Boiz-II-Man – Flagman Interview
Left to right: Grant Freeman (drums, backing vocals), Sam Stewart (main vocals, bass), Cody Singleton (guitar, vocals).
May 20, 2023
Have you ever tried to imagine a firecracker going off in your head? If youâd like to simulate that experience, Iâd highly recommend listening to Flagman.
With Sam Stewart on bass and main vocals, Cody Singleton on guitar and occasional vocals, and Grant Freeman on drums, percussion, and backing vocals, the Orlando band come together as a mech unit, producing a sound akin to 90s alternative metal bands such as Primus and Mr. Bungle, but heavier, faster, and a bit more abrasive, and do all of which in total succession.
In support of their recently released album, Thank You, Come Again, and in coordination with a new single, “Hot Off The Log,” they announced their very first U.S. tour in April. Once I saw that they were playing in Nashville at The Cobra, I instantly knew I had to interview them. After reaching out to the band, they delightfully agreed.
Once the day finally came, Thursday, May 4th, we were supposed to meet and conduct the interview at Tower Market and Deli, a location that was just within eyeshot of The Cobra. Admittedly, I was a bit anxious waiting for them. Iâm still not quite sure why, but it had been a while since I had done an interview, so I imagine that contributed a bit. The owner of the deli was actually helping reassure me and wishing me good luck, which I absolutely appreciated.
Last minute, we had a location change to The Cobra. This was of no fault to the band, as it had taken them way longer than expected to unpack, and they felt it would be easier to do the interview at the venue. My dad and I obliged. Once we made it inside the venue, however, we were semi-politely informed by the man behind the counter that we could not stay and conduct the interview inside. Not only is there a strict age limit for shows, but a strict age limit on who is able to enter in general. Since I was 16, and the venue is restricted to 21 and up, there was no way we could stay. We were, however, able to wait in the lobby until the band was ready.
The first to walk out was Sam. The immediate thing that struck me about him was how tall he was — I had always known he was tall, but it’s a little shocking in person. We shook hands, he complimented my Melted Bodies shirt, and we made our way outside. Meeting us outdoors was Grant, with Cody walking out a couple of minutes later. He was already donning a costume you will rarely see him without, sporting a denim vest, sunglasses, and both a hat and sleeve decorated by the American flag. After talking for a bit, we decide to move towards a staircase on the side of The Cobra and hold the interview there.
Sam’s wedding ring clinks his metal water bottle on the way downhill. It was covered in stickers, including the faces of two children. “That’s my niece and nephew,” Sam says, smiling. “Those are my sister’s kids.” “I never even thought of that,” Cody responds, baffled. Sam retorts, ” you think I just have random kids on my water bottle?”
Finally, once we made it to the staircase and I had the self-proclaimed pioneers of poop-rock in front of me, we began our conversation.

Would you be able to introduce yourselves and describe your sound a bit to anyone that isnât familiar with you guys?
S: Sure. Iâm Sam, I play bass, and we are poop-rock pioneers.
G: Iâm Grant, I play drums⌠just crispy rock.
S: Deep-friedâŚ
G: Deep-fried!
C: Iâm Cody, I play guitar, do a little singing, and weâre deep-fried alternative metal.
I donât know if Iâm just bad at digging, but is this the first time you guys have done an interview as a full unit? Iâve typically just seen stuff with Sam.
S: I think we didâ we did one and it never came out. Well, actually, weâve done a few. Weâve done a couple withâ thereâs a college radio station in Orlando that weâve doneâ our good friend Chris has had us on his show a few times. But, yeah. All of the full band stuff weâve done, for some reason⌠I donât know if weâre just too powerful as a unit, but they canât release it to the public for some reason. So, I guess to answer your question, yes, this may be the first documented one.
You guys typically describe your sound as being inspired by Mr. Bungle and Primus, but what would you say are some influences of yours that people wouldnât really expect?
S: Hmm⌠probably Frank Zappa?
C: Frank Zappa for sure.
S: Yeah, we like Zappa. Yeah, [gesturing to Grant], you turned me onto all the Frank Zappa stuff. I grew up listening to The Beatles⌠[turning to Grant] You listen to a lot of electronic music.
G: I do. I mean, probably more relevant would be like avant-garde classical music. Like Igor Stravinsky and stuff. Thatâs kinda my original favorite music when I was a kid.Â
C: Yeah. He was kind of a dork.
S: Oh! I love Willie Nelson. Thatâs a good one, I love Willie Nelson. What about you, Code?
C: System of a Down, baby. Just chugs, just chugsâ
S: Well, ones they wouldnât expect.
C: Ah! Eugh. Iâm kind of, uh, Iâm kind of a loser, dude. I like, uh, NickelbackâŚ
S: Nice.
C: Breaking BenjaminâŚ
S: Classic.
C: PanteraâŚ
S: Classic.
C: Sheesh, the list goes on. Whatever you can hear on the radio, thatâs what I play.Â
SOAD rocks, though. Their self-titled album is just perfect to me. If Iâm correct, this is your first big tour. Howâs tour life treating you guys?
S: Itâs been a great tour. Itâs been, uhâŚ
C: [laughs] Yeah, man! Itâs been awesome, dude!
S: Weâre ten days in and we havenât killed each other yet, so thatâs good. We all still like each other.
C: Yeah, we all still like each other.
Thatâs really impressive.
S: Yeah, yeah! Especially ten days in the minivan. Thatâs close – close proximity. A lot of farting. A lot of farts. A lot of farts, man.Â
C: Mostly farts.
S: Thereâs a lot of farts, dude.
G: A lot of stupid arguments.
S: Just to pass the time. Sometimes youâve just gotta argue to pass the time.
Yeah, if I were in a van with my friends I wouldâve killed them by now.
S: Thereâs still time, weâve got two more days.

Individually, you guys are âFlagboizâ and together youâre Flagman.
[They start laughing]
S: Yes, exactly.
G: Itâs like a mech unit, yep.
Yeah, of course. What were some other group names that didnât make it?
S: Oh, I donât know. There was a LOT.
G: These guys were Flagman by the time I joined.
C: Oh, man. There was a lot of really bad ones. I donât have a list of the band names anymore, but one of them was like⌠E150, another one was like Rise Up–
[At this point, a driver doing an awful parking job almost hits another car, a traffic cone (which we later used for photos), and my dad. Instead of listing off band names, the group starts to list off the car models involved in the near collision.]
C: Another one was Chevy Impala, kinda like Tame Impalâ
S: Anotherâ a really bad, a REALLY bad one was CRV. That was really bad.
C: Honda CRV.
S: Yeah, I wishâ we shouldâve documented that better, that journey to find Flagman. âCause it was like a year of batting around terrible band names.
I gotta ask, I know you guys are pretty big fans of Rob Zombie, did the name Flagman come from Powerman at all?
S; No, actually. That actually didnât happen untilâ I was actually checking out a lot of that stuff several years later because I had a friend in high school who was really big into Rob Zombie and I got real big into his stuff during the pandemic. Listened through all the White Zombie stuff and all the solo records. Itâs great, man. I love it.
Coinciding with the tour you released a single called “Hot Off The Log.” How would you say that differs from the material on Thank You, Come Again?
S: More aggressive.
G: Heavier.
C: Smarter, stronger, faster, harder.
G: Less fat on it, I think.
S: Definitely. As streamlined as possible. It was the first time we got to actually record everything. We got to work with Ben McLeod from All Them Witches, and he had mixed Thank You, Come Again, but this was the first time we got to record with him at his studio, which is definitely a game-changer for us to get in the studio with somebody that kinda understands where weâre coming from, so it really made it easy on us. Which was niceâ Itâs nice to not have to struggle in the studio trying to figure out what weâre doing.
Is this a part of an album or is it just a one-off single?
S: Part of an album. Thereâs a new Flagboiz record in the making right now.
Is there anything specific you guys want to change up on the next album?
S: I think like Cody said. Just more direct, more streamlined, making it harder, better, faster, stronger, as Daft Punk said.
This is your first big tour, but of course itâs not the first time youâve performed live. What were your best and worst performances and why?
C: Our best show ever⌠itâs gotta be a hometown showâ
G: It hasnât happened yet.
C: Yeah, our best show hasnât happened yet. Perfect show, that is.Â
S: The BATTLES one was pretty fun, when we opened for BATTLES. Our record release was great. The Thank You, Come Again record release was awesome.Â
C: I would say that one.
[The rest of the band agrees.]
S: Worst show was all the shows where we played with the old material. Right when Grant joined. Those were all the worst ones.
C: We donât talk about those.
G: Yeah, once I joined, we played our worst shows.
S: Yeah, weâ [laughs] No fault to you, I had written a bunch of really terrible songs, so we threw all those out.
Actually, back to the hometown shows, you guys have played countless shows at a venue called Willâs Pub. How do you think the performances there have influenced your band, and what do you love so much about the venue?
S: Oo, thatâs a great question.
G: Itâs kind of the homestay for Orlando.
S: Yeah, itâs probably the best venue for local bands in Orlando. I guess they just kind of allowed us a space to cut our teeth as a band, especially early on, figuring out what we were trying to do and who we were trying to be. They gave us room to do that, which was awesome. And, yeah, you know, they kinda keep that local music scene alive. A lot of local bands, a lot of cool bands come through there, so weâre very grateful to them.
Iâve seen a lot of cool stuff about them, one that I found was in 2019, you guys played an event called Not Ozzfest, could you talk a bit about that?
C: Oh, yeah. [laughs]
S: Yeah, that was fun! Our management, Montgomery Drive, put that on because they book a lot of stuff through Florida and throughout the countryâ but they had this idea for a cover night. There was a band, I believe it was Gillian Carter, was Korn, somebody did System of a Down, somebody did Slipknot, I think, and we did Primus. It wasâ
C: No, we did Sabbath⌠no, we did Primus.
S: We had done Sabbath sets for Halloween stuff before. But, yeah, we did Primus there, which was, you know⌠thatâs my favorite band! So it was real fun for me to play all those tunes that Iâve been playing since I was in middle school. It was a good time, I wish there was more footage of that.
C: YeahâŚ
G: That was a good one.

You guys have two albums out currently, The Ladybug Dilemma and Thank You, Come Again, but before that you actually had a debut called Gibberish and two extra EPsâ that were removedâ
[Sam and Cody respond simultaneously.]
S: Woah, woah! How do you know about that, buddy?!
C: Nope, that never existed. That never existed. That never existed.
[My dad interjects.] MSE: Let the boy talk!
[The band laughs.]
Could you talk a bit about why those were removed? Because I can only find two songs from that on YouTubeâ
S: You can find them?
C: So, where exactly did you find them so we know not to go there?
Thereâs a video for “Headache Talking” and thereâs an upload of the song “Melt.”
S: âŚWell, weâre gonna have to scrub those. Good to know.
[All laugh.]
C: Thank you for your beautiful reporting.
S: Yeah, thatâs some DEEP dive stuff.
C: I mean, Iâm sure you heard it, you can probably guess why weâre trying to scrap it. Itâs not what we sound like now.
G: Itâs part of that experimental era of stuff weâre not really, uhâŚ
C: Not super proud of it.
S: Yeah, we donât feel super connected to it artistically anymore. And, also, justâ a lot of the songs were stuff that Cody and I had written together or stuff that I had written alone before Grant joined the band, so by the time he joined the band and we started to write new stuff, it just kinda totally went into a different direction and then we ended up pulling it all down just becauseâŚ
G: We donât want it part of the catalog.
S: Right, and because it being the oldest stuff when you would look it up, it was the first thing that came up, so we were just worried that people would kind of get the wrong impression of what we do, you know? So, yeah. But, in our headcanon, none of that exists.
Do you think itâs possible later in the future for those to be reissued? Because, as it stands now, theyâre kinda lost to the public.
S: Yeah, no. Never ever. If I have anything to do with it, those twoâ Iâm gonna pull that video down, actually, cause I believe one of them is on our channel. And weâll have to find out whoever posted “Melt” and sic our lawyers on âem.
C: Whoâs my mom, by the way. Sheâs just gonna angrily yell at them.Â
S: Sheâs a pitbull.

The Ladybug Dilemma was released in late 2020 and it sounds way different than Gibberish. Did Covid inspire you to branch out your sound? If not, then how did it effect the writing process?
S: So, that record was actually written and recorded over the summer of 2019, so it was allâ
C: I think it came out in 2020.
S: It came out in 2020, October of 2020. So, none of it was written during Covid. Those were kind of the first batch of songs that we had written with Grant on the drums, so it just took us a long time to get them out. It took usâ from the time we recorded to the time it came out it was almost a year and a half, maybe two years.
C: Yeah, it took us a while to kinda figure out⌠who do we go to record, whoâs gonna mix it, whoâs gonna master itâ
S: Whoâs doing the art.
C: Whoâs doing the art, yeah. We kind of have that more streamlined now so things can kindaâŚ
S: Be faster.
C: Yeah, really faster.
Back to The Ladybug Dilemma. In a TikTok videoâ Sam, actuallyâ mentioned that the penultimate song, Alamo, almost didnât make it to the album. How often are songs on the chopping block for you, and why donât they make albums?
S: I think theyâre pretty muchâ everythingâs on the chopping block, all the time.
C: Yeah, we always kinda have a magnifying glass on them. But, the thing that differentiates it now is we do that before we get into the studio now. Like, we will do some demoing, weâll try to do as much as we can, weâll listen to it and say, âyeah, this isnât good.â
G: Why didnât we want to release “Alamo,” though?
S: It wasnât that we didnât want to release it, I think it was that we had never played that song fully. We recorded it in parts because we had all these sections and we had no way to really connect them, so we just kind of recorded each piece and then fit âem together like a puzzle piece. So, I think when we were in the middle of recordingâ and I hadnât finished the lyrics until the night before we went in the studio to track it, so I think⌠it was just a little aimless, you know? We were kind of going into the studio not knowing what we’re doing, which is something we tried to avoid doing, just âcause it costs time and money. That was why, it was just kind of likeâ we didn’t know how it was gonna pan out because before we came into the studio, there was only the instrumental, there was not really any parts. And it was just each section, you know, it wasn’t really a song, it was just kind of a bunch of different parts that we slapped together. But it worked out! And now itâs always in the set.
G: Yeah, itâs fun to play.
I love it! Back to TikTokâ TikTok and Instagram have been a huge part of you guys growing your presence. Trying to do research for this interview, I think within about 30 minutes I saw about 30 different examples of you absolutely screeching âlisten to Flagman.â But itâs paid off, absolutely. How would you say that social media like TikTok and Instagram have helped your band?
S: Oh, I mean, yeah, itâs made it. Thatâs like, to your question about how Covid changed the band, that was really where weâ it forced us to slow down âcause we were just playing a lot of shows, which is not bad, but we didnât really have a presence online, we didnât have a brand, we didnât have any way to really market ourselves. So, through 2020 we kinda took a second to be like, âwhat are we trying to do with this,â you know? And then we had some encouragement from friends to get on TikTok, and it was about a year before anything happened, and then one day this stupid, simple video blew up and had a bunch of people check us out and really enjoyed it. So, it kinda snowballed into, like, âwell, alright, we canât play shows, so weâll just post a bunch of stuff on here!â
That was the promotional video forâ was it “Bumblebee” or was it the one where youâre pointing at, âif you like these guysââ
S: That one! Yeah, I made that at like 7 A.M. before I went to work one day, and I almost took it down âcause I was like, âoh, itâs just so low-effort,â like I was really caught up in, âI want it to be good, high-quality content!â And I slept on it, and I woke up the next day, and it had gone from like a hundred views to like 200K views, and I was like, âOh! Well, I guess sometimes stupid works!â
C: Yup! And then that, and then the “Bumblebee” TikTok video, like our “Bumblebee” music video spliced up, was getting tons of views, too. And that really helped everyone drive to the streaming, and then the streaming algorithm picked us up on their playlists, and now itâs just kinda feeding into itself a little bit.
S: Yeah, and I think in some ways, it definitely helped us realize when weâre writing songs, we wanna make sure that theyâre as direct and punchy as possible. As Cody says, no prog songs.
G: No three minute intros.
C: Get to the point, get to the point!
I do want to ask about “Bumblebee,” though. A lot of the timeâ
MSE: Which, by the way, I freaking love.
Yeah, he loves it.
MSE: Iâve sent that to so many people, even his freakinâ mother. So many times.
S: Spreadinâ the word!
C: Thank you so much!
Whenever youâre promoting yourself on TikTok, you always use “Bumblebee,” calling it âADHD metal,â or, âif you like this and thisâŚâ A lot of bands, typically, whenever they promote a song like that, they start to have a love-hate relationship with it. Have you gotten to that point with “Bumblebee” yet?
S: Nah, I like that song.
G: Itâs still fun to play!
C: Iâd say definitely we love it still.
S: And thatâs one thing we try to do, is always make songs that we would want to hear, you know? Stuff that if I heard a band playing and Iâd be like, âwow, Iâve gotta check this band out!â Itâs a little self-serving, but, hey, keeps me entertained!Â
Yeah, itâs incredibly addicting.
S: Oh, yeah.
C: Keeps us in shape, too, âcause thereâs a bass solo in there that you canât just, likeâ on a Tuesday night, not practicing at all be like, âyeah, letâs just play ‘Bumblebee.’â I canât do that.Â
S: Right. Keeps the chops up.
G: Itâs just like a big drum exercise, too. The whole thing.
S: Yeah, for real!
G: Sixteenth notes the whole time.Â
This is kind of off-topic. Whenever I was bored in class a couple months agoâ thereâs like this Spotify Canvas on “Bumblebee,” Iâve been trying to play with my phone where Iâm trying to sync it up with the Canvas for like five seconds to pass time in class.
[The members laugh.]
MSE: In class?
S: That is exactly what you SHOULD be doing. Along with the homework, of course.
G: After your homework.
C: Focusing on your studies!
C: You know you can do your homework and have “Bumblebee” playing under it so you can just stay focused.
G: It is good studying music.
S: Weâre known for nice, relaxing studying music.
G: Crispy beats to study to, yeah.
MSE: For cramming.
S: [laughs] Yeah, there you go.
For the promotional videos, whenever you have a clip of “Nice Guy” thereâs a video to accompany it and itâs always spliced up and youâve been doing that for the better part of a year now, but thereâs never been a full “Nice Guy” video released. What happened to it?
[The band, embarrassed, all wince and laugh.]
S: Oo. Uh. [chuckles] I donât know, what did happen to that video?
C: What DID happen to that?
S: We spent like two days making a videoâŚ
C: Yeah, we shot a video, for sure⌠But, it turned out, it kinda sucked!
S: Yeah, itâs kinda stuck in development hell. We got like 80% of the way, and then we were like, âIâm out of ideas, you guys have any ideas? No⌠Alright, weâll just use it for something else.â
G: Yeah, that footage will be used eventually, but itâs partially put together. I think it could be just, I donât know, promotional content.Â
S: Weâre gonna mine it eventually. Weâll turn it into something, but it probably wonât be a music video. At this point, with the new record coming out, weâre kinda onward and upward.
I donât know, release a box set in like twenty years, put that as a DVD special feature.
S: There you go! Weâre thinking about maybe starting a Patreon, so maybe itâll be up there. Some behind-the-scenes, some lost footage.
Some stuff about your live show: tonight youâre going to be selling some copies of Thank You, Come Again on vinyl. You mentioned on an episode of the âIâm Half Kiddingâ podcast that you were planning to press The Ladybug Dilemma on vinylâ three years later, Thank You, Come Again is on vinyl, but Ladybug isnât. What happened?
[The band laughs.]
C: Itâs called, uh, expenses. [laughs]
S: Yeah. Well, it takes a long timeâ and, actually, the same thing kinda happened with that that happened with the Nice Guy video. By the time we got to like, âokay, letâs press some vinyl,â we already had Thank You, Come Again coming out, so we were like, âokay, weâll do the new record and get back to the old record.â We had someone ask us about it in Memphis last night as well. Itâll happen eventually, it just takes likeâ itâs expensive and it takes like a year and a half to get the records. So, itâll be a while. Maybe for like the fifth or tenth anniversary or something itâll come out.
Maybe you can getâ youâre with Flummox, you can get Needlejuice [Records] to make a super colorful one.Â
C: There you go!
You guys have been playing for a while, is there one song that youâre consistently excited to play?
G: “Alamo!” Iâm always excited for “Alamo,” for sure.
I canât believe that almost didnât make it.Â
S: Yeah, right? Uhhh, I donât know. We keep our set pretty exciting.
C: Mine is “Dummy,” man! My job on that is just, [imitating guitar], DAH! DAH! DAH!
G: You like that one cause itâs easy.
C: Yeah, itâs easy and I can just make faces and move around the stage and I can pretend like Iâm playing in an easy band.
G: Just for that one song.
S: I donât know. I like âem all!
C: Thatâs a safe answer.
S: Yeah, right?

Actually, back to Flummox. I think you guys were supposed to play a show with them a few years ago, did that not happen?
S: Yeah, it never did. We talked a lot about playing shows together over the past few years, so Iâm stoked that itâs finally happening. I think they were gonna come down to Florida at some point, but then that fell through, and then we had planned a run up to here, and then that fell through⌠itâs just syncing calendars. Thatâs like 90% of being in a band. âCan you do this? Aw, you canât? Alright, well I can do this weekend, can you do that weekend?â
Well, itâs cool you guys are able to do it again. How did you guys meet, and what do you admire so much about them?
S: You know, thatâs a good question.
C: I thinkâ werenât they on our related artists on Spotify?
S: They might have been. I donât know, itâs hard when itâs all the internet band stuff âcause youâll meet people and youâll have them on Instagram or Facebook or Twitter or whatever, and then itâs like you donât even know how you met, cause itâs all, âthis person knows this person who knows meâŚ.â I donât know, to be honest. Iâm not sure how we met. But I know the first thing that caught my eye is that theyâre all fans of Mr. Bungle. Any band thatâs a fan of Mr. Bungleâs, Iâm interested.Â
G: Thatâs how you put me in the band.
S: Yeah, exactly! Thatâs actually exactly how I met you.
G: I was playing Mr. Bungle covers on Instagram.
S: Yeah. I was like, alrightâ we were playing in another band, and we found him on Instagram, and he had Squeeze Me Macaroni, a cover of it, and we were looking for a drummer at the time, and I was like, âwell, this is the guy! This is the guy right here!â
G: And then I said no.
S: Yeah, you did. [laughs]
C: Wore him down.
I was surprised to find out that Grant originally wasnât really a fan of Primus, and then you kinda got him into it.
S: Yeah! Neither one was.Â
G: They had to turn me onto it, for sure.
S: I had to convince them. I infected them.
G: I mean, I had listened to Primus here and there growing up, but they werenât on my radar that much.Â
I was going to say something and then I totally forgotâŚ
MSE: “Thank you?”
[The band laughs.]

Right. Actually, very indirectly, Flummox is kind of how I found you guys.
S: Oh, really?
Yeah, my friend in passing conversation coined the term âweird guy metal,â with like System of a Down, Tool, so I tried making a playlist of that with Melted Bodies and Flummox, and I went through all of the related songs and eventually Bumblebee came up, and it was the only one that really caught my eye.
S: Nice! Yes!
Thatâs pretty much the end! I do want to ask, though, is there anything you guys want to say or promote to anyone reading?
S: Listen to Flagman!
C: Listen to Flagman!
S: Flagboiz for lyfe!
C: Flagboiz for lyfe! Listen to Flagman, Flagboiz for lyfe. Thatâs all you need. Youâll be great, youâll be well-off, youâll be a great person.
G: Itâll enhance your life.
S: It will.
C: It will.
S: Dramatically.
C: Dramaticalâ absolutely dramatically. Tremendously, even.Â
S: Tremendously. Ridiculously.
C: Almost even immensely.
S: Whatâs another adjective?
G: A lot.
[The band laughs.]
C: A lot?
S: Thatâs not an adjective, thatâs a synonym.
MSE: Swimmingly?
S: Swimmingly.
C: I was homeschooled so I donât know words.Â
Smoothly.
C: Smoothly.
S: Smoothly.
G: Exponentially.
C: Surreptitiously.
S: Greatly. Youâve gottaâ youâve gotta stop us.
MSE: No, no, no, no, this is like Mad-Libs.
G: Largely.
S: Largely. Bigly.
Iâm keeping all of this in the article.
C: Enormously?
G: Monstrously.
C: This is how it ends. Just word soup.
S: Slowly fades outâŚ

HUGE thank you to Montgomery Drive and the Flagboiz for giving us the time of day. You guys rock!