Finding the Rhythms: A Conversation with Jason Black of Hot Water Music
Talking about the cult-favorite punk band ahead of their Erie debut at Centennial Hall
For over 30 years, Gainesville's Hot Water Music has been playing for crowds all over the world. On Wednesday, Nov. 18, they'll be in Erie for the first time. Their headlining set at Centennial Hall will feature Pittsburgh's Nightmarathons, along with Meadville's One If By Land, and a special reunion from Erie's Penny Racer.
For a lot of music lovers, Hot Water Music isn't just a band. They mean something. For years, I've talked with devoted fans like One If By Land's Fred Oakman or Penny Racer's Sam Donahue about different lyrics, side projects, and tours from the band. There have been countless T-shirts, records, watches, and even tattoos emblazoned with their memorable logo. Tracking them from their time at Doghouse and No Idea Records, to Epitaph, to Equal Vision, every few years provided a new album to shout along to, with their next album titled Exit Wounds, set to be released Friday, April 2, 2027.
The band was formed in 1994 with Chuck Ragan and Chris Wollard on guitar, sharing most lead vocals, with drummer George Rebelo and bassist Jason Black. In 2017, Wollard stepped away from touring, with the Flatliners' Chris Cresswell filling in for live shows. Cresswell has joined in on songwriting and recording ever since, while the others continue to tour as a quartet.
Marked by thoughtful and passionate lyrics, anthemic choruses, and complex rhythms, the band has carved out an irreplicable niche in the indie music world. We got to talk to the man responsible for some of the most impressive bass lines in the history of punk rock, Jason Black.
Nick Warren (NW): You've obviously toured extensively and played many shows in the Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and Buffalo areas. How has the fandom and following been through the years in that area?
Jason Black (JB): I feel like it's been good to great to excellent. It's hard. We've been doing this for 32 years now, so there are a lot of ebbs and flows with the scene in general, with music in general, and then with bands in particular.
The longer we do it – and I feel like this is more of a newer-times symptom – it's just show-to-show. I don't know anymore. Everything is so uncertain right now. We could have an amazing show one day and a terrible show the next day. By that, I mean a full show one day and a not-so-full show the next day. Both shows are great, and there's no rhyme or reason. Promoters don't know.
All that to say, I've always really loved Cleveland. Lately, we've started going to Buffalo a ton, and it's been great. I think the longer we do it, the more stock we start to put in the non-major markets. The shows outside those places are tending to be better and better because people appreciate it more, and they're not just inundated with 7 million things to do.
The more we do it, the more I find myself enjoying, "That was a cool show. Why haven't we played there in 15 years?" So it's always been really good in that area, the Steel Belt and the Rust Belt.
NW: I reached out to a couple of the bands that are on the bill, and they had a couple of questions, too. Fred Oakman, the singer of One If By Land, is one of the people who helped introduce me to Hot Water Music. He was wondering: How do you pick setlists with such an extensive catalog? It feels like it would be hard to cut songs when you only get a certain amount of time.
JB: It's super hard. I do the setlist. It's still a democracy, but I'm the one who goes, "Hey, here's what we're doing. Feel free to veto whatever." Wollard used to do it, and I just kind of took it over when he stopped touring.
There are two problems. One is exactly that: You have to cut so much stuff. You kind of have to remove yourself a little bit from it and be like, "Well, I'm not paying to see me play tonight." So I'm gonna honor the pact we've made with folks who are coming: "Hey, we're gonna give you a really good show and hopefully give you the things you've paid to hear."
On the other hand, we have to not play stuff that makes us want to die, because that's not fair to the people who come either. It's tricky, and the more records we put out, the harder it gets. We have a new one now, and all I want to play [are] the new songs from the record. It's not even out yet.
The cutting part is hard. Then you get a setlist that works, and at least I find myself thinking, "Now I'm stuck in a rut." We've been playing the same 25 songs for the last year and a half or whatever. Then you try to add other ones in, and there's no room to put them, and you start feeling like you're just playing the same show for the same people over and over again.
The only answer, I think, is to do what The Cure do, where they play for three and a half hours and just play everything, or do it like Fugazi did, where there's no setlist and they just go up there and go for it. It is really hard. We genuinely try to play everything that everyone would want to hear, plus maybe a few surprises and deep cuts for people who like stuff beyond the top streaming songs or the most obvious stuff.
It's also important for us to put a little bit of a flow to it. We try to put it together the same way we put together the tracklist on a record, where there's a flow that makes sense and dips down in a couple spots. It's a lot of fun to do, but it's particularly hard on this tour because most of the shows were supporting The Menzingers, so we have a 45-minute set. That is literally just the top 12 streaming songs and out. That one is kind of easy. But then when we do the headline shows, I want to play 45 songs because we haven't played all this stuff the whole time.
NW: What are some songs or releases you wish you could bring back, or that you wish got more attention, be it newer stuff or older stuff?
JB: For older stuff, we haven't tried anything from Forever and Counting in quite a while. "Manual" and "Better Sense" were back in the mix for a minute, and we were all like, "People are gonna be psyched we're playing these," and nobody was psyched [laughs].
I know there were people there who were fans of those records, but at large, I feel like Forever and Counting and a little bit Fuel for the Hate Game are kind of ghost records.
NW: That seems so strange to me. Especially Fuel for the Hate Game – it was so formative to me at the time.
JB: It's wild. I'm 99 percent sure we'll play "Turnstile" in Erie. Outside of that, maybe "Freightliner," because it was on Tony Hawk. Those are the two that people seem to have a reaction to.
As far as stuff I wish people – including us – paid more attention to, The New What Next. All of us really like that record, and that was just a weird time in the band. We kind of broke up and weren't getting along right when that came out, so we never learned any of them to play live.
It didn't get any attention from us either, so it's not shocking that people don't really seem to care about it so much. But as a person who plays, there are a lot of songs on that record where I'm like, "Man, those are cool. We really, really should start playing those again."
NW: For you personally, how did you develop your style? Your style of bass playing is so distinct and memorable and active, and it feels so educated. How did that come about?
JB: You kind of nailed it, I guess. I started playing string bass in middle school. Not in some super-intense program, but I started playing from a school aspect. George and I met in high school. We were in a performing arts program, so I studied classical early and then moved into jazz in high school and went back to classical a little bit in college.
That's probably how that happened. Now it's kind of second nature, hopefully. But a lot of it came from learning and being taught how to improvise. Playing jazz is pretty much the basic end of it, and then figuring out how that fits into what we do.
A lot of it was hearing the Descendents for the first time, which is funny, because [Descendents drummer] Bill [Stevenson] writes a lot of those basslines – figuring out how the basslines fit. It's kind of similar to what 12-bar blues is to jazz. Hearing it in a punk context, you're like, "Oh, that's kind of the same thing as Paul Chambers playing with Miles Davis, but just punky," or whatever. Once I heard it in a narrative that fit what I was trying to do, it started to make a lot more sense. Then there are the obvious influences that probably everyone who plays bass my age has, like Rush, early Metallica, Primus, and stuff like that. Any time there was a bass player in the forefront back then, it was a big deal.
All those players had a lot to do with it. You just steal from everyone, right? That's what everyone does. There are no new notes. We have the same amount of notes we've had forever. You figure out what someone else is doing, and you take it and make it your own.
NW: Here's another question from Sam Donahue, who plays bass with Penny Racer. They're actually getting back together for this show, which is really cool. Everyone in that band is a huge Hot Water Music fan, too.
Obviously, you've done several splits, especially back in the day, with bands like Leatherface and Alkaline Trio. Past or present, if you could pick one band to do a split with, who would it be?
JB: That's a tough one because – for a while, I would have been like, "Oh, Quicksand," but we did that. We're really lucky. It's like, "Oh, they want to cover one of our songs, and we're friends? Weird. OK, cool." Stuff like that freaks me out still.
Honestly, one that obviously won't happen now, for obvious reasons, that we would have really loved to do would have been a split with Sick of It All.
[Note: Sick of It All singer Lou Koller passed away in July of 2026 from esophageal cancer]
Those guys did a lot for us coming up, and they've just been some guys to us for 25 years now. For my money, they're the best hardcore band ever, and probably that ever will be. That would be one I would definitely love to have had happen at some point.
NW: Let's talk quickly about side projects, because Hot Water Music has had many. Which ones stick in your mind the most?
JB: For me, The Draft was a lot of fun. I love that record, In a Million Pieces. I think that was really kind of the only one I was in, too.
NW: Were you in Unitas?
JB: Yeah, I did Unitas, too. That was friends having fun. That was fun, but that was definitely like, "Oh God, we're actually gonna go on tour? OK, whatever," because this is what we did at that point.
A lot of the other older stuff – Rumbleseat or The Blacktop Cadence or that stuff – was all, "These songs aren't gonna make it in Hot Water, so we're gonna put them somewhere." And we all ended up playing with each other all the time because there are only so many people in Gainesville to play with, I guess. That's how it goes.
Originally, a lot of the stuff was, "I want to do something a little different," and/or, "I don't want to have to listen to these guys tell me this song's not gonna make the record," or whatever. You get a lot more autonomy, understandably. That's how all those early ones came to be, for sure.
NW: Then those things shift and intermingle. Rumbleseat songs become Chuck solo songs, and it becomes this greater extended universe of Hot Water Music. That's one of the reasons I love the band, and I know a lot of other people do, too. You guys don't stop making music. It's all original, and it's all good.
Do you think that rich history is one of the things that keeps fans coming back?
JB: I hope so. It's been kind of wild lately because we just recorded another record. We haven't done one this quickly in a while. It's just happening, so we're going with it.
At this stage, we're very much in the "I'm not making a record unless it's good or it's different" mindset, because we've said a lot over the course of 30-some years. Unless we've got something new to say, I don't think anybody needs just a different version of "Remedy" or whatever.
That said, we keep ending up writing stuff that we are inspired by and that feels fresh. If it feels fresh and good, then we're gonna go ahead and record it. I think people appreciate that.
As a fan of music, everyone has their favorite record. It's never the new one. Sometimes it is, but generally speaking, it's not the new one.
That's something that comes up a lot with us. When I look at how I listen to records, a lot of that doesn't have to do with the record. It has to do with my life at the time. I think that's the same thing for people. People's favorite record is more anchored to the personal experience around that record than the actual record.
The longer we're at it, the newer records will become people's favorite records because they'll be going through different things in life – maybe inflection points that are a little more important.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
See Hot Water Music with Nightmarathons, One If By Land, and Penny Racer at 6 p.m. on Wednesday, Nov. 18 at Centennial Hall (145 W. 11th St.) Tickets are $30 in advance or $35 at the door and can be purchased at tickets.eriereader.com
Nick Warren has seen Hot Water Music more than a dozen times, but never this close to home. They can be reached at nick@eriereader.com
