Brendan B. Brown From Wheatus On That Iconic Hit ‘Teenage Dirtbag’

Wheatus front man and incredibly nice guy, Brendan B. Brown along with his better half, fellow Wheatus member Gabrielle Sterbenz will return to Australia for an epic fourteen date run of acoustic shows through January and February of 2025 starting in Adelaide tomorrow night then dirt bagging it across the nation with an acoustic set that is perfect for these stripped-back, intimate shows across our great southern land.

After a whirlwind 2024 that saw Brendan down under twice, once in February for acoustic shows with Art from Everclear and again with Wheatus in April for the Pandemonium Festival, BBB has become a beloved fixture in the Aussie music scene. The Wheatus sets at Pandemonium were one of the standout moments of the day, finding that perfect balance between stoking the fires of nostalgia and putting on a killer rock ‘n’ roll show.

You definitely know THAT song, but for those needing a reminder about the enduring magic of Teenage Dirtbag, Wheatus’ iconic debut single, released back in 2000, remains a cultural touchstone nearly twenty five years later. The viral “Teenage Dirtbag photos” trend on TikTok has attracted over a million participants, including celebs like Madonna, Lady Gaga, and Mark Ruffalo, and the hashtag #teenagedirtbag has been viewed over 2 billion times!

The song’s timeless appeal has also been featured in Netflix’s Big Mouth, Disney’s Cruel Summer, and in 2023, it incredibly re-entered the UK Top 40 charts! The buzz culminated in a performance at Madison Square Garden for iHeartRadio’s Jingle Ball, where Brendan sang alongside pop sensation Jax. Wheatus recently re-released their debut album in an epic twenty-song expanded edition, offering fans “lost” tracks from over the years. Brendan talks to Hi Fi Way about the tour and that iconic hit.

Another Australian tour you must be looking forward to this one?
Absolutely, this is the third trip back in twelve months, so, wow! It’s been really cool to be able to get back so frequently these days. I didn’t expect that but it’s happening, so we’re happy about it.

Was it just band demand or do you just love it here, or combination of all of the above?
Well, we do love it there. Australia being the first place that ever made Teenage Dirtbag a hit. Actually, you guys gave us a, a career in music, whether you know that or not, I’m not sure, but, Dirtbag had kind of come and gone in the States and had run its course and it hadn’t really broken through on the radio. I’ve said this before, but the night before we got the call that we had to go to Australia, we were playing a show in Lawrence, Kansas, in front of two people who thought we were Smash Mouth! It was looking pretty down and then your Christmas time, you made it a number one and all that. We started working as professionals in music finally after decades of failing to do it.

How did you find that acoustic tour with art from Everclear? It was a fantastic night I thought.
I loved that tour. What show did you go to?

Lion Arts Factory here in Adelaide…
Right, yeah, Adelaide man, what a beautiful place. We had toured with Art in the States on his Summerland tour that he puts together with the full Everclear band and Living Colour and Hoobastank, we had a blast. It was the first tour out of Covid lock down that we had done. So it was great. When he invited me to come down to Australia and do acoustic tour, I was a little nervous because I’m not an acoustic touring guy, or at least I wasn’t at the time, and he kind of broke the ice and showed me. That guy, he’s got MS, he gets up there and he does an two and a half hour show with requests and talking to the crowd. He just works and works and works, and he loves it so much, and he’s such a good entertainer. We decided off the back of that Australian tour with Art that we should do an American acoustic run, and we did, and it really went off. It was so cool. So many people showed up, we couldn’t have expected, and we wound up doing the United States, over seventy shows or something like that. We did acoustic, myself and my partner Gabrielle, who’s actually a backing vocalist in Wheatus, but also does her own singer songwriter thing. She’ll be opening up these tour dates in January at the acoustic shows. When we did it in the States, we did a hundred percent request, no set list.

That kept us on our toes, forced us to learn songs we hadn’t paid attention to for years and years. We got to a point where the vibe was just so cool and we finished up the lower forty eight we thought we got to add Hawaii. Once you’re in Hawaii, you’re halfway to Australia. So, our friend Mugs, who books us down there got wind of it, and he said come on down, so we decided to do it again and we’re really happy about it. Super stoked! Skipping the New York Winter one more time, that’s two in a row for me, but the rest of the band are going to get kind of pissed off I think, eventually having to shovel snow by themselves!

Is this tour mostly about celebrating the debut album?
Everything on the debut album is stuff that we played for years and years, years. I can play those songs blindfolded, however, putting it out to the crowd for all requests means that we might get some stuff that we haven’t really paid attention to like the b-side of an experimental progressive noise record in 2009 and didn’t follow it up. So, you got to be ready for that stuff too. I’m going to be working on about eighty songs and try and get to the point where I know what I’m doing on all of them, which is crazy. We did that on the American tour and it was great. The first album is definitely on the table. Shout them at us and we’ll do them.

Eighty songs is impressive. Isn’t there a saying that a tortured artist only has capacity for twelve?
We toured the UK about a year ago and we had the whole entire repertoire which was seventy two or three all told that we could whip out if we needed to and they put us to the test over there. They were calling out some crazy stuff. The request thing winds up being where the audience gets the show that they want, not the one that we’ve prepared. I felt in the early days that it was a little bit arrogant to work on the same twenty songs and just stick to that with crowds going to get what they get and that’s it.

I’ve been to shows where I’ve, when I went to see AC/DC, I wanted them to play Hell Ain’t a Bad Place and I only saw them do that once. It’s one of those things where people like lots of different stuff. They’re definitely going to get “Teenage Dirtbag” and they can get anything from the first record that they want to hear. Of course, we love playing that stuff still. But, we’ve expanded it for people who like some of our weirder stuff and not the off the beaten path and, we’re going to keep it real for them too.

Can you believe the legacy that Teenage Dirtbag continues to create? It’s been in movies, it’s been in just about everything and it just seems to grow a new set of legs every year.
Yeah, it keeps coming around. I love it. I’m not the least bit tired of that song yet. I don’t think I ever will be. It’s a song that’s true to me, myself as a songwriter, and feels good to sing, feels authentic, feels like it comes from a real place emotionally. You don’t have to act your way through it or anything. A lot of bands who are in that position where you had a song that maybe was the A&R guy’s idea or something. Like, we were lucky that way. We didn’t have any of that kind of stuff and we fooled him into having our own song. We feel lucky about it and we still love playing it.

Do you still get impressed by the stories from fans that tell you how much that particular song means to them?
That’s always one of the coolest parts of doing this is you get to see how everybody sees themselves in the music, sees themselves in Teenage Dirtbag, and they make themselves a character in it. You hear it from a perspective that you wouldn’t have even imagined. Jax, the pop star on TikTok, for example, she did a version of it from the point of view of Noelle, so sang it from Noelle’s point of view, and okay, I hadn’t considered that at all. She saw that that was her, that was her way into the narrative that made sense for her. I really enjoyed getting an alternate take like that, even if sometimes people misunderstand the song, they misunderstand the lyric, sometimes those are more fun, you know, I’ve heard ‘she drives and I rock as a misconstrued first verse lyric. I kind of think in some ways that’s a little bit cooler, it’s a little bit even more pathetic of our protagonist to be thinking he’s cool because he knows how to play guitar or something, as opposed to driving this car, which was where I grew up called IROC (International Race Of Champions). How you see yourself in the song that contributes more to its longevity and its importance. It’s the only reason it’s important is how you see yourself in it. It doesn’t matter what I meant or what I intended for. It is nonsense.

Have you been impressed by any other covers of the song?
Phoebe Bridger’s version is really emotional. I enjoyed Ruston Kelly’s version. I’ve seen some pretty heavy versions. Roswell Kidd did a really cool heavy version of it. Everybody’s got their way that they interpret it and like I said that’s typically cooler.

Are there any particular songs that you’re looking to cover yourself that you haven’t, that you’d like to give a give a go?
We started playing The Darkness Growing On Me recently. We added that to our live set, which I’ve been really enjoying. If you look on YouTube, on our official YouTube account, there’s a whole series of covers that we’ve done, where we did Scissor Sisters, Fleetwood Mac, Cheap Trick, we did Wilson Phillips Hold On For One More Day. We went through this series and then like a couple, like Rush The Trees, progressive rock stuff that I grew up listening to. What we were doing was we were doing one where you learn it and play it in one day. Now, of course, you can’t do that with Rush, but a lot of them you could. So that’s the way we were approaching it, like learn it and play it in one day kind of vibe. It was super, super cool. It was fun.

Do you ever feel like there’s been pressure there to kind of come up with a, another hit in the calibre of Teenage Dirtbag?
I’ve never experienced that pressure. I don’t care to revisit that motif in any way. It’s just, I feel like whatever I did in that regard would really flop and be pathetic, you know? There’s a song called Lemonade that everybody’s always chanting when we play live, full electric band. Another song called Fourteen, a song called Valentine, I really like to play. There’s a few out there that have gone in very different directions that don’t sound like Teenage Dirtbag at all, that are sort of like, just as important to me. In fact, in some cases, I prefer to play a song like Valentine or a song called Lullaby, to make it obvious that we can do a lot of different kinds of music and not stick to this. Can you imagine if I just wrote another Teenage Dirtbag, who the hell would want to see that? I don’t think anybody would want to see that. It’d have to be a better different song than Teenage Dirtbag. That’s what it’d have to be.

What is funny, we did this funny thing one time where we asked an AI to write a song that was better than Teenage Dirtbag, and it wrote the song about the song Teenage Dirtbag, which was weird. AI is dumb anyway, but whatever. I mean, it was an interesting experiment, and we thought, well, yeah, maybe that’s a sign nobody should do it.

Does playing smaller venue and being up close with the fans excite you?
Absolutely, the most important shows I ever saw when I started paying attention to music as a young adult, were always smaller clubs, CBGBs, Mercury Lounge, under Acme Lion’s Den, all these little clubs around New York. Our first feelings of being a band that was worth anything, were in the Mercury Lounge and the Luna Lounge, these two places we used to play back and forth Downtown, in the city. I’m basically looking for that feeling every time we are on a small stage in a club, trying to get that feeling where it’s like, okay, this is actually a magic thing is happening here, and I just happen to be here to see it in this tiny little place. That feeling is better than any grand concert that there’s for me anyway. That’s what we’re looking for. We’re looking for that feeling all the time

Did you hand pick the local supports yourself?
Actually what we did was we asked, Gabrielle has been touring with me supporting the whole Wheatus acoustic thing, doing her show for over a year and a half now. So, we’re well into that as a like the vibe of the show. But, coming to Australia, we said to our guy Mugs, I was like, Mugs, just get something that’s really cool in Australia, give me something very Australian, what’s the cool thing? He was like, all right, all right, so he went and got Pricey. So, I’m really stoked about that. Aimee Isobel is opening up for us in Melbourne, so that’s going to be fun. Every time we’ve ever gone to Australia and either been on a festival or picked up a local support, they were awesome. You guys don’t mess around and we’re excited about that.

Are there any new plans for new music?
We have currently have about eighty songs streaming. We’re about to try and finish our seventh album, which is another ten songs. But in the meantime, I’m reissuing the vinyl from our third, which is what I was working on today, remixing our sixth studio album, repackaging that one and of course, album seven, which is done, it’s been done for a while. I’m trying desperately to cut time out of the calendar to dedicate uninterrupted time to this process of making a record, but it’s hard because I keep getting called out on the road. I’m going to have to take maybe the summer of 2025 or maybe just call 2026 off the road year, finish the albums kind of year.

Is that going to be made available here in Australia?
Oh, absolutely. A hundred percent. Yeah!

Are there any Aussie bands that you are really into at the moment?
Well, the first band ever that I was ever into was AC/DC, my favourite of all time since I was nine, but since then I found a band called Motor Ace. Do you remember them? That album Five Star Laundry is a masterpiece, an absolute banger, classic, you know, unassailable masterpiece, whatever you want to call it. I don’t really care. It’s such a good record, such an awesome record.

Did you get it on vinyl?
That’s how I finally got it because you couldn’t get that record for twenty years. You couldn’t even stream it. They were one of those bands for me that I was in love with that band. A band we toured with for a long time ago called Lotel, they were cool. Of course, the Tim Rogers outfit, You Am , there’s no denying the power of that freaking band. They’re incredible, they’ll melt your face off! The first time I ever heard of You Am I was when I saw them live, I had never heard about them before. Somebody said, we’re going to see this Australian band at Brownies or Under Acme, and they ripped my face off. I had never seen anything like it in a small club. I felt like I was watching The Who, they’re so good, man, what a band. He had his shtick where Tim Rogers is going to steal your girlfriend, that whole thing. He was just magnificent. Australia kicks ass. You guys don’t ever mess around. There’s always something brilliant happening in the Australian music scene.

Interview By Rob Lyon

Catch Wheatus acoustic at the following shows , tickets HERE…