They use two tap dancers for percussions.
Not only do they have a tuba player, but he dresses up in his high school band uniform on stage.
They write songs with titles such as “Gimme Back My Mullet” and “If You Were Dead You’d Be Home Now.”
They have the word “novelties” in the title of their debut EP.
But get one thing straight, Born Again Floozies is not a novelty act.
“I don’t consider us a novelty act by any means,” says band founder, songwriter, guitarist and vocalist, Joey Welch. “I understand where people get that just because of the first record. But like I said, it’s a misunderstanding, and, of course, the misunderstanding is due to the way we wound up releasing them.”
The first record, the 2006 EP, NOVELTIES, ADDENDA, AND EPHEMERA, was recorded at the same time as their current CD, 7 DEADLY SINNERS. Both were recorded by Steve Albini, who Welch chose after he heard the Pixies SURFER ROSA, which Albini also produced. “I love the way it’s like a Tom Waits record, where you can hear the room, which I have always loved,” says Welch. “I want to hear the room. I don’t like the stuff that’s flat up against the speakers or drowned in reverb. All the pop records now have been gone over with microscopes for hours and hours, and beat doctors and pitch correction and all this crap, then you have a robot singing this commercial. It’s awful.”
Once the tracks were recorded, there came the decision of how to arrange them to make a coherent album. “We were listening and there seemed to be a division,” explains Welch. “There were some songs that were more novelties, and then there was the record. We were going to release them as two separate CDs, one as SEVEN DEADLY SINNERS and one being NOVELTIES, ADDENDA, AND EPHEMERA, meaning just crap you find laying around. Kind of an outtake, but it was really like an addenda, it was going to be after the fact. But then the label that we’re working with said NOVELTIES is a great introduction, you should do this first and separate them. Don’t do them both because who’s going to want to make the commitment to buy two CDs of a band they never heard of? So this is why I’m not a businessman.”
What Welch is, is a rare breed of musician who would rather play music that excites him and keeps himself interested rather than become famous on record company terms. “My musical heroes are [composer, pianist, and experimentalist] Henry Cowell and [modernist classical composer] Charles Ives. Those guys were shocking the hell out of the establishment and really challenging people’s ideas of what music should be, not in a way that was pedantic, but in a way that was charming and exciting. And that’s the best thing a band can do,” he says.
The Floozies are shocking, not in the tired, Marilyn Manson “I worship the devil” way. Musically, they are unlike any band that has ever existed. Welch, who has dyslexia and ADD, was never able to learn how to play guitar correctly and thus plays just the fret, which give his playing a very rhythmic quality. He was in the living room of his girlfriend (now wife), Elizabeth Milliken, talking music, when the Floozies were born. “I was looking for some other instrumentation to begin with. She had been talking about the fact that she tapped danced and I said, ‘whoa, that’s kind of hot.’ So one day I was just playing guitar and she went up in the attic and got her tap shoes and we recorded the first floozies session there. And for about a year we were just a duet, acoustic guitar and tap dancing,” says Welch.
Welch always loved traditional Irish and Bulgarian music, which is loaded with foot-stomping and percussion. But he still felt like the band needed something else. “We tried a couple other things and nothing was working. Mainly it was just people stumbling in our path. It starts out with people that I like then it’s ‘Hey, do you play anything?’ But none of the instruments we tried out were the right instrumentation. Then I was at this Mexican restaurant and they had this kick ass Tejano band playing on the juke box. The tuba player was just ripping it up, and I thought, oh man, that would be perfect, because it would be a nice pillow to set all this percussive crap on. So that night we were playing at a club and there was a band playing the happy hour and they had a tuba. I hadn’t seen a tuba player in a rock or country band in about 10 years. So this guy steps off stage and I could tell he was the one holding the band together. I just walked up to him and said, ‘Hey man, I don’t know how many gigs you’ve got, but you have to play with us.’ And it turns out he’d seen us and loved it. And he said ‘Hell, yeah!’”
Thus Ben Vokits and his high school band uniform joined the band. Amy Gilmore joined as the second tap dancer when, in her eighth month of pregnancy, Milliken broke her ankle and was forced to do one-foot tap-dancing while sitting on a chair.
The band’s name also shocks. They were almost forced to cancel a show in a small Indiana town after the venue became flooded with calls. “People kept calling, asking, ‘Why are you having a bunch of filthy-minded heathens play our town?’” says Welch.
The name, according to Welch, actually stems from a St. Patrick’s Day tradition he began. “We have a thing we do every year at St. Patrick’s Day. It’s kind of like caroling except we sing very raucous and offensive Irish songs and we call it the Godless Pagans. We made these shirts and on the back they say ‘Bring Back the Snakes.’ We just liked the fact that people had to stop and say, ‘What the hell does that mean?’ So with Born Again Floozies, we liked that idea of a name that makes people wonder, ‘Are they floozies that have reformed or are they born again to floozie ways? What is it?’ It’s not a very deep question, more fun than deep, but nevertheless it’s a question.”
It was a name that blended well with their NOVELTIES release. With songs like “Gimme Back My Mullet” and “Small Penis Compensation Vehicle” (about Hummers, naturally), the Floozies explored the sillier side of life and human nature, although there is some depth to them. Welch wrote “Small Penis” after he and his three-year-old son, driving along in a beat-up 1981 Toyota Corolla, were mercilessly tailgated by a guy in a Hummer.
7 DEADLY SINNERS, on the other hand, explores the darker side of life while throwing in touches of humor. While NOVELTIES commentaries offered laugh-out-loud humor by picking on easy targets, SINNERS is darker and more introspective, forcing the listener to pay more attention to the daring and unique instrumentations. Welch explains it this way, “Part of the reason of releasing NOVELTIES first is it kind of eases people into the idea of the next record, just like SINNERS will ease people into the next one. It’s still easing people into this instrumentation. I think is very difficult for people at times to accept anything that’s really different. We’ve had shows where people are just looking like, ‘Is this okay? I like it but I’m afraid to admit it.’”
The Floozies are different, and that’s the main reason why they’re so damn great. Add to that their humor, sophistication, musicianship and all-around presentation, and you have a reason to fall in love with music all over again. 
