Morgan Winston
Trophy Dad (from left): Justin Huber, Abby Sherman, Jordan Zamansky and Henry Stoehr.
Labels can be so restricting.
Just ask Jordan Zamansky and Abby Sherman, friends and founding members of Madison’s Trophy Dad, whose music has been categorized as everything from shoegaze to bedroom pop to power pop.
“What the fuck is power pop, anyway?” Sherman asks, conference-calling with Zamansky. “I feel like that ought to be the theme music of The Powerpuff Girls or something.”
"Dog rock,” a term coined by the band’s guitarist and nicknamer-in chief Henry Stoehr, feels more true to the band’s ragged, earnest sound. And it obviously plays nicely into Dogman, the title of the band’s second EP, a set of five songs released in early May.
The momentum is building for a band that began when Zamansky and Sherman bonded over a shared love of Modest Mouse as freshmen at UW-Madison; they’ll be seniors in the fall. In addition to the EP, the band headlined a successful show at the High Noon Saloon in May, scored a Band-to-Watch feature on Stereogum and has been tapped as one of the openers for The New Pornographers’ Live on King Street gig in late August. For a pair of musicians whose dream has always been to play with bands they love, that’s a turn of events that pretty much blows up the bucket list.
If Trophy Dad’s first EP, 2015’s Shirtless Algebra Afternoons, showed strong hints of the band’s promise, then Dogman’s the payoff. “The songwriting is improved,” says Sherman, who plays bass, hails from Watertown and shares vocal duties with Zamansky, who’s from Wilmette, Illinois. “We understand a lot better what we wanted it to be.”
It’s hard to argue about the songwriting. The lyrics, co-written by the pair, are confessional, clever and head-snappingly detailed. “And She Succeeded” is a tune that references a girl kissing the guy from Twin Peaks (we’re assuming the band, not the TV show). In “Addison,” Sherman describes herself as “your skinny, hungry headache” and “your sexual oppression” before proclaiming, “I can’t be your man anymore.”
Maybe the secret’s in the creative process. Zamansky composes songs by singing melodies into his iPhone rather than taking pen to paper.
“It works more accurately than if I sat down and wrote things down in Google Docs,” he says. “It feels more ad-libbed.”
The ad-libbing is working for them, but the synergy between Sherman and Zamansky is what elevates the material. On “Louis Sachar,” one of Dogman’s standout tracks, Zamansky wrote the song’s chorus line — “don’t cause a scene” — and Sherman filled in the details of a relationship with a seriously pain-in-the-ass dude. That proves a common refrain.
“Everything I write about is things I’m upset or sad about,” Sherman admits.
Zamansky is on a similar wavelength.“The songs on the EP deal with metaphorical mon-sters — things like anxiety, romanticizing peo-ple, self-esteem, the bad things that really mess up your life,” he says. “When things are scary, songwriting strips away the ambiguity for me.”
Dogman strikes an impressive blow, but some of those monsters still need slaying. Sherman admits she sometimes struggles with the awkwardness of interacting with fans offstage and being the center of attention while performing. Then again, it might be easier than balancing the stress of songwriting, live gigs and final exams. But Sherman seems to be handling that okay as well: “I never would have thought I’d go to college, be in a band and do well.”