Nick Faber of the “funny punk band” Worthington’s Law stopped by Live & Local this week, following the release of the band’s latest album, “Funnier! Punkier! Bandier!”
“Funnier! Punkier! Bandier!” is Worthington’s Law’s fourth full-length album in the last five years, not counting several additional EPs – not bad for a band that started out as Faber’s one-man pandemic project.
“The bass player from my old (college) band reached out to me in 2020, and that really inspired me to get back to it,” he says of the band’s origin. “I’ve always had creative things in my life, I’ve done comedy a lot, so I like to have an outlet…and my friend Dave (reminded) me that I can just pick up my iPad, open up Garage Band, and start banging things out.”
With a name pulled from a Mr. Show comedy sketch – which coined the phrase “Worthington’s Law” as the belief that your wealth determines your worth – Faber wrote a satirical political song called “Gaga for Maga.” And the rest, eventually, was history.
Listen to the full album and purchase it on Bandcamp.
“I wrote it on Midi instruments because I actually don’t really play anything very well,” he says. “I found a guy on YouTube to produce it, another old bandmate played the guitar, put it together, and started playing it for friends – and (then) a friend shared it with Scotty Sandwich.”
Based out of Oxford, Scotty Sandwich is an acclaimed musician, a prolific rock producer, and a central figure in the Triangle’s music scene – and he quickly signed on to what had hitherto been a solo project.
“He saw that I had some kind of something I was going for,” Faber says. “We put out an EP in 2021 called ‘Suburban Hell On Wheels,’ and then we got reached out to by a record label…
“And then we suddenly unlocked the magic of what our band has become: Scotty was like, ‘Hey man, I’ve got some ideas for these songs. Can I try arranging them a little bit differently? And it came out way better than what I had even imagined for myself.”
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Today, Worthington’s Law has grown into a four-piece band, with bassist Dylan Rock and drummer Landon Johnson joining the initial Faber-Sandwich core. But while the band’s lineup has expanded, that initial vibe remains unchanged: just like their very first releases back in 2021, the 17 tracks on “Funnier! Punkier! Bandier!” combine Faber’s observational humor (“Student Driver Sticker”) with tongue-in-cheek leftie politics (“Cybertruckin’ MFer”), filtered through the eyes of a proudly middle-aged dad (“Too Old To Mosh”) – all with the hard-rocking pop-punk flair of Weezer or Blink-182 or the Descendents. (“Cul-de-sac core,” they call it.)
“I’m in my forties, and a lot of our peers are sort of settled in,” Faber says with a laugh. “So I feel like our band is a way to sort of say, ‘Hey, we can still have fun, come on out.’ We might not mosh as hard as we used to, but come to our show and you can feel like you’re young again, and laugh, and have a silly punk rock time and love it.”
And while a Worthington’s Law song is more likely than not to lean into humor, the music is also not without heart and meaning (“I Don’t Believe in Anything”) – and Faber says he also feels fulfilled when fans respond to that side as well.
“The most gratifying thing, and this has happened several times, is when a person comes up to us after seeing us live and tells us specifically how we made them feel,” he says. “A guy came up to me after (a) show and was asking, ‘What’s your background? How did you get into this?’ And now he makes music! This is The Lousy Hitchhikers, from Winston-Salem. And more recently, we were playing in Durham, and we have this one song called ‘I Wrote A Song,’ which is a little more sincere – and we played it as the last song of our set, and this guy came up to me and was like, ‘Hey, I know you guys refer to yourselves as a funny punk band…but I just want you to know that last song really touched me.’ And man, that felt so good…
“Because when I write these songs, I put so much of myself into them. So if another person can hear that and feel a connection to it, that’s worth so much more than any dream success scenario that I had in my head. Because I can go to bed that night and be like, ‘wow, I really touched someone with the lyrics that I wrote. This thing that I just hammered out in my bedroom one night, I just did it on a stage and somebody felt compelled to tell me what it meant to him. That to me is the most satisfying…just having a person come up to me and tell me they connect with something I wrote, I think that’s what all artists actually want.”
Nick Faber of Worthington’s Law stopped by Live & Local this week to discuss “Funnier! Punkier! Bandier!” and play three tracks: “Kate (The Fun Times),” “Beard Envy,” and “Funny Thoughts.” Listen:
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