RXGhost will perform at Barleycorn’s on Saturday, Sept. 21, on a bill with Wichita’s Vehicles and the reunited Zsa Zsa Ketzner.
RXGhost is from Kansas City, Missouri. It released the album “Scaffolding” earlier in 2024, a collection of 13 shoegaze-inflected songs that recalls the best elements of Midwestern indie rock bands such as Shiner.
Josh Thomas is RXGhost’s founding member, primary songwriter as well as guitarist and vocalist. He says that the group is already at work on new music and some other material that will come out over the next few months.
The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.
I read that the lyrics on the album are reflective of your personal experiences over the last couple of years.
I think I had an early midlife crisis situation going on. I was working too much and had a family [and there was a lot of pressure] with all the responsibilities that come with that. I was coping with all the anxiety with too many drugs and too much drinking. I ended up doing two months in rehab about three years ago. Since then, I’ve been clean, and things are going a lot smoother [now that] I’m not messed up all the time.
It’s been kind of a rebuilding over the last five years or so, getting divorced [and so on]. I still have my kids half the time, and we’re still friends but I have this time now to do the things I need to do to keep myself sane.
It would seem that music was deeply important in getting through that.
My favorite thing is to send the guys a new song I wrote in the band chat. I probably attach too much of my self-worth to creativity and things like that. Whenever I’m working on stuff I enjoy working on, it definitely helps my mood. It helps keep me clean. There’s a song about it on the new album I’m working on right now. The song’s called “Being Prolific.” It’s pretty much about how I have to keep so many things going at once to keep myself away from me a little bit, without getting too far inside my own head or thinking about all the things that would stress me out years ago. I’m actually at the point where I’m writing songs about writing songs and about how it keeps me sane.
Paul Malinowski of Shiner recorded and mixed the album. Shiner has had such an impact on the Kansas City music scene. Were you a fan of their music when you were coming up?
I didn’t grow up in Kansas City, so they were long broken up by the time I got up around here. But Paul did sound at a lot of the cool venues around Kansas City when I moved up here years ago. So, I kind of met him that way. How we ended up recording with him is that I’ve probably been recording myself for a decade but not nearly as well as he records things. I moved into a townhouse after I got divorced. There was no space to have massive guitar amps and drum sets set up, so we had to go somewhere else to do the tracking for the album. I was going to mix it at my house myself, but [Paul] was so good right away that we just had him record and mix the entire album. I did record some things at my house: guitar overdubs and vocal overdubs, things like that.
I think through that whole process of getting to know the songs and getting to know the band better [helped him appreciate us]. When Shiner was having their [annual] Kansas City show we were invited to play. I wanted to ask if we could be on the bill but that could have been a weird spot. I figured he was getting hit up by tons of bands asking to play with them because they’re massive around here, and they’re really good. But he called me up one day out of the blue and said, “Do you guys want to open up for us?” I said, “Of course!”
That was a huge crowd for us. We usually play for around 50 to 100 people but that show ended up selling out at Record Bar. Over 400 people were at that show. We played the middle slot, so it was [cool]. I was stoked that they picked us because they could have had their choice of a lot of other bands to be on that show.
You have a live album in the works, a single, and a studio album coming up. You’re definitely not just sitting around.
[Laughs.] This isn’t even my only band. I’m also doing a fun, weird punk band called The Eradicats; it’s a Pixies-ish sound with They Might Be Giants-type lyrics. They’re absurd. My girlfriend was talking about how I’m not super serious as a person but all of the RXGhost stuff is serious. We put The Eradicats together, and she plays bass in it. We recorded seven songs at the house, and we should have a seven-inch single out pretty soon. I have a lathe in the basement, so I sometimes cut records for people down there.
What inspired you to start doing that?
Vinyl is really expensive to make. I started looking into more short-run vinyl and with short-run vinyl you kind of have to do the lathe process because a lot of the expense is getting those initial plates made that they use to stamp the vinyl with. At that point, even for a seven-inch, you’re already in $600, $700 before you even make your first record because they have to make all the plates to stamp them with.
That’s when I came across the original way of making records, where you cut them in real time. I bought one that I tried to rehab about five or six years ago. I was on this Lathe Trolls forum, where there’s a bunch of old guys helping people who are trying to get these old-ass lathes to work right. I never could get it to cut anything good. Then I got a bonus from work last winter, and I blew the whole thing on buying a fully functional lathe from a guy in St. Louis. I went there and spent a whole day at his house. He showed me how it worked and all that.
It's still kind of a weird process. You have to take the mix and make it mono then apply a reverse RIAA curve to it, then run that through some EQ to counteract what you lose with the lathe cutting process. You don’t get the full frequency range. You lose a little bit of the low end and the high end. It’s been a learning process getting that going.
It’s pretty solidly mid-fi vinyl. At this point, I can just buy a piece of plastic off the internet for five bucks, and I can print the sleeves and the center labels at my house. [What we make] is about 80 percent of the volume of regular-cut vinyl. The sheen is gone on the high end, but it has this almost FM quality to it that’s really cool. It’s pretty cool for short-run, limited-edition merch stuff.
