What Are The Odds?

Seven friends, one summer, a 22-minute receipt.

The logline is already a dare. "The mostly true story of seven friends mortgaging the future to rock in the present," a Fiona Woodman short cut from Alien Boy and Cool Original's summer 2019 Never Stop Hanging Out Tour. TMDB dates the US release 28 May 2021, 22 minutes, music and documentary, NR. The tagline on the page is Better Luck Next Year, latestnetflix.com maintains, which is also the name of Nathan Tucker's old home-recording compilations from his Cool American years. That joke is the whole movie. ,

Summer 2019 they were on the road as a double bill. Alien Boy is Sonia Weber's Portland guitar-pop band with drummer Derek McNeil and whoever else fit in the van that week. Weber told the Bozeman Daily Chronicle they were "a queer band for queer people" and a "punk, emo, shoegaze criss-cross thing." Cool Original had just left Portland for Philadelphia after Tucker (sort of) changed the name from Cool American and put out I Never Said I Didn't Care. Weber played drums for Cool Original on that run. The two bands even dropped twin videos, Alien Boy's "If We Don't Speak" and Cool Original's "Never Stop Hanging Out," both of them hanging out in front of a school-picture backdrop. ,

KALX in Berkeley booked both bands for a Monday morning live set on 22 July 2019. Half Way Home in San Diego filmed a versus session that September, Cool Original on "Funny Before," Alien Boy on "The Way I Feel," with a note that they share members and had already been in each other's clips. The credited selves on TMDB read like a tour-van roll call: Weber, Tucker, Elian Conroy, McNeil, Jeremy Murphy, Laura Daegling, Andy Rusinek, Caleb Misclevitz, Alex Fiedler. Conroy looks to have built the TMDB page himself. Discogs lists Weber, McNeil, Conroy, and Misclevitz as Alien Boy members, which is how a 22-minute tour tape ends up with nine people billed as Self. , , ,

First Avenue's Alien Boy bio, written by Tucker, still sells Sleeping Lessons as the 2018 breakout and Weber as a PDX lifer named after Greg Sage's Wipers. Topshelf later filed Cool Original as Tucker's chameleonic pop project, the Pacific Northwest years packed into Infinite Hiatus and those Better Luck Next Year tapes before the Philadelphia rename. Woodman is the person with the camera. She also cut a 13-minute tour tape from May and June 2019 with Strange Ranger and Spirit of the Beehive, her other scene. What Are The Odds is the Alien Boy and Cool Original version of that habit, posted in full on YouTube under the same title. , , ,

There is no studio scandal. The gossip is the bet they made in public. Leave a city, share a van, play rooms that still use school-picture backdrops, and keep the receipts at 22 minutes so nobody can pretend it was a career plan. Weber's later records kept coming. Tucker's project kept changing names. The 2019 tape is the one summer they mortgaged on camera.