Enema Of The Garden State | Madi Diaz
Defending Our Neighbors Fund: https://defendingourneighbors.org/
These recordings started out as a fun light exercise fueled by an eternal love and fandom I have for blink-182 and the record Enema Of The State. I was in the studio in New Jersey peeling back layers and tracking and writing Fatal Optimist, and every morning to warm up in the studio, producer and engineer Andrew Maury would set up some mics and turn on the 4 track and let me just play around by myself. I had been listening to this batch of songs obsessively once again (it’s almost a seasonal occurrence with certain records) on my jogs and I wanted to see if I could just run these songs and let the nostalgia drive my memory for the lyrics and tear through a punky acoustic arrangement. No planning, no overthinking, no analyzing allowed, just ripping into the songs. It was just pure fun pure joy. There was no clear intention of releasing this project until recently. We started thinking about how incredible the name Enema Of The State is for a record. How the title is somehow so hilariously current and politically culturally socially insanely ironic…. How funny/ridiculous it is to cover this record in 2025 when it feels like we really need to flush the system and give our whole government a health check / gut check. And as time has gone on it continues to become more and more apparent that we are at a real boiling point - there is just so much going on at this very moment across America and so much pain with ICE raids and false condemnations of hard working American citizens and Undocumented Immigrants …and maybe just maybe we could use this version of enema of the (garden) state in whatever way we possibly can to raise awareness and money for people in need of defense and aid in their right to live and work and breathe and be and stay on American soil.
I may have been born on US soil but my family came from Danish and Peruvian immigrants. So much of The United States of America is populated by people who came from other places. There is so much here we have to love and protect and nurture. So, for all of those reasons, this project is up on bandcamp, and every penny it generates will go to Defending Our Neighbors Fund. This will help give immigrant families, adults, young children, and so many of those in need of advocates, access to resources through this support system. They are providing immediate grants for trusted organizations to deploy legal advice and bond assistance. Thank you so so much for listening. For me, it’s become about so much more than just a nostalgia for teenage rebellion against mom and dad. Fuck ICE. Enema Of The State Forever.
