Mitchell (he/him) is a 23 year old who contains multitudes. Among these multitudes are musician, writer, type 4, lover of short-sleeved button ups, wise guy, fan of Spider-Man, missionary, roleplayer, and friend to all. Mitchell is incredibly thankful for the opportunity to make music alongside the many talented members of the Garages, where he considers himself a talented vocalist, a passable guitarist, and a percussionist by necessity. When not making music, Mitchell works in campus ministry, building relationships with students and making free dinners for crowds of roughly 100 college kids. Mitchell can be found on Twitter at @ItsAMeMitchell, should he be needed.

This episode of idol board was edited by BONES, hosted by Aoife, produced by Tangereen Velveteen, transcribed by Merry, and written by Aoife and Tangereen Velveteen. Find all episodes and transcripts of idol board at fourth-strike.com/podcast and follow @idolboard on Twitter for updates. Get all episodes plus bonuses by supporting Fourth Strike on Patreon.

Listen to “blood, sweat, tears, and blood” by the garages on Blandcamp:

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Episode Transcript

[musical intro plays]

ANNOUNCER:

You’re listening to a Fourth Strike production.

[The end of the musical intro plays, followed by the beginning of ‘blood, sweat, tears, and blood’. The vocals fade out while the instrumentals continue playing under the conversation.]

AOIFE

Hello and welcome to idol board! I’m Aoife and I use she/her pronouns. In this podcast, I will be interviewing members of the garages about their songs, the creation process, and possible inspirations. My guest for this episode is garages band member Mitchell Keys. Thanks for coming on Mitchell! Can you tell us your pronouns, your blood type, and what song you’ll be talking about with us today?

MITCHELL KEYS

Yeah, thank you so much for having me. My name is Mitchell Keys, I use he/him pronouns, I will be talking about the song ‘blood, sweat, tears, and blood’ off the album ‘ROSTER’, and my blood type is, um, poison. I am a, I am a poison-type… person, that’s what we’re called. There, we got there.

AOIFE

[both chuckling] We did. So, when and why did you join the garages? The band, not the team.

MITCHELL KEYS

I discovered Blaseball, I think it was sometime around Season 4, someone can fact check me on this, but, I saw the article on Polygon about it and I looked into it, and I joined the discord before I joined any of the, um… I, I, I picked a favorite team and someone said “do some research on the teams on like the fan wiki just to figure out, like, which team you vibe with, which team you think is interesting”, so I was looking up all the different teams and something about the idea that the Garages wasn’t a blaseball team as much as a band whose touring schedule perfectly lined up with a blaseball team’s schedule, something about that was just really funny to me, so I joined the Garages. I dunno, I was in the main Blaseball discord, and I sort of became peripherally aware of the garages like making music, just something clicked in my mind like “Oh I got a guitar for my birthday, I could, I could try making something”, put together, um, what is it, it was, it was ‘seagull’s song’, off ‘in the feedback’. Honestly not my best work but it was just something to say like “Okay, well, I am now, strictly speaking, technically a professional musician”, in the same sense that when I played basketball with people at summer camp that I was working at I was technically a professional basketball player. It was really satisfying to be able to make something, if, even if I didn't think it was very good, and be paid for it, and like have a community of people care about it and engage with it, y’know?

AOIFE

Yeah, definitely. You mentioned that you got a guitar for your birthday, is that the extent of your musical background or do you have, like, more?

MITCHELL KEYS

I have a… unique musical background. I joined my middle school band when I was in seventh grade, I played french horn. In fourth grade, I took guitar lessons for like half a school year, but I never practiced, cause I wanted to go watch cartoons instead, uh, I did musical theater in high school and then quarantine hit and I was like, “Y’know I’m home for the foreseeable future, I want to pick up guitar again”, but when I started practicing guitar in late 2020, that was when I was like “Oh this is really fun, I wanna practice this to, for my own sake, to better myself, to, to, just to do it”, if that makes sense.

AOIFE

Yeah, definitely, that’s kinda how I started with ukulele myself, I’m garbage at it don’t worry.

MITCHELL KEYS

Hey, I’m garbage at guitar and they still put me on the records.

AOIFE

I don’t know about that one, chief. [Mitchell laughing]

AOIFE

So, how did this song start?

MITCHELL KEYS

To tell the story of how this song came out, I want to tell the story of how ‘ROSTER’ came about, which, it was the long siesta, I had put one so-so song on ‘in the feedback’ and I wanted to like, I wanted to reach for the next rung on the ladder, I wanted to test the upper limit of what I could do at the time, and so I messaged in the Fourth Strike discord like “Hey, I have an idea for a project”, a song for each member of the Garages at the time, done by a different artist, and when you propose a project like that, people assume that you’re gonna lead it and so I was like yeah okay I can lead it.

Turns out I am not as great at leading big group projects like this as I thought, I sort of became an absentee leader, I, I wasn’t very present, I wasn’t checking in on things. To my immense gratitude, VigilantBaker on the discord messaged me like “Hey, I noticed you’re not around, would you like some help leading this” and I said yes, at first it became sort of a co-producer situation and then I fully handed the project to him, which, frankly I’m a little bit embarrassed about just because I had proposed this project, I should have been more, I guess, pun not intended, but vigilant and checking in on people, but after the pressure of not having to, y’know, check in on people all the time was gone, it gave me more time to write this song. At the very beginning of the project, when people were sort of like picking or drafting players of the Garages to write songs about, I noticed that Pitching Machine had been dropped into the Garages, and I’m always a big fan of, you know in like sci-fi shows and like Mass Effect how most of the characters are humans, and one of them will be an alien or one of them will be an android, and they’re really like the only interesting one on the, the ship or in the team or whatever. I felt that way about Pitching Machine and I thought it’d be really interesting to write a song from the perspective of a sentient piece of training equipment that had, y’know, stepped up to the big leagues.

AOIFE

That’s really interesting, cause when I think of the song, one of the interesting lines is the reference to Pinocchio, where you say like, “like the puppet wanting to be real but is eaten by the whale”. Do you see a parallel between Pinocchio and Pitching Machine, do you think Pitching Machine will ever become a quote real boy?

MITCHELL KEYS

That’s a, that’s an interesting question. First off I do think there’s definitely a, a parallel just because you know, no piece of media is ever just about what it says on the surface. My seventh grade english teacher once said that like Shrek is about racism, and feeling alone, and all those sorts of things but it’s also about, y’know, a fantasy ogre. A lot of the, the energy I took into the song, it’s someone who looks around and sees that everyone is not like him but he can’t quite place a finger on why and I thought the Pinocchio metaphor was apt so I, I wrote it into the music.

AOIFE

Yeah you talked earlier about how you were involved, and then not involved, and there was this whole thing about ‘ROSTER’ as a project. How did that affect your songwriting process for the individual song you ended up creating?

MITCHELL KEYS

I mean it affected my songwriting process in the sense that when I was quote unquote in charge it, it, I felt like I didn’t have room to be creative, I felt like I had to be the manager instead of one of the artists. I, I tried to do both and I realized I couldn’t so it affected the songwriting process in as much as, it let me start the songwriting process? Instead of being the one setting the deadline, then I had the deadline so I was like “I gotta get going on this if I want it to be worth anything.”

AOIFE

Yeah, I get that. So, what’s your favorite part of this song, what are you most proud of?

MITCHELL KEYS

So, like I said, I’ve, I’ve two, y’know songs to my name on various garages records, the first is, uh, ‘seagull’s song’ which is just me and my guitar and I knew I wanted something beyond that, I wanted to at least incrementally increase what I could do musically, and I work at a campus ministry in a college town and at our ministry we have a big, open, like, gathering space and we also have a couple instruments in the back room that we use for worship nights and we had a cajón, which, I don’t want to assume, if you don’t know what that is, it’s a box drum you sit on it and you bang on the front, which is the instrument you hear in ‘blood, sweat, tears, and blood’. I thought about trying to find a sample of a pitching machine and use that as sort of like a very rhythmical, very, very, like cyclical sort of backbeat, uh, but then I got the cajón out and I messed around with it a little bit and I was like “Oh, this sounds good” so I have it in this big, y’know, like big empty room and I’m playing it back and there’s a weird amount of reverb that just comes from playing in like a huge empty room by yourself, and after everything was said and done, after ‘ROSTER’ had been released I played it for a couple friends and they all said “Yeah, that sounds exactly like a pitching machine” so sort of subconsciously I got the effect I was looking for without really getting the effect I was looking for, if that makes sense.

AOIFE

That’s really interesting, it’s, that’s almost y'know to tie back into you said you were like, working on like, worship type stuff, that’s almost like divine intervention.

MITCHELL KEYS

[laughing] One could say, I suppose, yeah.

AOIFE

Yeah, so, what’s the community reaction been like for you both for ‘blood, sweat, tears, and blood’ and ‘ROSTER’ as a whole?

MITCHELL KEYS

Oh my god, it’s been… incredible. One of, one of my favorite things about being in the garages was sitting at my computer watching the, the first livestream and people... y’know reacting and, and, and flipping out when they hear the song and posting, posting like candle emojis when the slow songs come up and it was all... even, even though I had sort of stepped back from leadership, knowing that this idea I had had been seen to reality was really satisfying for me. I don’t know, man... When you have an idea like that and it takes hold of you until you can’t not see it through? When you see the finished product it’s... that’s something else, I don’t know how to describe it.

AOIFE

Yeah, it’s really bizarre being in, like, seeing the things that you’ve made being, like, shown to so many people and having them all be so excited.

MITCHELL KEYS

God, it’s so bizarre you do this with like, your group of friends online for y’know, a week or two or three and then everyone is streaming and reacting to it and saying they like it and it’s like “Wow this is not what I was expecting at all”. You sit with it for so long, like “Do I tweak this, do I tweak that, do I change this line” for so long that it, you almost become sort of like desensitized to it and they’re all, they all see the finished product and they have no idea, they don't always realize how much is put into it which I suppose is why this podcast exists in the first place to give y'know the laymen some sort of idea about all the effort that goes into different garages songs.

AOIFE

Yeah, and I mean to be honest, that layman is me, it’s [Mitchell laughing] to talk about idol board for a moment, to get a quick tangent, we kind of had the idea because it was really fascinating to me, as someone who has not made music before, to see how people from so many different styles of music and so many different levels of experience in music all worked together. It was all about kind of just like this is a way that someone can like learn “Oh, you can really just make music” like you don't need, [Mitchell laughing] you don’t need that art degree, although some people here have it, like you don’t need that music degree, you don’t need to go to college for eight years, you don’t need to put down a hundred grand, you don’t need to buy the best instruments, but like you can just make music.

MITCHELL KEYS

Exactly. To say it with as much love and admiration as I can, uh, skill is not a requirement for entry for the garages.

AOIFE

Yeah.

MITCHELL KEYS

By which I mean, anyone with, with passion and drive can participate and not only like get the music out there, but also like hone their craft and get better at it, like I never played percussion until I picked up the cajón for ‘blood, sweat, tears, and blood’ and that was just because I needed to, that was cause I needed some sort of percussion track and I was like “Well I have this space, I know where these instruments are, i’m sure no one will be upset if I use it” and so I did and it was fun, I really like playing the cajón now. If this, if this episode right here is the one that like some, y'know, Joe Schmoe who’s never even heard of Blaseball, or maybe is in the Blaseball fandom but has never even thought they could make music, if this is the one that they hear, and they think “Maybe I could do that”, I’m talking to them right now, you can, I think you should, ask to borrow your buddy’s guitar, go to YouTube, learn how to play a few simple chords, do it, post it on the, the Fourth Strike discord, see what people think, see what they can help you with, and also say hi! [laughing]

AOIFE

Yeah! And if that happens, please, please, please @ us on discord. We would very much like to see that. [Mitchell laughing]

MITCHELL KEYS

We would love to hear that, that would be, that would make my life.

AOIFE

Yeah… We come to our last question, which is, outside of your own work, what would you consider to be the most underrated garages song?

MITCHELL KEYS

Man, I’ve been thinking about this question since I realized I was going to be on this podcast and it’s hard for me to pick, like, what song is underrated just because the, the body of garages fans are not as established as, as Red Hot Chili Peppers or, or, or other, y’know, mainstream bands so it’s hard to figure out what’s even rated, much less what’s underrated. Uh, songs I like though, I mean, not to, not to play favorites, but all of ‘ROSTER’ is just banger after banger after banger, ‘rooting for you’, uh, ‘FIRE EATER’ is my go-to, like, pump-up song at this point, I... [laughing] I’m growing my hair out and I'm practicing how to headbang, and ‘FIRE EATER’ is my go-to for that, just, oh my god, blasting it as loud as I can in the car with the windows down turns my day around no matter what.

AOIFE

Yeah I’m, fun fact, I’m actually in that one, I was one of the chorus.

MITCHELL KEYS

Oh, no way!

AOIFE

Yeah!

MITCHELL KEYS

[laughing] We’re, however many minutes in now, and suddenly I’m getting all nervous like I'm meeting a celebrity, jeez! [lots of laughing from both]

AOIFE

Well, on that note, thank you so much for joining us on idol board, a podcast--

MITCHELL KEYS

Thank you so much for having me, this has been a lot of fun!

AOIFE

Yeah, it’s been great! We are a podcast where we interview members of the garages, an anarcho-syndicalist blaseball band from the fictional location of Seattle. We make songs about being gay, the apocalypse, and fighting the gods, and you can find our music at blandcamp.com, with an L, Spotify, or on YouTube. We’ll see you next week! Now, here’s ‘blood, sweat, tears, and blood’ by Mitchell Keys, of the garages!

[‘blood, sweat, tears, and blood’ plays in its entirety]

ANNOUNCER:

idol board is edited by Ada Quinn, BONES, Jennifer Cat, nuclear tourist, and zack.ry, hosted by Aoife, produced by Tangereen Velveteen, transcribed by SigilCrafter Aya, Merry, and VigilantBaker, and written by Aoife and Tangereen Velveteen.

[outro music plays]

ANNOUNCER:

That was a Fourth Strike production.