We Came From Celluloid

Nicky P and Brian Pritchard are back together after Brian Noll sat in last week, and the conversation takes a left turn into hair. Nicky describes army tests on Native American trackers who supposedly lost their edge after military haircuts, and argues that hair is part of your nervous system, something you feel the wind with. Brian runs that idea through Hair the musical and Samson. Nicky adds Ta...

Cleveland rapper A-Dub HDX booked a run through Houston, New Mexico, Vegas, Phoenix, and California, paid for the car and the hotels, and asked his crew to just buy a flight. Nobody came. His son was three months old. He went anyway. Brian and I talk with A-Dub about 20 years of shows since his first one at Peabody's, why he added HDX so people could actually find him, rapping only about his own l...

In A Rut, from the Akron area, join Brian and me before we share a stage at the Maple Grove. Chad, Chris, and Steve are married homeowners with kids, dogs, and day jobs, and they sat down and did the math on going pro: a label would have to pay them $70,000 to $100,000 per person, per year. That's probably never happening, so why keep doing it? Brian's take: anybody can do anything once. The quest...

Pritchard's off doing movie pictures with his wife, so Puma Thurman guitarist Brian Noll sits in for his first time on the show, at 9:21 at night, fresh out of parent-teacher conferences. We start with the greatest villain dances in film, from Mr. Blonde and Patrick Bateman to a guy in the Reacher spinoff Neagley who gets ready to torture someone while dancing to Ambrosia's How Much I Feel. Then H...

This week we fit an entire band on one screen. The Femaliens, out of Pittsburgh, join Brian and me on their Tuesday practice night: Emily "Chaos" on vocals, Chandrika on bass, Jules on drums, and Eve on guitar. Turns out their band exists for the same reason Brian and I do: somebody refused to cancel a show. They put together their first set in two months for a female feature fest in Erie, and the...

Brian Pritchard and I start with Doug Liman's Go and the '90s wave of too-cool-for-the-room crime movies, and end up somewhere I didn't see coming: who gets pulled up in Hollywood, and why. Brian tells a story from a Heath Ledger documentary about Ledger's LA house becoming home base for Cate Blanchett, Guy Pearce, and Naomi Watts. Jonah Hill landed Accepted because he was Justin Long's roommate....

This week Brian and I sit down with Jeremy, the guy who books the bands, runs the sound, and secretly runs the social media at Maple Grove Tavern. We talk about what it's like being the most second-guessed man in any bar, including the guy who wanted the PA pointed at his barstool, and the one question every band should ask themselves: where's your energy going? Jeremy has a warning for bands usin...

Brian Pritchard and I dig into a question I've been chewing on since I rebuilt wecamefromcelluloid.com : stand-up comedians built huge audiences off podcasts and parasocial relationships, so why can't bands do the same? Brian pushes back. Liking us as people doesn't mean you'll like the music. We get into why you can buy exposure but never virality, the Shirley Manson warning about a generation of...

This week Brian & I sit down with his son Ben Pritchard, filmmaker, and the guy behind the music project Sparks McFly, to talk about actually making things happen with no gatekeepers standing in your way. We get into whether he sees himself as more of a producer or a rapper, how his found-footage mockumentaries That Time We Stole the TV and Next Up come together without a written script, and the o...

Brian Pritchard and I kick things off talking about Devs, Alex Garland's miniseries with Nick Offerman, before getting into something that's been bugging both of us: how much of the stuff we love just disappears once streamers decide it's not worth keeping around. That turns into a real conversation about physical media, why I'm still hunting down DVDs and Blu-rays, and why owning something, studi...

Brian Pritchard and I start with music this week, Presidents of the United States of America's Supermodel, Kaspar Babypants, why modern production makes every genre sound the same, Polyphia's Tim Henson chasing his final form, and the Dream Theater album that got even better after Mike Portnoy came back. Then things get heavier. We trace a line from Fight Club straight into nu-metal and the incel...

Welcome back to We Came From Celluloid, where a couple of Ohio dads who make video-game-adjacent music sit down with two guys who actually built a whole band around it. This week Brian and I are joined by Saker and Rick from Masterhand, the Smash Bros.-costumed, nu-metal-meets-nerdcore-hip-hop supergroup that's somehow only two years old and already headlining, touring, and about to share a stage...

Welcome back to We Came From Celluloid, where two dads with a podcast and a band try to figure out how to be both at the same time. I'm Nicky P, here with Brian Pritchard, and this episode isn't really about a movie, it's about the business of trying to be a band, which somehow still manages to turn into a bit about writing a Halloween III song on the spot.   We open up honest about where things a...

Welcome back to We Came From Celluloid, where two Ohio dads with a podcast and a band try to figure out why art means something different than what it was actually built to mean. I'm Nicky P, here with Brian Pritchard, and this week we went from Chris Nolan's most confusing movie to the dumbest, most brilliant songwriting origin story in our band's history. We kick things off with Tenet, Brian's w...

Welcome back to We Came From Celluloid, where two pop culture nerds and band geeks sit at the apex of music & film, except this week we actually let a third weirdo into the room. I'm Nicky P, here with Brian Pritchard, and this episode we're joined by Joey Steele, a man Brian has known since they were 13-year-olds destroying their hearing in a band called Nosferatu, and who has since spent the las...

Welcome back to We Came From Celluloid, where two pop culture nerds and band geeks sit at the apex of music & film, except this week the "film" part is literally about us. I'm Nicky P, here with Brian Pritchard, and we just got back from Puma Thurman's first out-of-state, multi-city run, which means we also just got back from watching a rough cut of an actual documentary somebody made about it.  ...

Welcome back to We Came From Celluloid, where two band dads talk movies until it somehow turns into a life lesson. I'm Nicky P, here with Brian, and this week we brought on somebody who's built an entire second life out of a question most of us have asked exactly once and then forgotten about five seconds later: "Wait, is that a real place?"   Ryan Albanese runs a YouTube channel dedicated to find...

We told you last time that we'd come back different. Turns out we weren't kidding. This episode is the debrief nobody tells you they need after a first tour, five gigs, five completely different rooms (an art-space bookshop, a punk bar across from a soccer riot-in-waiting, a Chicago venue, a guy's actual apartment balcony in Denver), and about a thousand small lessons we didn't know we needed unti...

Welcome back to We Came From Celluloid, I'm Nicky P, here with Brian Pritchard, and this one's a little different. This is the last episode we recorded before Puma Thurman hit the road for our first real tour. And I don't say that as a throwaway detail. By the time you hear this, we're already different people. Whatever version of us is in this recording, that's the old guys. The pre-tour guys.  ...

Welcome back to We Came From Celluloid, where Brian and I talk about the movies and music that keep us sane, and occasionally stumble into conversations that remind us why we started playing in the first place. I'm Nicky P., here with Brian Pritchard, and this week we're joined by Dennis of PsyDefects out of Sioux Falls, South Dakota.   Here's how this episode came to exist: Puma Thurman is going...

Welcome back to We Came From Celluloid. I'm Nicky P, here with Brian, and this week we've got our Milwaukee connection on the pod, Tlalok Rodriguez, the guy who single-handedly made our Wisconsin tour stop possible by doing something apparently rare in this business: seeing a post and actually doing something about it.   Tlaloc is a Milwaukee-based multi-instrumentalist operating under the band na...

Welcome back to We Came From Celluloid, the show where we start talking about a Michael Bolton tour shirt and end up at the uncanny valley. I'm Nicky P., here with Brian Pritchard, and this week we accidentally made an episode about one of the defining questions of the moment: why does everything fake feel worse, and why does everything real feel better?   We open where any great conversation open...

Welcome back to We Came From Celluloid, where two dads from Ohio prove weekly that the most interesting conversations happen when musicians decide they also care about movies. I'm Nicky P, here with Brian Pritchard, and today we've got Nico Cellz from Bag of Humans sitting across from us, which, if you're just tuning in, is not a band name I made up. Here's the thing about Nico: we're sharing a st...

Welcome back to We Came From Celluloid, the podcast where two guys from a band in Ohio overthink movies until something useful falls out. I'm Nicky P, here with Brian Pritchard, and this week we went somewhere I genuinely wasn't expecting. We started the way we always do: talking about nothing in particular. GPS disasters, MapQuest horror stories, the existential terror of 80-degree weather. And t...

Welcome back to We Came From Celluloid, the podcast where two musicians who think too hard about movies talk to other musicians who think too hard about everything else. I'm Nicky P., Brian Pritchard is here doing his thing, and today we've got TJ Costanza from Neighbor Dan, a band out of the Youngstown/Mercer, PA area that plays what one very smart show attendee once described as "calculated loud...