Creativity Quote by Brody Armstrong

Casting lore always sounds like destiny when it survives long enough to become a story. Brody Armstrong’s line is tossed off in the casual, behind-the-scenes register of band history, but it does real narrative work: it turns the messy contingency of finding a bandmate into a clean origin myth. “Dante didn’t work out” is brisk to the point of cruelty, the kind of edit you can only make after the fact, when a near-miss is safely filed away. Then comes the pivot: “and then we found Ryan,” a phrase that frames a person like a discovered artifact, less recruited than unearthed.

The Fremont detail is the kicker. Saying Ryan “worked at a comic, record and toy store” locates him in a pre-streaming ecosystem where taste was curated by whoever stood behind the counter. It’s shorthand for a whole cultural skill set: scene fluency, collector brain, the ability to talk music and mythologies with strangers all day. In other words, not just a musician but a node in a community.

Subtextually, Armstrong is also drawing a boundary around authenticity. The store job signals a DIY pedigree and a certain kind of nerd-adjacent cool that punk-pop has long depended on: earnest obsession, not industry polish. The quote’s intent isn’t to dunk on Dante; it’s to make Ryan feel inevitable, as if the band’s chemistry was sitting there in Fremont all along, waiting amid stacks of records and plastic figurines to be “found.”