When Cole Kinnear quit Cheap Time, I was in a state of shock. Why was it so hard to keep a consistent bass player? We had gone through four different bassists in six years by the beginning of 2013. Cole wasn’t the best musician, but he was my best friend. It was almost worse than getting dumped by a girlfriend. I loved Cole so much. We lived together and toured the world playing in a band. We just spent too much time together, and it got to be too much, so he was moving to Puerto Rico to join a new group that AJ from Davila 666 was forming. I didn’t know what to do, so I drove to my parents’ house to chill out for a few days.

The first person I called to talk about Cole quitting was Jessica McFarland. Jessica and I had become close friends over the previous couple of years. She was at this bizarre show I played with my One Man Band at a dance recital studio in her hometown of Paris, TN, back in 2005, but I didn’t meet Jessica until years later when she moved to Nashville. She had played drums in a band called Mee Maw, which I never saw play. I first knew her as the lead singer for Heavy Cream, and I had approached her about trying to produce some recordings for her band. I don’t think the three songs I recorded for Heavy Cream ever got released, and they ended up getting Ty Segall to produce their second album instead of me.

Heavy Cream had sort of broken up by the time I was calling Jessica from my parents’ house in Henderson in late January 2013. I remember telling her I didn’t know what I was going to do with Cheap Time now that Cole Kinnear was leaving. I told her if she wanted to learn how to play bass, I would help teach her, because she was the only person in my mind who could join Cheap Time at this point. I think my offer really surprised her and maybe caught her off guard. I’m not even sure if I’d thought about it before our phone call or not. It just all made sense at once for me.

Luckily for us, Jessica took my offer seriously, and she picked up on the bass guitar very quickly. We had already started recording our follow-up to Wallpaper Music in my bedroom studio before Jessica joined the band, so I ended up playing most of the bass parts again. However, Jessica was able to add some crucial backing vocals that gave the new album a totally different sound than our previous three.

The artwork for Exit Smiles was a very simple homage to British pop artist Richard Hamilton, which I tried my hardest to draw by hand and not make look hand-drawn. The photo of us on the inner sleeve is a blown-up Polaroid of us at the newly built Riverfront Park next to the Titans’ Stadium and the Cumberland River, taken by Brooke Powell.

Our first tour with the Exit Smiles lineup of Cheap Time was kind of odd and surreal. It was a month-long summer journey throughout the East Coast and Midwest, opening for Social Distortion. I had honestly never even heard Social D’s music before that tour. This was just something our booking agent had pitched us for, but it ended up being a fun tour. For the most part, Social D’s fans seemed to like us, and we sold more T-shirts and CDs at those shows than at any other opening gigs we ever played.

During the Social Distortion tour, while we were having lunch at a Bob Evans restaurant in Ohio, I got a phone call from Larry Hardy with some bad news. Larry informed me that the September release date for Exit Smiles that he had promised us back in March was going to have to be pushed back until later in the year. Larry said that he needed that particular September date to instead release an album by one of Ty Segall’s side project bands, and that I needed to understand how many records Ty was selling at that time. Cheap Time was not as high of a priority anymore. Sometimes the truth hurts, but that was the deck of cards we were being dealt by In The Red in 2013 after almost seven years with the label.

Our September tour opening for Mudhoney in the South, which we had been looking forward to for many months, felt bittersweet not having copies of Exit Smiles with us to promote. I understood where Larry was coming from, though, and I don’t hold any grudges. That’s just the music business, for better or worse. We ended up getting copies of Exit Smiles in November, just in time for our fourth European tour. Then we toured the entire United States throughout some horrible winter weather in January and February 2014.

When we got home from the Exit Smiles US tour in March, I had already started work on our next studio album, but I was rushed to the emergency room in the middle of recording to get my ruptured appendix removed. When I got out of the hospital with a mountain of medical bills, I kind of lost all interest in picking up where I left off with the fifth Cheap Time album. I was just so happy to be alive that I didn’t care about those songs anymore and abandoned the project halfway through production.

A month later, Cheap Time got an offer to do some songs for an Xbox game called Sunset Overdrive. When I called Larry to tell him the great news, he suggested that we should turn down the offer because the same company had already reached out to Ty Segall before us. Ty had told them no, and so Larry thought we should do the same. I tried to explain to Larry that this was a really great opportunity for us and that it would help me pay off my mountain of medical bills after my emergency surgery. Surprisingly, Larry’s response was that I should think about moving out to LA because Ty Segall had just bought a house in his neighborhood. I couldn’t even afford to pay off my medical debt, much less move to California.

I never really got to know Ty Segall very well. The few times I met him, he seemed like a nice enough guy. Jay Reatard really didn’t like people referring to Ty as “the next Jay Reatard.” Jay called me after the Reatard’s reunion show at Goner Fest 6 in 2009 to brag to me about how he’d pissed on Segall after their set. Once Ty started working with In The Red, everything changed for that label. Larry started selling a lot more records, and lower-selling bands like Cheap Time and others weren’t as important anymore. I still think Larry Hardy’s a great guy, and you can’t knock someone for being a good businessman. I was sort of burned out on the whole Cheap Time concept by then anyway. I wanted to do a new project with Jessica McFarland, which became Savoy Motel.

Cheap Time and Savoy Motel coexisted loosely together for about a year until Jessica said she didn’t want to play bass in Cheap Time anymore. Less than a year later, we got a good offer to play a one-off show in Chicago. On our drive up, we decided it would be our last show. I made a short announcement about it being our last show right before we closed with the first song ever written for Cheap Time, “Spoiled Brat.” After the show, most people thought I was joking, and the promoter seemed a little annoyed that we hadn’t informed him of our decision so he could have exploited the event more. None of that mattered to me. I hate when bands do big, over-promoted farewell shows or tours. I’m proud of everything Cheap Time did in our ten years of operation. I wouldn’t change a thing.