Left to right, Zach Tipton, Matt Wilcox and Adam Halferty of Young Coyoteswww.weareyoungcoyotes.com
EPs on official site (and iTunes)
Listen:
Young Coyotes - "Momentary Drowning"
Young Coyotes - "The Sun Continues to Reach Me"
About halfway through our interview, Zach Tipton of Denver's Young Coyotes tells me an asteroid could be coming.
"Our whole solar system just rocks everywhere, like a shooting gallery, and we basically only have 30% of the money to look at the entire sky to see if anything's coming," he explains, referring to a news story he'd read on NASA funding. "You think about that, and you could go one of three ways: You have the religious way, which is like, Oh no, it's God's plan, we're gonna get hit by an asteroid. And then there's the second, which is, Oh no, it's not going to happen to us. Then there's the way I think about it, which is like, Uh, fuck that. That means anything could happen at any time."
It may seem morbid or disturbing or pessimistic at first, but the way Tipton describes the lifestyle that springs from this perspective is lifted by an unexpected and undeniable lightness. The reverse could be said about Young Coyotes' music, which absorbs listeners in the sing-songy melodies and chipper bells over thickly layered metaphors on death, hell, apocalypse. But Tipton offers advice that seems to explain their songs' irony the way you'd put a name to a new instrument:
"Just laugh in the face of everything bad that happens," he says. "There's lots of heavy things in the world, but just kind of enjoy it, just kind of close your eyes and take it in."
Zach Tipton spoke with The Overcast about death and desire and what they do to a song.
The Overcast: How did you and Adam meet and how did this all start?
Zach Tipton: Well, my old band Moros Eros, we were touring, and when we came to Colorado this promoter named Josh thought that The Axe That Chopped the Cherry Tree [Adam's old band] would fit with Moros. I actually thought it was funny because I think The Axe was a Christian group, and Moros was the opposite of that kind of. The first music video I had devil horns. Anyways, we ended up liking the guys, and then we met them and then said we didn't want to tour with anybody that we weren't friends with anymore. I made sure they toured with us, and Adam and I just became friends, and a couple months later he started asking me to move out to Denver, because he knew I wasn't having a very good time in Atlanta. After seven months of him asking me, I said, "Okay, I have nothing here." I actually left within two weeks with everything I had and I just moved to Denver. That was last April.
Young Coyotes sounds nothing like your past bands at all.
Zach: I don't listen to anything that sounds anything like Moros or Young Coyotes. But there's also the emotional content of everything that I have. That was there, the anger and whatever else was there for Moros, and when the four guys in Moros were playing together, that's the kind of music we made. We weren't trying to do anything, we weren't saying, "We need to get harder" or "We need to get softer." It's just what happened. That's the kind of music that we had. Same thing with Young Coyotes. This is what happened when we couldn't be loud in Adam's apartment. His bass drum was a suitcase, we put ten towels over the snare drum, and I had my acoustic, and that's the kind of music that we had.
I definitely like it a lot better. It's easier to sing than Moros, especially because Moros is heavy emotional content. Well I mean, so is Young Coyotes, but I guess if you have that anger everyday, and when it still doesn't move after that long, it's like you're going around in circles constantly. So after singing all those songs with Moros for so long, I didn't really feel any better than I did before I started out. I decided that it didn't really seem like a good idea. It wasn't helping me. Just to be honest, music, whether people like it or not, is kind of a self-indulgent thing. I mean, I like if people like it, but I write songs to help me deal with things and associate it and try to get other people to try to deal with things in a different way.
You had talked about writing what you're feeling at the time and what your experience was at the time. Do you see Young Coyotes' sound sticking to the minimalistic sort of thing it started out as?
Zach: No. Well, we haven't played a show for a couple months but the last couple of shows we’ve had an amp, and I really like distortion on my guitar. I play really, really hard on the acoustic, so I thought it would be cool if I had an amp, and it just sounded really loud. Just really loud. Our friend Matt [Wilcox] plays the keyboards whenever we get him, but mostly it's just Adam and I just playing as loud as we can and just doing whatever we do.
In your Daytrotter session--most people do something like an acoustic version of an electric song, but you kind of did the opposite, plugging in songs that are normally acoustic.
Zach: That's how I wanted it. I think I'm happier with those recordings, actually, more than anything. I hate to say that, but--we recorded the songs, no metronome, nothing like that, nothing that kills the groove. And we were like, Yeah, let's do it, just soak it. I'm not talking, like, My Morning Jacket cliché reverb, I wanted, like, you-could-barely-understand-what-I'm-saying reverb. Just crush everything where it just sounds like static. It worked. I love it. I wish we could sell those.
Adam's been gone for the summer drumming with 3OH!3? Have you been talking to him?
Zach: Yeah, I talked to him a couple times. Warped Tour is Warped Tour. It's kind of just, show up at seven, and then leave really late, and then you drive all night, and then you just play a show. He's doing his thing. And they're making tons of money, so whatever they want to do is cool. I have no comment on the band. I think it's just an experience thing, just travel around the U.S. for free and with lots of food.
So, tell me a little bit about I Am the Dot and what that's all about.
Zach: Well, I wrote a song in February, just randomly, you know, you just need it sometimes. The first song was "Detroit" and I just left it alone. A couple months later, I said [to Matt Wilcox], "Matt, I really want to do this," I had this crazy idea. I didn't know. I didn't think it was good. He was like, "Holy shit, you've got to record this. Write a couple songs and I'll help you record." And so those four songs I wrote a couple weeks later, perfected everything, and then I recorded them and then put them up, and it'll be out on an EP and on iTunes in a couple weeks. Actually, what's been funny, 'cause Adam has been gone, I have all this time to do whatever I want. So, I wrote a record in the past month. It's just me. Even the rhythm and everything, those are not samples. That's me beatboxing and hitting my guitar, over and over. I figured out all these arrangements for strings and like vocals and all that kind of stuff, so now there's fourteen songs total for I Am the Dot, which is more than Young Coyotes. It just kind of happens. It's all natural. It's not like I'm trying to do all those things. I think I have enough mental baggage to write however much I want to, so I do.
That's so random, how that happened. It sounds good, though!
Zach: Thank you. I still don't think I'm where I want to be, musically. Moros was like, Okay, this is just showing I can write songs. Young Coyotes is like, Okay, let me try to write more vocals, singing instead of just screaming lyrics. With I Am the Dot it's like, Okay, now let's try to write arrangement and singing, and then everything else from now on is, Okay, let's try to get an orchestra in here. And if I have a million dollars, I'll just pay and just go and write it. We'll see what happens. I hope to get to that point.
I find it entertaining that, you know, you've got a month without the other guy around and you just...kind of write stuff.
Zach: It's just what happens.
It's awesome. I mean, if you're going to keep on with an attitude like that, yeah something's gonna happen.
Zach: Well, I live my life by a very specific way. I'm very strict on my time. There are a lot of crazy things that happened to make me know that life is very short. Thinking about that so much for so long--you know, I grew up very, very young. I grew up very fast and very young. I was dealt with a lot of things, and because of all these things, I make every day count. I know people say that, but they really don't do it, you know what I mean?
I refuse to do anything I don't want to do ever. I know it sounds like an asshole kind of thing, but, I'm very, very adamant about sticking to it, no matter how bad it gets, no matter how poor I am, no matter who turns their back on me because of the way I live my life--people can't handle that way of living because they want money and jobs and houses and everything like that. I don't even care about any of those things.
I read a lot. And when I first started reading a lot (you know, when everyone has those periods in their lives where they really start finding books--I hope) I read this essay by Albert Camus. He's one of the creators of absurdism, and after that I thought, "Wow, this is exactly the thing that makes sense to me." Everything. Where, it's almost beautifully meaningless. I think it's so much more beautiful to live life as it has no point, just to do exactly what you want to do all the time, because there isn't a point. It's very hard, I am not going to lie to you. I basically live my life like I'm going to have a short one. And when I die, as far as my beliefs are concerned, I don't really think there's anything. But that's okay because I live my life 100%. When I love, I love 100%. When I hate, I hate 100%. When I am creative, I'll be obsessed with it.
On the notion that this kind of lifestyle can seem consuming...
Zach: It's not even an account of I'm always creating and I'm always doing stuff. That's not true, because sometimes, all I want to do is just sit there with my girlfriend and watch TV, just enjoy those times. [People are] say, How can you be so obsessed all the time? I'm not. I eat, I laugh, and I watch good movies. And I make sure I don't watch bad movies twice. It's really not that hard. You just gotta lose everything and just focus on how special each moment that you have is, because there's people everywhere in this world that don't have shit. Even at my poorest, I still have clothes. I've been homeless, I've been hungry and all that stuff, nothing compared to everyone else. What the fuck do I have to complain about? I have this responsibility, I'm going to do as much as I can because I'm doing it for those people. That's what I think about, because I live my life for the people who want to do it.
This is vague and big too, but what sort of decides what it is that you want?
Zach: You know how they say the journey's more important than the destination? It's exactly like that. It's just the ability to just let things happen naturally. I'm a very goal-oriented person, I always have stuff I want to do. You have all these things, and no matter what you're doing you can never say as an excuse "I'm bored." I'm never bored, never. I want to write a book, so why don't I start brainstorming right now? Every day's adventurous. There's no point to anything, so just look at the comedy of that. I think it's the most important in life is to constantly have goals, even if they're just the most absurd goals ever. Not rewards, but goals. People say a lot, I want to have a Gold Record. That's not a goal; that's a reward. You've gotta say, I want to write a record--that's a goal.
You alluded to this a bit, but can you tell me more specifically about where that came from for you and what motivated that lifestyle?
Zach: Well, a lot of close brushes with death, basically. I've had a lot of people die in my life--friends, family. Even myself, I've been very, very, very close to dying. And to be totally honest, if anything, I was spiritual growing up, and after all these things I wasn't. Usually you find God once you get close to something like that, but with me, I lost it. I was like, "Why am I praying for something to happen, why don't I just make it happen myself?" I think that's it, I really think people should give themselves more credit. People are always saying, "Oh, God wanted this to happen," or "Oh it was meant to be," or "We were just lucky." I'm not saying I'm right. I'm just saying that's what I believe. This is the idea that I have. A lot of religious people would start getting mad at me, even people who I know, relatives. I think people should give themselves more credit, and that's exactly why I started living my life like this. It seems kind of selfish, but it's more of a humanistic thing. Think about what people can achieve, you know, changing the whole world, like Martin Luther King. Or, you can kill millions of people with a big bomb. If anybody's capable of those two extremes, and if you're not counting on people, then what are you counting on?
Can I hear some of your goals?
Zach: Yeah. I have the second I Am the Dot record. I have a western thing that I wanted to do--not country, but I really like Cormac McCarthy--Blood Meridian, creepy, old, western kind of stuff, and I thought I'd write music for it. I'm working on a book. I remember writing this with my girlfriend, we wrote down all these goals: "I want to learn all the constellations," "Okay. I want to learn origami." So we did it. We want to plant a garden. We want to learn how to change oil by ourselves. You've just gotta commit.
You have these personal goals for yourself, but what do you want to achieve with the music that you make? Is there some hope that you have for people who listen to it?
Zach: No matter what you experience, there's always someone who's experienced worse, and there's always someone who's experienced the exact same thing as you. So all these horrible things that have happened, I try to relate that musically--and in super metaphor so no one ever understands (I try to bury metaphors because it'd be awful if I just used exact details about it). But [I try to] just kind of show people, whoever listens to the music, "You know what? Just laugh in the face of everything bad that happens. You're going to get over it." I learned that the hard way. There's always going to be major roadblocks. I would like people, whenever they hear our music, to really just make sure that they take the most out of that. Whether it's the worst--if you're sad, cry your fucking eyes out. If you're happy, go out to dinner with everyone you care about and just enjoy and talk about it. I know it's a pretty obscure reason to get from everything I write, but, at the very end of it, you know, there's lots of heavy things in the world, but just kind of enjoy it, just kind of close your eyes and take it in. Take everything in passionately. If you see someone die on the news, just feel it, feel it, have total empathy. Everything. Everything that happens. I think that, people start learning that, and they start thinking a little differently. I think that's my main goal. Just try to get people to just have major, major empathy. As much empathy as possible. Not sympathy, empathy.
Do you have anything else that you wanted to add or want people to know?
Zach: I'd like to record ten more records by the end of the year. The things I know that are guaranteed are that we're recording a couple songs with Young Coyotes whenever Adam gets back, and we have a couple shows lined up in the Denver area. I'm continuing to write I Am the Dot stuff, and whatever happens I'll just let it happen. See where it takes me, all this stuff I do. That's pretty much all I have to say. An hour worth of talking.