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Pissed Jeans: The Curious Case of an Unrequited Hard-On

Pissed Jeans / Photo by Andrew Swartz

The guests arrive early. Doris, a friend of Maria’s from work, has brought along a bowl of pecans glazed in Mexican hot chocolate and a plate of Rice Krispies squares she’d drowned in Kahlua. Kosloff offers her a local craft ale from the refrigerator and passes along two slips of white paper with which to label and number her desserts. “Damn, I like the sound of that,” he says, motioning to her pecans. “I made cookies like that once, with a little cayenne pepper kick — Snickerdoodles.”

A couple named Matthew and Estelle come through the front door moments later bearing a lemon curd pound cake wrapped in aluminum foil. “Damn,” Kosloff says showing them his cheesecake. “It’s the year of the lemon curd.” Because Estelle had originally thought the party was the night before, her cake has come with a disclaimer: it came out of the oven too early and is dried out almost completely. Kosloff places it alongside his cheesecake and Doris’ offerings on the dining-room table up against the wall and assures her it’s fine. And as guests continue to stream in, some with cookies (buttered popcorn, bacon) and others with more elaborate confections (“Greek Delight” and flotillas of sponge cake under sculptures of chantilly cream), the conversation turns to the Kosloff home’s beautiful, wide-plank flooring, then on to the trials of kitchen renovation and quality shelving and baby-proofing specialists and the state-of-the-art monitor around which we’ve all huddled to watch, in grainy black-and-white, as Anders finally sits up in his crib, hair mussed.

“The key is keeping him asleep for the next few hours,” Kosloff says as we hold our breath. “Maria and I have three noise machines going in his room right now,” he says, mimicking their collective whoosh. “Just really soothing stuff.”

Then Anders begins to cry.

“When you have a kid,” says McGuinness, speaking on the phone, “for whatever reason, your testosterone levels drop. It’s hilarious what makes me cry now. It could be a movie, it could be a recording of a happy child, either way, I’ll well up.”

If there is one change Kosloff has seen in his band over the past few years, it’s a softness that goes unexpressed on Honeys. “I feel like we’ve become tender individuals,” he says, “because we’re parents now. It isn’t reflected necessarily in the lyrical content, but we’re sweeter, more gentle people. The guys who were most likely to do drugs and get drunk have curtailed that sort of behavior. Because suddenly, you’re thinking about your legacy as, ‘I better keep living.'”