Planes Mistaken For Stars are currently flying in unchartered territory. Following the death of their frontman Gared O'Donnell from cancer in 2021, the remaining members of the Illinois-born, Colorado-raised post-hardcore veterans were left with an unfinished album, one started during a period where no-one honestly knew whether or not O'Donnell might survive to see it completed.
In addition, another death, that of founding guitarist Matt Bellinger, hung over their work on what would become their recently-released fifth album, Do You Still Love Me? Bellinger, who left the group in 2006, was reported to have died by suicide in 2017, while incarcerated, and is acknowledged in the album's opening track, bluntly titled Matthew Is Dead. It's one of several songs on the new record that embodies Planes' trademark contradictions: direct but vulnerable, stripped back but packed with ideas.
Louder sat down with drummer Mike Ricketts, bassist Neil Keener and guitarist Chuck French to reflect on the losses that ended up underpinning their new album, the experiences that have brought them closer, and the open skies stretching before them.
Given the circumstances under which you were working, how hard was it to stay positive during the making of the new record?
Mike Ricketts: "It was more something that we knew we wanted and needed to do. I compartmentalised the aspect of what the job was to get the recording done and make sure it was a good record. I separated that from dealing with the potential of Gared's death, because we had hope up until the very end. And then once Gared passed, which was in the middle of the mixing of the record, it became something that we had to do for him, in his honour. When something like that happens, you go through these existential questions. How do I fit into this? What does this mean for me in my life? How is this going to affect the band and fans around the world who love Planes? Positivity was never really in the equation."
Neil Keener: "At the beginning of the pandemic, I was in Peoria at Gared's house, specifically to work on new shit. And that was well before his diagnosis. Once he did get diagnosed, like Mikey said, I don't know if there was a conscious effort to stay positive. We just knew we needed to get it done as quickly as we could.
"I decided to try to write a song every day. Being in Gared's house was great, because if he heard something he liked, he would run upstairs and say, 'We should use this.'
"When he got diagnosed, I talked to him and his wife and I was, like, 'If you guys need me out of here, if you need your space…' and Gared said, 'If you ever talk about leaving here again, I'm gonna beat the shit out of you!'
"It was an easy decision to stay. It's been hard emotionally, obviously, but I knew that I was exactly where I needed to be."
MR: "Gared would tell me, 'Neil's a slave driver, man. He makes me come up here every day and bust stuff out constantly.' [Laughs] But honestly, I think that Neil did a huge service by encouraging Gared to write lyrics and get guitar parts down. Because of that, we still have lots of material that we're continuing to work with beyond this record."
You address the death of your former bandmate Matt Bellinger head-on on the album's opening song.
MR: "I love Matthew Is Dead, because it's a very direct and kind of fucked-up approach, but it is also such a beautiful tribute to the relationship that Gared and Matt had growing up. I don't want to say [Matt's death was] shocking, because Matt had been going down a path for years that we knew was not a good path. But it was heartbreaking, having played music with the guy since I was 19 years old, spending our formative years together. All those early years with Planes, all those tours… He was such a fun and likeable guy."
What experiences on tour brought you closer together as band?
Chuck French: "Tons. Having and Mastodon and Against Me! asking us to go on tour with them was, like, 'Fuck, yeah!' We were so stoked to do that."
NK: "Because [musically] we were so hard to pin down, it made it easier for those bands to get into what we were doing and hope that their fans would, too. It gave us a unique opportunity to play with so many different kinds of bands."
Away from the music, what was your most memorable experience on tour away?
MR: "When you're in a band on tour with another band, and you're all bros, you decide stuff like, 'We're gonna go to Alligator Point [in Florida] tonight and do a shit-ton of shrooms and wade out into the fucking ocean together, and then we're gonna go explore these little alligator holes that go down.' Maybe we shouldn't do that, but, well, it's fun.
"And then you're swimming together, and there's fucking phosphorescence happening, and fucking stars shooting overhead… shit becomes magical. Those experiences you're all sharing together, there's nothing more bonding than that."
CF: "We were having Roman Candle fights, there were crabs on the beach, it was just nuts. If you moved the water, it would glow. Gared was terrified to go into the ocean because he was petrified of sharks. He made me stay with him while those guys just walked off because it was low tide, so the water was waist-deep for a mile, maybe more. They walked so far that we couldn't hear them anymore, and Gared and I were just floating in the water, laughing and looking at the phosphorescence. Finally, they all came back, after an hour or so. But yeah, it was a hell of a night."
You mentioned earlier that there's more Planes material recorded with Gared in addition to the new album. Have you talked about how you might release that?
MR: "Some of it's sloshy, like, we have Gared's vocals over a chorus but we don't have a verse. There are other tracks where we have just a guitar part but no vocals. Then there are other songs that are totally complete. But yeah, there's definitely a load of material still to work with and we're hoping that in the next couple years we'll have something else to put out."
Have you considered working with guest vocalists?
MR: "We've discussed that and approached some friends, but that'll be a decision we need to make down the road. We've also discussed possibly playing live again, too, but imagining trying to do Planes without Gared seems impossible. We want to play shows, but playing these songs without Gared onstage would be emotionally difficult. Just the thought of it is hard to grapple with as well.
"The other aspect is, how would we pull it off, technically? Who could do that? Could we make it sound like we want it to sound? Would it be representative? Would it be honouring Gared or not? We still are trying to figure that out."
Planes are a band who've managed to stay admired and influential without being particularly active in the past decade. How does your new album fit into that legacy?
NK: "I wasn't in the band for the early albums, but some of my favourite stuff to play live was off [2004 album] Up In Them Guts and the few songs we did off of [2001 album] Fuck With Fire. Those songs are so unique.
"Watching Planes play before I was in the band, I always got the impression that there were four different people who thought that they were in four different bands and were playing four different songs at the same time, and somehow it all came together and worked.
"After I joined the band, I think we all got onboard with playing the same song, which was good in some ways, but I think some of the magic changed a little bit. A lot of the new album came about because of the way that Gared and I were demoing those songs. We were just doing stuff that we liked. Making whatever felt good, you know? A song like Put Your Heart On The Fire is a little more accessible, but we weren't, like, 'Oh, this is too poppy,' or whatever. We were, like, 'Oh, this is poppy. Let's lean into that a little bit and see where it goes.'
Bringing those ideas to Mikey and Chuck, we knew that they were going to become Planes songs, because when the four of us play together, it sounds like Planes. There wasn't a concern about 'Does this fit?', because we knew it would once everybody got their hands on it."
