The Vitality of Julia Steiner

Julia Steiner is a huge, huge fan of Jack Black. “I think he’s the best vocalist on the planet,” she tells me, the words of a kindred spirit worshipping at the altar of School of Rock. Steiner is enamored with Black and his ability to hold immaculate pitch while acting like a complete nutcase. An accomplished singer in her own right, Steiner seeks to emulate that balance between precision and goofiness; between being tenacious and being Tenacious D. This comes as no surprise to those well acquainted with the one known as Ratboy.

While Steiner’s Chicago-based rock ensemble exists under the pluralized form, this title was bestowed upon her by the mean streets of Louisville. “The name ‘Ratboy’ comes from my friends in high school,” she says. “They gave me that nickname when I was 14 for no apparent reason.” Steiner knew it was a term of endearment and has worn it as a badge of pride. She believes her given name to be a tad bland; the outlandishness of “Ratboy” adds seasoning.

Steiner was originally afforded a passion for music by following a time-honored tradition. Youth takes piano lessons. Youth despises piano lessons. Youth quits piano lessons. Youth regrets quitting piano lessons. “I was a petulant child,” she laughs. “I don’t know if I realized it right away, but I really did miss playing music.”

With ivory in the rearview, it was time for Steiner to take the next step: swiping her mother’s Yamaha acoustic guitar and firing up 2006 YouTube. “I really enjoyed music and dipping my toes into songwriting,” she remembers. “It was always just me writing songs in my room by myself. I was always just kind of alone, musically.” As Steiner trekked further and further into the DIY musical frontier, her friends failed to follow. They liked music, sure — they would attend concerts together and raid the late Ear X-tacy for records based on the caliber of cover art. But none were willing bandmates, for better or for worse.

Upon arrival at University of Notre Dame*, this was no longer the case. The day after moving into her freshman dorm, Steiner became acquainted with Dave Sagan, who would grow to be her partner, both sonically and spiritually. “This is classic indie kid romance,” says Steiner, reminiscing on the mixtapes the two of them made for one another, blending Wilco and The Dodos with Gorillaz and Tune-Yards. “We just clicked immediately. I had never met anyone who had ever played in bands or who wanted to. We started working on songs together pretty much right away.”

* Steiner happens to be an enormous Notre Dame football fan. When I ask her if she’s prepared to classify C.J. Prosise as the greatest NFL player of all time bar none, she balks — yet another example of the greats going underappreciated — and states that she is instead majorly hyped on Chase Claypool.

At a certain point, the project outgrew Room 125 of Breen Phillips Hall. While Steiner was known as Ratboy for years beforehand, she hadn’t thought about pursuing music as more than a hobby until she met Sagan. Adopting this label as a collective made sense.

You may be wondering, then, where the “s” in Ratboys comes from. “Oh my god, dude,” is her response when I ask as much. “That was actually a very fraught situation.” Steiner and Sagan put out their first release on Bandcamp in the spring of 2011. By the summer of 2012, they had changed the name because, improbably, there was another Ratboy. “We added the ‘s’ that year because that guy was sending us threatening emails,” she recalls. To clarify, “that guy” is referring to upstate New York’s fedora-clad duo Ratboy Jr., not to be confused with Essex rap rock wunderkind Rat Boy, of course. Who could have guessed that the Ratboy market would be so saturated? Steiner isn’t bummed about adding the extra consonant, though. “I’m into it. I’m glad [our name] is still derived from my closest pals back home.”

Since then, Ratboys has continued to hone its sound, a thoughtful, dynamic brand of crunch rock. It’s the kind of music that sounds perfect for a vocalist of Jack Black’s ilk. So why, then, is a voice as tender as Steiner’s so effective? “I’d like to hope that my voice is somewhat soothing,” she says. “Something that makes people feel warm and welcome.” The juxtaposition between her genial, choir-honed pipes and the thunderous detonations of Ratboys’ instrumentation can be jarring at first listen. Steiner’s approach to the vocal arts allows for the mating of these disparate tones; she looks up to singers such as Black and Frances Quinlan, whose voices are so unique and defined in their own spectra. “I pride myself on taking up the right amount of space,” she says, an important attribute for one tasked with traversing this aural topography.

Steiner is still working to figure out how her voice fits within the framework of Ratboys’ songs. She welcomes the challenge of single-tracking vocal performances during the recording process, looking to follow in the footsteps of Jenny Lewis, royalty when discussing such endeavors. “She’s the queen of single track,” says Steiner. “No doubt it’s her. That’s god-tier shit right there.”

After locking down studio renditions, Steiner further optimizes on the road. She was planning on utilizing her time touring this summer to further elevate newer material. That, obviously, didn’t happen.

If releasing an album two weeks before the United States shuts down due to a global pandemic isn’t shitty timing, I don’t know what is. Ratboys had planned a full tour accompanying the release of their third LP, Printer’s Devil, before the world was put on pause by COVID-19. The record, originally recorded in 2018, was built to be experienced in a live setting. The band is conscious of the energy they bring to the stage. “The main goal,” Steiner says, “was to translate our live sound more accurately and more faithfully to a recording than we’ve done before. Hopefully in a tasteful way. It’s not just bullshit coming out of the speakers.”

Steiner relishes touring; cancelling a journey that features such a lively catalog is as gutting as one would imagine. Plus, after spending extended time in the axe lab, she was looking forward to melting some faces. “It definitely sucks not being in that groove of playing shows and rehearsing all the time,” she says, the longing evident in her voice. “No one was expecting 2020 to be what it was. When we are able to tour again, that’s going to be a huge reward.”

Past road stints with the likes of PUP, Foxing, and Wild Pink stand out as favorable memories for Steiner. She appreciates the familial elements of these tours. One example: a cohort-defining experience in which the group rallied around drummer Marcus Nuccio, who possessed the fortitude to tough out a slate of shows with a slipped disc in his back. “Marcus definitely paid his dues at the altar of rock,” she chuckles. “Without veering into cliché, Kelly Clarkson territory, I feel like it definitely made us stronger as a group.”

Steiner acknowledges her great support system in these disheartening times, living with or in close proximity to all of her bandmates. She says that their inability to, in good conscience, host a Halloween party was a “crushing weight of disappointment.” But from the somber ashes of what was once to be an absolute rager rose the Ratboys Halloween Telethon, a colossus featuring 60 bands and spanning 25 hours. “Oh my god, it was crazy,” she recalls. “It was almost like booking a music festival.”

It comes as no surprise when Steiner admits that the idea originated from her prominent Parks and Rec fandom; her cheery, determined nature is reminiscent of 99th percentile doer Leslie Knope. Factor in the immense sum of donations that were raised for charity and you have an event whose success would put Li’l Sebastian to shame. The only letdowns? An inability to book Duke Silver and the devastating reality that sleep is essential. “My body was not happy with me at the end of that,” laughs Steiner. “I was so confident going in. I stayed up all night in college all the time. We’re almost 30 now. It’s not the same.”

A rousing triumph, the telethon acts as a monument to Steiner’s zeal for togetherness, but more importantly social justice. She and her bandmates aimed to select two dissimilar organizations that champion equally important causes; they settled on the Equal Justice Initiative and Girls Rock Chicago. “A huge priority was to have fun and give people an escape from reality,” she says, “but also it was to encourage people to take stock of their community and/or country and figure out how to make it better.”

Amid everything, Steiner has managed to stay busy writing. She and the rest of Ratboys recently traveled to her family’s northern Michigan cabin to track demos for a new crop of songs. She refers to the body of work as “quarantine jams” before questioning as to the characteristics allowing that designation. She wonders if a retrospective down the line will find lyrical patterns or a different through line that links much of the music written in this trying year. Perhaps there will be a resurgence of something ridiculous like the kazoo. God, I hope so.

While the process has been beautiful and the music inspiring, Steiner doesn’t want to get ahead of herself. “I really hope touring comes back before we put out whatever these demos are going to be,” she says. “We put a lot of love into Printer’s Devil. We haven’t gotten to fulfill that side of the bargain yet.”

With the distribution of COVID-19 vaccinations on the horizon, life as we once knew it may not be too far away. The Ratboys tour that never was may come to be after all, beckoning the band with its promises of spinal ailments and camaraderie. Despite the unavoidable restlessness, Steiner doesn’t want to be the first band back out there. “We’ll be patient and wait it out,” she laughs. “We know it’ll be worth it.”