Breakup to Makeup

Before the recently ended hiatus, Divorce members moved on to other local bands including Woman, Dirty Knees and Hometown Slackers Make Good, and they now seem reluctant to confirm if the band is really back together.

“We don't really practice or get together much,” relays Miller. “We may try to play a show a month. I don't know.”

Perhaps this casual approach to their reunion and future suggests some of the reasons the band broke up in the first place.

“Well, I was losing my hearing,” Miller jokes.

“I think I was taking it a little too seriously,” comes Garza's more philosophical reply. “It was consuming a little more of my life than I wanted it to.”

The threat of becoming too serious isn't one of the more common reasons espoused by bands that break up, although maybe it should be. Brannon floats the idea that the more standard, expected narrative of a band (as dictated by an age-old process most bands never stop to question) was something no one really felt comfortable with.

“The business side — if you want to call it that — really stressed us out a whole lot,” she says. “Trying to think about touring, and like, who's gonna book this show, do we have T-shirts? Whose responsibility is it? That stuff's not really important, we never really cared about it, but somehow we got stressed out about it. Playing is all we really need to do.”

The band members were perfectly fine when playing, but anything beyond that seemed beside the point.

“It's kinda like, it was just sort of uncontrollable, this band. You couldn't guide it,” Miller says.

So what spurred the reunion?

“I tricked them,” Brannon laughs. “There was the Whisk-Hutzel Records thing. We were on [the compilation album], so it just naturally seemed like we should play the release party.”

Having been separated for so long, there might have been a concern that one member wasn't as into it as everyone else, or some hesitation in approaching old material, but this turned out to not be the case.

“It just kind of happened,” Miller says. “Those songs came back like that.”

Garza elaborates, offering one of the more forward-looking comments of the discussion. “Everybody, I think especially me, had a mentality of, maybe we'd matured a little bit as far as how to go about it and what we felt like we could accomplish musically.”

Divorce w/ The Cheat
Saturday, Feb.2 (Groundhog Day!)
Longbranch Saloon / 10 p.m. / $5