ALL HAIL KING BOB!
It’s clear that Jackson McDonald – AKA King Bob – is destined to be pop-punk royalty, and not just because of his crown. The semi-regular fixture of the Victoria music scene makes hyper-relatable music for the masses with anthems that feel a little too close to home.
King Bob expands his kingdom as 2025’s first Zone @ 91-3 Band of the Month with his single, Figure It Out.
While you might know Jackson McDonald as King Bob his band is made up of heavy hitters from the Victoria music scene like Evan Matthiesen (The This/Projectors) on drums, Jes Matthiesen on guitar, Annie McKinley also on guitar, and Jimbo Rai on bass. Evan Matthiesen also produced King Bob’s latest record, Rookie.
After receiving the royal treatment and receiving not one, but two, photo shoots from Rocktographers (the second one was inspired by Biggie), Jackson McDonald and Tyson Elder sat down to talk Victoria, King Bob, and hockey.
Tyson Elder: So, before we get started, how should I address you? Your Highness? <laugh> King Bob?
King Bob: I always say my friends call me KB.
TE: KB, it is. Well, congratulations on being 2025’s first Band of the Month.
King Bob: It’s crazy. I was surprised because I didn’t know that we applied. <laugh> Evan (Matthiesen) just went rogue and applied for us, which is great and I’m very happy that he did that. Since we started playing live and putting out singles, I’m just continually am surprised by the response that we get. It feels like we’re moving up in the world very quickly, which is very different from my prior experiences in bands. I think Band of the Month is definitely a good kick in the ass too – for moving things forward.
TE: It absolutely is.
King Bob: Evan, as you know, has obviously been Band of The Month before with The This and he produced the new record, Rookie. Stem to Stern – all the way through.
TE: Tell me a little bit about the process of making this record. I know you’ve been in a bunch of other bands but this is your first project that was just yours.
King Bob: I was in a band when I was a teenager, and then I was a side man in a bunch of bands after that. With this one, I was getting ready to hit the ground running in 2020 with a new project that was gonna be primarily my songs, me singing, yada, yada, yada. Obviously that did not even come close to happening… because it was 2020.
TE: I don’t remember. Did something happen? [laughs]
King Bob: Something happened [laughs] and that was a bummer because I had been trying to get my life in order for a long time. I guess it ended up being a blessing in disguise. It gave me all this extra time to work on stuff. I learned how to use Audacity and start recording my own demos. So about maybe two and a half or three years ago I approached Evan with 19 demos in a tracklist that mostly resembled what ended up on the record, Rookie.
TE: You’ve got what, 17 songs on Rookie?
King Bob: We cut two songs. I basically would go over to Evan’s place – at the time he was still recording in his house and we would basically just use the demos that I had as the scratch tracks and record over them. He would go in lay the drums down, stitch ’em up if they needed to be stitched up and then I would lay down parts upon parts upon parts until eventually we didn’t need the demo anymore. We’d have the complete song.
There are a couple of places on the record with a couple of particularly lo-fi moments that are actually just from the demos.
TE: I’ve listened to the record a bunch since I picked it up at Vinyl Envy, and I have to tell you: there’s some stuff on that record — especially songs like Something Belonging To Others — that feels like an anthem to where we live.
King Bob: Oh yeah – this record feels like a disenfranchised millennial in a lot of ways.
TE: I think a lot of people can relate to a lot of the songs on this record, you know, about paying rent and working shitty jobs.
King Bob: I tried very hard. Well – I don’t know how conscious it was. We’ve talked about how much I love BA Johnson, right? One of the things I love about BA – people think of BA as like a novelty comedic artist and that’s obviously there. He’s very funny, his lyrics are very funny, his live show is very funny, but he also has these songs I don’t think are funny at all. At least I take them very seriously and they tend to be the ones about work or about being broke. That’s something that I wanted to do with this project. Do a similar thing, but make it more clear that it’s not a joke. I hope the jokes land or whatever, but a lot of it isn’t actually funny. Like it’s not How Many Tbone Steaks Can I Fit In My Pants or whatever. Yes, it’s a hilarious song, but it’s not funny that you have to steal from work to afford to eat. That is a reality for a lot of people and I think that’s what makes the album so relatable. It’s completely underrepresented because most music is made by people with money.
In the realm of most pop music it is about basically two things. I’m horny or my girlfriend broke up with me. I like pop music, but the good stuff is often able to step outside of that, and the breadth of human experience is so much more than that. I don’t know. [laugh] Okay. It’s at least a little bit more than that. The things that people spend most of their time dealing with or worrying about are obviously how am I gonna get laid, breakups or whatever. That’s a big deal too, but at least the people I know they are worrying about how they’re going to pay rent or what’s gonna happen. My boss can basically just cut my hours or fire me for no reason and that experience is not spoken to for a lot of people. I’m not one of these art-can-change-the-world people because I think you need a lot more than art to change things. I do think that one thing that it can do is remind people what of what’s going on.
TE: I’m curious to hear about your Band of the Month single, Figure It Out.
King Bob: That’s a funny one. That’s probably the oldest song on the record in terms of how long I’ve been playing some sort of version of it. It didn’t get good until I learned how to do the whole demo thing and record myself. There was a version of that song that I was doing in a band with Jimbo in like 2013 or 2014. It’s a song about a few different things but it’s mainly about growing up and realizing — at least for me — it always felt like one day I’m gonna step through a door or wake up in the morning and be like, “I am an adult. I am an adult man and that never happened.” Now I’m like 31 and I still feel all the same feelings that I did when I was a teenager.
TE: Trust me, I’m 38. I feel the same way.
King Bob: When I was in my early twenties, everything felt the same. I think there’s a bunch of reasons for that, and again, getting back to some of the other subject matter on the record. It’s like you don’t just feel that way ’cause there’s something wrong with you or ’cause you have mental health or whatever. Like, there’s like material reasons why you feel that way. It’s a song about growing up to some extent or . . . not growing up is a better way of putting it. It’s kind of the synthesis of all the stuff that the record is about in one song, which is like arrested development. I should feel like a successful person. I have a job that I like, I have this band that people like, but I can’t get out of a one bedroom apartment.
TE: The last thing I’d like to touch on is hockey. You’re always wearing Hartford Whalers gear. It was always the team I picked when playing NHL ’92 on Super Nintendo. I need to know the connection here.
King Bob: Well, there’s a bunch. The first is I was a sports writer for a long time. I was hilariously the managing editor for Canucks Army for like a year and a half. I don’t know if I was ever very good at it.
TE: Have the Canucks ever been very good? [laughs]
King Bob: Yeah, I was only as good as they deserve. [laughs] I was better than they deserved probably and hockey has been a big part of my life for a long time but as a complete outsider. I never played. I relate a lot to sports metaphors and to sports storytelling. Good sports writers and the good storytellers understand something about it that I think a lot of regular people and selfish sports fans don’t. Most of what sports is, is a loser machine.
It is a finely-tuned machine that produces losers. It’s like, in a hockey season, you get to the end of the year and one team has won and every other team is a loser. Within that there’s even more losers. You can get philosophical with it too. Who’s the biggest loser? Is it the team that loses the last game of the season? Is it like the team that didn’t even come close – failure to launch?
As far as the Hartford Whalers thing goes, there’s some just good symmetry there. They had the great fight song, the Brass Bonanza that we use as our intro music. They have the best logo as far as I’m concerned, some of the best team colours. That part made it easy to want to gravitate towards that. But I also was really attached to the idea that to mourn the Whalers is to mourn something that kind of never really got to exist. They had all this talent come through the franchise. Like we’re talking like household names. I mean, Gordie Howe obviously but also Chris Pronger and Brendan Shanahan.
TE: Who I saw play with the Jets when I used to live in Winnipeg as a kid.
King Bob: There has been some real star power that’s gone through that team, and none of it was ever able to coalesce at the same time. They won one playoff series. The, they got moved outta town because of land deal scandals.
Everybody loves the Whalers jersey. Everybody’s like nostalgic for it – I was three years old when that team moved to Carolina. I don’t have the nostalgia for it but I have this weird inherited nostalgia for it that I can never quite seem to place. There isn’t a team that stands in for all of these feelings in the way that the Whalers can, and I guess the reason why. I mean – I could give a simple answer and just go Brass Bonanza whips [laugh].
TE: Thank you so much for chatting about the Whalers and once again congratulations on Band of the Month!
January 2025’s Band of the Month, King Bob, will shake those winter blues with their single, Figure It Out, on The Zone @ 91-3 all month long. The song is available for download, along two other songs, and more photos from Rocktographers, on their Band of the Month microsite.
Rocktographers is a proud supporting sponsor of The Zone’s Band of the Month program.