Heavy metal dads

Just two dads chatting about extreme music and toddler parenting

My 4-year-old daughter is going through a phase where she loves to spook me by sneaking around the house and screaming directly in my face, and I can’t even be mad about it; her technique is pretty good.

She did this to me in bed the other morning when I should have already been awake. Bolting upright, I remembered an old familiar thrill that I used to feel at metal and hardcore shows in high school: the primal jolt of adrenaline, the giddy fear, the ringing in my ears. She collapsed into the bed laughing, and I woke up smiling for the first time in weeks.

There’s something instinctual about good heavy music and about children’s games. That’s part of the reason why I’ve been wanting to interview fellow dad Travis Andrews, an avant-garde and metal guitarist from the San Francisco Bay Area.

Our paths crossed once in 2015, when he and percussionist Andy Meyerson brought their high-concept experimental duo The Living Earth Show to Charleston’s Spoleto Festival USA. I was writing for the alt-weekly newspaper in town back then, and when I walked into the theater to review the show, I was a little intimidated. There was a fish bowl full of free earplugs at the bar so audience members could protect their hearing, and people who’d seen their other set from the night before still appeared shell-shocked and baffled by what they’d heard.

And then I sat through the show and loved it. I barely comprehended the theory or the broader musical concepts they were working with, but the songs connected on an emotional level, and isn’t that enough? I gave it an “A.”

Andrews and I are both parents now. His metal band Freighter, which is way louder and brasher than what I heard during Spoleto, put out an excellent album this year called The Den, and if fatherhood has smoothed out Andrews’ rough edges, it doesn’t show in the music. The songs are thrashy, abrasive, and profane. Andrews sits up front in the mix, playing spazzy guitar riffs while yowling like a demoniac. It’s a lot of fun if you are into that sort of thing (which I am), but it’s not likely to appear on any playlists that include “Butterfly Kisses.”

I wanted to talk to Andrews about art and parenting, but also about the universal stuff we all face as parents when our home life looks a lot different than our outside-the-home life.

So I got Andrews on the phone and we talked about art and fatherhood and feelings. I’ve excerpted the interesting parts below, with slight edits for brevity and clarity.

High and low art

Brutal South: So I was thinking back to that Living Earth Show Spoleto concert because that, to me, was more in the realm of fine art, maybe just because of the setting it was in; it was this big fancy art festival. But you have this artist statement about The Den where you say it’s “folk art, not fine art.” Is that your delineation between these two projects, that the Living Earth Show would be more fine and Freighter would be more folk? And also, what do you mean by “folk” here?

Travis Andrews: For me, it’s like the same difference that I would make between something being very visceral and then something being very cerebral. And I don’t know if it’s fair of me, because it’s not a criticism, it’s just kind of a way that I feel when I’m making music, is that a fine art thing, music that’s in the Western classical tradition, I’m really doing a lot more critical thinking and I’m having to do all this frontal lobe shit when I’m processing music that I didn’t write. And to me that’s the fine arts thing.

And then, you know, the visceral thing, when I’m playing metal I feel like I’m just doing gestures because it’s difficult to hear all the notes, so it’s all about the energy and the gestures, and that’s, I think, also part of the folk thing to me, where it is just kind of about what I hear. It’s about what I’ve heard other people do and how I process it and what my emotional response to it is. So I think you have particular insight into this kind of binary-bin thinking that I have about music and my projects.

BS: Yeah, and maybe if fine art is more cerebral, this is more something for, I don’t know, the brain stem.

TA: Yeah, totally.

BS: So with the music you’re playing here [on The Den], it’s progressive, it’s mathy, you’ve got a lot of things that sound really difficult to play. Even when it’s not high art, a lot of the bands in that [genre] kind of lean on their virtuosity. And that’s not always for me, like I can’t get into Dillinger Escape Plan as much as some other people, and sometimes it just sounds like something very impressive but that I don’t connect to on any emotional or visceral level. So how do you walk that line? I mean you’re doing stuff that’s obviously challenging and, from a music theory standpoint, really interesting, but also it just makes sense to laymen. You listen to it and you’re like, “Yeah, this rips.”

TA: I’ve done a lot of music school; I’ve done more music school than a lot of people. And in some ways I’m really attracted to, like, playing really fast and notes and shit, and in other ways I’m kind of over it. And it’s a part of what I do because I love practicing, I pick up the guitar for fun. I just kind of work on technicality as a pastime, so it’s there, but like… One of the things that I thought a lot about in making the record was that, OK, this type of music really is just like a power fantasy for people. When you’re drawn to listening to something that sounds heavy or you’re really into the abrasiveness or something, there’s something about it that makes you feel bigger than you …

I’ve just been thinking about [how] I don’t want to sound macho when I’m doing this, and it’s impossible for me to appear macho when I’m doing this. It’s like the yelling thing, when I do it, isn’t macho. When I play a bunch of notes I don’t think that it’s particularly macho. I think the thing that’s coming out of me at my core is that there’s this kind of ecstatic freakout.

So I think that other people try to make themselves appear bigger by playing precisely, or there’s a lot of things that you do to try to inflate yourself to play this music, and you do it in a lot of different ways, and it just didn’t work for me … In my head, when I’m singing, I always think that I sound like Devin Townsend [of extreme metal band Strapping Young Lad] or something, but then I don’t, of course. Or like when I’m playing heavy riffs, I feel like I’m playing like James Hetfield [of Metallica], like I’m doing really heavy downstrokes and stuff — but I don’t. (laughs) You know, I’m trying, but I think I have this self-awareness that when I do it, I sound like I’m gonna explode. I don’t sound tough. … When I do it, I feel kinda vulnerable.

BS: Yeah, I don’t get machismo from this album at all; it’s more nervous energy. It feels neurotic, you know? I hope you take that as a compliment, but it feels vulnerable and it feels at times even slap-happy when you’re throwing in, like, a toy piano riff or samples of a pinball machine. I don’t know, there’s nothing about it that feels egotistical. Like you say, it’s vulnerable, and it does not make me revere you as a guitar god, per se.

TA: Yeah, no, it’s just spazzy. It’s just like this — you know, kind of like a small dog is spazzy.

BS: Big chihuahua energy.

TA: You feel bad for it in some ways.

That dad life

Andrews explained to me that the band recorded the drum and bass tracks, along with some guitar parts, in the summer of 2015 shortly before his daughter was born. He still had to track the other guitar parts, write more lyrics, and record vocals.

TA: … And I was trying to fit stuff in over the past several years, to just give myself enough alone time to process the music and what I wanted to do. In a weird way, it was to be kind of transcendent about it and just kind of do this stream-of-consciousness thing that was super autobiographical. And then just, by the nature of what my life is now, I was just constantly exhausted, and then I was really leaning into being tired to kind of get a little psychedelic about it, I guess.

BS: Right, right, that’s an altered state.

TA: Then I was just trying to use that as a muse because I was so overwhelmed and spazzing out, that’s what I had. That was my altered state … Not to get too deep into the complaining about it, but I just had to like find 20 minutes to run over to my rehearsal space and scream into a microphone to try to track the vocals, because it was just impossible for me to block off a day. So John Smart who mixed the record loaned me some gear, and I just had it in my rehearsal space, and then when I had a couple of minutes I’d just go yell. 

BS: So I’m a dad too, I’ve got three kids now —

TA: Oh my god, congratulations.

BS: So I’ve been there, I’ve felt that exhaustion and that delirium that sets in after a while. Especially in those early days, it’s like you’ve never done this before and your whole life is in a different pattern.

TA: It does change though, because I feel differently now than I did during that time, by a lot. It’s crazy because I was just having to deal with a lot of things that I wasn’t prepared for and I was just totally losing my shit.

BS: Well, and a lot of it’s just practical considerations. Like you said, you have to find 20 minutes to run off and scream into a mic. Whatever your creative outlet is, you’re kind of having to squeeze it into the time around when your kid needs you. I always like hearing from people about that because I think especially male artists don’t always talk about that. It’s expected of women, maybe, that “Oh, being a mother will change everything,” but so does becoming a dad if you’re doing it right, you know?

TA: I know, it was really crazy for us. You know, my wife works nights, I’m a musician, I don’t have another job, I have to take every job I can get, and I live in an expensive place and blah blah blah. So it did not come easy for us — not that it does for anybody — but I had a particularly hard time of it because I really wanted to be part of it, but in the beginning I didn’t fit in.

BS: One thing I’ve noticed is, I’ve been writing a long time, and growing up, I would write something and then I would self-edit a lot of times thinking about “Oh, what are my parents gonna think when they read this?” I’m picturing my mom reading this and maybe I’ll just delete that sentence. And now the thought process and the self-censoring has more to do with, well, my kids are gonna grow up one day and read this and they’re gonna know all this about their dad, and maybe I don’t want to write this.

You don’t seem like someone who self-censors much, at least in your lyrics and your music. Do you have to deal with that or fight that instinct at all when you’re making music?

TA: First of all, I always watch stand-up comedians and I wonder about this, like if you’re this person, do you just have a really bad relationship with people that are close to you? Are you free to do this? Is this your therapy?

BS: Right, did you just burn all your bridges before you came out here or what?

TA: But I don’t think that’s true. I think in order to do that and do that in the long term, you need to have a lot of support, so I just always assume that there’s a fair amount of fiction when people are telling personal anecdotes for money. This is I guess different because there’s no money, but when I’m doing it — I did the same thing you did, where I’d think about “What would my family think?” And then, yeah, now I think a little bit harder about how what I do impacts my daughter.

But I think I have a pretty good relationship with it or handle on it. My parents saw me do a ton of embarrassing shit when I was growing up or read really embarrassing shit that I wrote just on accident when I was in high school. So I got over that really early in life. But also my parents have just been 100% supportive of music ... I had metal bands in the basement when I was in high school, and I was just always trying to make my parents laugh anyway. I was just a weird kid.

It is a little bit bigger deal to me now, with (my daughter), but I don’t know, it’s kind of been an interesting process because she’s just kind of over it. She’s just like, “You know, Dad does this.” If she hears a song where someone’s yelling, she’s just like, “Alright, that sounds like Dad music.” It’s just this harmless object to her.

***

You can buy Freighter’s music on Bandcamp or stream it on Spotify. You should also check out The Living Earth show, particularly their first album High Art, which features some lovely minimalist compositions by Timo Andres and Samuel Carl Adams.

There’s more to this interview, but I don’t want to make you read all of it. Let me ask you this: Would you be interested in hearing the full interview as a podcast episode? I’ve been toying around with the idea of recording and releasing interesting interviews, maybe as a perk I could offer to paying subscribers one day. Email me back and let me know what you think.