INTERVIEW: ANTLERHEAD
Photo by: Emily Bates
February 10th, 2023 | By: Emily Bates
Stereotypical question for you guys, how’d you guys come up with your name?
Billy: That was him (Ty).
Ty: It’s a couple of things. First of all, a couple of years ago I found a couple of notebooks from high-school that had a bunch of doodles I did during class. And most of ‘em were just like, human people with antlers. I don’t know what that was about, but I was like, I dunno, that’s something. And then also, I don’t know, maybe it was from that Fall Out Boy video that I saw when I was 15 that changed my life.
I was also doing the whole looking around the room like, what can I use for inspiration?
Billy: You also thought that bonehead was cool.
Ty: Oh yeah! I was gonna call it bonehead. And I have a friend Aaron Becker from Stay Outside. I told him about it and he was like “that’s so stupid, what’s your next choice?”
Who would you guys say are some of your musical influences?
Oh, Circa Survive is probably one of the big ones. Yeah, I like to think our collective sound thus far is like Circa Survive meets Green Day meets From Indian Lakes. It’s weird because we all have our own musical backgrounds too you know.
Billy: But I’d say that Ty sounds the most like Anthony Green from Circa.
Billy: You pull a lot of inspiration in your notes from Nirvana and stuff too.
Ty: Yeah, I kinda grew up on a lot of like punk and grunge stuff from the mid-late nineties or whatever. Everyone’s is just kinda different.
Ty: Thus far we haven’t done a lot of collaborative writing together yet. The band for a long time was me and a handful of other players, like a rotating cast of people, it’s mostly been just me thus far. I take a pretty finished song structure to a drummer to then record the actual drums with it. And then, I don’t know, they put their little spin on it. I try to get Circa Survive-ish with guitars and stuff.
Tim: A lot of As Cities Burn
Billy: We haven’t really had a good opportunity to actually sit down and write together and start from scratch. And we all kind of understand exactly what the vibe of this band is and what it sounds like. And I think we’re pretty good at accomplishing that.
Ty: Yeah we probably didn’t play a show for the first 6 months after we got together. We just spent the first half of 2021 getting acclimated with each other and basically just doing covers of songs that I wrote more or less. But over time as we’ve gotten comfortable as a unit, when we play live, there’s a bit of a different spin on some of the songs. I love how stuff translates live now.
Billy: That’s a very complicated answer to that question because there’s a lot of influence all over the place.
Could I get a bit of insight into what your writing process looks like?
Ty: I really love a lot of singer-songwriter stuff. But then every time I pick up a guitar, I kind of, whatever the image in my head of how the song was going to sound when I’m making something. I start to kind of structure things in a pretty basic format. But when I actually get my hands on a guitar, it accidentally comes out way heavier than I intended. And then I just kind of go with it.
At this point in my musical creative journey, I’ve kind of just learned to let things be whatever the hell they will be instead of trying too hard, ‘cause it’s pretty easy to emulate your heroes. I’ve just learned to be okay with everything I like.
Like right now we have a single in the works right now getting mixed, and I know every artist says this , but it’s like the newest thing we’re doing is my favorite thing thus far. I wrote a song that I didn’t we were actually going to use, I was just writing it to have fun. And when I demoed it out, I just kind of got really self-indulgent. And when we actually played it, I was like, “this is sick!” it’s very like an “I don’t give a shit song”, and it goes really hard. It feels very us and it feels great to play.
Tim: You’ve also mentioned that you’ve started off with like melodic doodles and then building off of that rather than here’s a core progression or here’s some lyrics.
Kyle: I feel like a big part of your thing too is you’re really appreciative of pop and try and incorporate that as well.
Ty: I like to study how the geniuses (like Ryan Tedder, from One Republic who’s written tons of popular songs like Sucker by the Jonas Brothers) make these hits. I have to look at what they’re doing and what they say but also keep it me because when I’m playing, I’m probably going to have a guitar. I like listening to pop and figuring out how I can make those ideas work for what we sound like.
Fun question, if you guys could open for anybody, who would you want to open for?
Kyle: Movements, easy for me! I feel like we could fit that bill really well.
Tim: For guilty pleasure, I’d say Culture Club and Boy George.
Ty: I would love to open for Fall Out Boy or like Paramore, that’d be so fun.
What’s everyone’s favorite song to perform?
Kyle: Mine’s Go to Sleep.
Tim: To be honest, even though I don’t do a whole lot, I love Saved just because that one is so near and dear to me. Lyrically, musically & historically that song has meant a lot.
Ty: I really like playing Saved. I was trying to rethink my songwriting style and was like, is some of the old stuff too heavy? Is it corny? Does it make us sound kind of scene or whatever? And also we started getting requests for some of the older stuff, because I think there was a bunch of stuff I wrote that I wasn’t sure if people cared. And then years later we kind of just, with this crew, once we started this conversion of the band and, gained some traction, which then got people more and more into our stuff. So then I started hearing more responses from people or seeing more faces in the crowd that were showing up, seeing the lyrics to specifically saved as one of them.
I don’t even like that song and I would never write that again. I don’t connect with it. But as soon as the lyrics come in, people like singing along. And then obviously the song gets kind of heavy in the bridge of it. So like, people headband, which is always fun that they’re into it. Like I think it’s kind of every band’s goal for people to like you. I never show up assuming anyone knows who we are or that they give a shit. It’s always special when you see people mouthing the lyrics back to you.
Tim: I think another thing with that song, when you wrote it, there were people saying please don’t do this because you’re going to lead people astray. And the thing is, when I first heard it, I was very much still evangelical, like SUPER religious. But it stirred stuff inside of me, it asked a lot of questions that nobody wanted to answer and still don’t want to answer.
Ty: That’s kind of the point of the song, to get people to ask those questions.
Tim: And now that we’re 6, 7 years down the line and we’re seeing the craziness in America, everyone’s finally starting to see like, holy shit. It gives people something to feel recognized and not alone.
Ty: Yeah and I think that’s sort of where we found our niche too, which is not anything that we ever set out to do or I ever set out to do with writing. I wasn’t ever trying to be the band that writes songs about being ex-christian or whatever. But it’s interesting to when people say thank you for saying this. Or more people need to need to hear this or think this way. It’s cool that it seems to be a song that a lot of people connect with, which is pretty special to me.
Thank you guys so much for letting me sit down and chat with you!