the album. That was a cool bonding discovery, and they’re just a great band.
AW: Who are the Pepper’s Ghost Players?
BSR: Thanks for asking! For those who haven’t heard the album, almost every song gets an introductory vignette that’s a tribute to a scary cultural phenomenon, mostly from the ’60s or ’70s, that’s tied in to the song that’s about to play. They’re like very short radio dramas, and a lot of them are based on the ’60s sound effects record Chilling, Thrilling Sounds Of The Haunted House on Disneyland Records. It wasn’t really planned that way, but when we were putatively mastering the album with Michael Simmons, and we planned to maybe do intros for each side of the LP at most, we sort of turned into an improv group, writing, performing, and sound-designing these things on the fly, and we found we were pretty good at keeping them short, hitting the ground with sound cues and dialogue styles that say “this bit is a riff on MacBeth, this is The Twilight Zone, this is Vincent Price, this is a ’50s monster move trailer” and wrapping it up in less than half a minute. It really makes the album both fun and coherent! So, while there are some fun guests on those bits, The Pepper’s Ghost Players are basically the two of us and Michael Simmons. Of course, along the way, we ended up writing a song, “Spread My Ashes In The Haunted Mansion,” that wasn’t really in the style of either of our bands – both of whom were already on the album anyway! – so we used the same name as we had for the little narrative interludes for the band name on that song, which was a delightful excursion for all of us.
AW: I like how it’s devilish fun, and ghoulish humor. Was that humor planned in advance or did everyone’s lyrics naturally point that way?
BSR: We thought about that a lot as all the artists sent in their songs! Our theory is that it’s kind of a zeitgeist thing. These are bleak times, and the only way to get through them is with a sense of humor about some pretty grim subjects. We imagine (and in some cases know for sure) that the artists felt the same – “Zombie Century” by Dolph Chaney and The Speed Of Sound is overtly political, while a few others like the Corner Laughers and Armoires songs celebrate “differentness.” Overall we think that in a world with so few heroes, falling back on horror stories, especially humorous ones, helps us cope. The album is fun, but it’s also a kind of investigation into why we like being scared, and how does the whole idea of horror or the supernatural relate to rock and roll, which it has since it’s folk and blues roots. The final song, which we wrote as The Pepper’s Ghost Players, is pretty explicit about our conclusions in the first verse: “When life is oppressive, depressive and bleak / It could be cathartic to let out a shriek / And seek sweet solace in a scary story / A madcap macabre memento mori.” To us, that’s what ties the whole album together.
AW: Who was everyone listening to when they wrote the songs?
BSR: The artists all provided us with song notes, so we can answer that in a lot of cases! Some of them did amazing jobs at pushing their core sounds in spooky directions (jangle pop for Librarians With Hickeys, power pop for Splitsville and Shplang and Crossword Smiles, sinister soul for Graham Parker, psych-pop for The Gold Needles, postpunk for The Jack Rubies and Lady Darkevyl). Others branched out... sparkle*jet u.k. went ’50s retro for a cover of an unreleased song by singer Susan West’s dad, which was really special. We know Hungrytown was going for a meld of Pentangle and Dead Can Dance. Blake Jones was thinking new wave and Two-Tone ska in the Madness vein. For us as The Armoires, we were looking to add a dub-influenced groove, somewhat borrowed from postpunk bands like The Slits or the Raincoats, or Jah Wobble. It just felt very “connected to the things that move beneath the surface” to us, appropriately witchy, although our vocal approach remains more akin to the differently-witchy Fleetwood Mac!
AW: There are a lot of good in-jokes on power pop and Halloween. Was that more spooky fun?
BSR: Hahaha! Most of those genre-based cracks were written by Michael Simmons, and he’s earned the right! Although the title with “hooks and harmonies” in it was made up by Rex, who writes all the press releases for Big Stir Records and gets tired of those terms being overused. It was a pretty great “writer’s room” with the three of us. Christina landed some of the best jokes on there. But yeah, it was fun projecting our friends and our musical concerns into genre stories, like Scooby-Doo or Rosemary’s Baby. Some of it is really only intelligible to people who are mutually nerdy about music and Halloween or spooky retro media, but the vibes are always there, we think.
AW: Were there any scary movies watched during the making of the album? Or horror novels?
BSR: Again, we’re lucky to have gotten song notes! And we also were at the bottleneck when another blog asked us to ask all the artists for their favorite scary film. More than one of them picked the original Wicker Man, and it’s funny that we went with the Rosemary’s Baby bit, because it’s a favorite of Susan West (of sparkle*jets u.k.) and she ended up voice-acting the Ruth Gordon character in our parody. The biggest influence you can hear is on Rick Hromadka’s track “Stories Of Souls,” which is very much a love letter to the whole history of horror movies It should be noted that everyone was working on these songs in the middle of Spring, so the actual “let’s scare ourselves” time of year was very far off! But two bands, Shplang and Splitsville, did complementary takes on the Frankenstein story, so that tells you something.
We’d be less able to say what anyone was reading, although we know Hungrytown’s song “Footprints” was inspired by their reading about the Brazilian folkloric spirit the Curupira, and Steve Stoeckel’s “I Wanna Be A Vampire” has quite a Dickensian flair, mixed with Bram Stoker, of course! One thing that happened as we were getting deeper and deeper into the Haunted Mansion-related references is that we found out that the Splitsville guys, very much like Michael Simmons and Rex, were huge fans of the ride and even similarly philosophical about it, and Paul Krysiak of the band recommended the book Boundless Realm: Deep Explorations Inside Disney’s Haunted Mansion by Foxx Nolte, which Rex bought and read immediately. And he’s been reading books and articles on “haunted” attractions ever since. We’ve been working on this Halloween thing all year and thinking about the genre, so we’ve learned a lot and developed a lot of pet theories about “horror humor.” So it’s been interesting to have a more informed perspective as media like Wednesday rolled out, and Halloween candy started appearing in grocery stores, hahaha! Rex and his kids (who are into this stuff too) even went to one of the first days of Knott’s Scary Farm, the long-running Halloween overlay at the Knott’s Berry Farm theme park near LA, and he says it was a totally different experience this year, being so immersed in it. So while those aren’t novels, there’s been a lot of reading and deep dives into this whole vibe that have been going on as a result of this record. We’re happy to feel like we’re part of that lineage now, and living up to some of the best of it!
