A Little Corner #4

An Interview With Taylor Ross

Taylor Ross is a Georgia-based musician and songwriter behind the projects Dream Love, Surface To Air Missive, Swan’s Chamber and Shelly’s Gone. I had reached out to him to enquire about his first record as Surface To Air Missive, and then followed up for an interview for A Little Corner.

Vincent Byas: What did you think when I reached out to ask you about that album?

Taylor Ross: I don't know if I thought that much of it, honestly. I don't mean that in a bad way, I get emails like that every once in a while. I think most people like the second one more. The first one, I think, is kind of forgotten about.

VB: That album was huge for me last year. I heard it through Discover Weekly, the Spotify playlist. 

TR: Yeah, that's the good thing about Spotify. I don't really understand how the whole streaming thing works as far as the algorithms, but the stuff that I put out on Leaving gets pushed pretty hard by the algorithms and gets put on playlists far more than things I've released myself, so that's cool. I'm really happy to have worked with Leaving Records.

VB: I mean, this is kind of a big question, but what do you think about your whole life of making music? Did it start as a passion and then it's just kept on throughout the years? You were Dream Love, which is 2011, and then you released something in 2022 so you’ve always been active.

TR: I started recording in 2005 when I first started just putting stuff up on Myspace. Myspace was huge for music, you'd get your four songs, and there was this concept of the Myspace EP. You’d upload to the little player, and a lot of big EPs actually hit the Internet through Myspace, so that was really cool. That was how I started out. I don't think any of that stuff survives today. I think a few years ago Myspace got wiped out and all the music got diluted from it. So I don't think any of it even exists anymore. What was the other part of the question? 

VB: Has there always been a passion and a drive to do it?

TR: Yeah, well, certainly passion because there's no money in it. That’s for sure. I can say that earlier on, the aim really was to try and make it something I could make money off of, but that didn't work out and basically abandoned any hopes of that probably like five years ago.

It actually got a lot more fun after that because it just became making music to make music and not really attaching any expectations to it. That was always the worst part about trying to make it. You put so much time and effort into making an album and then nothing happened. Nothing really comes over it. Huge disappointment. I think I got over that. But that said, I haven't actually worked on anything since 2022. I haven't even really been working on anything at all, which is like the first time in my life that's ever happened. I've pretty much been recording and making albums and working on stuff since I was 15 years old. So this is kind of new territory.

To make money in music, it's just so rare. I feel like probably 99.9% of all the bands don't make money at all. To make money is like a very privileged position. It's healthy to not come into this expecting to make any money. That's all I got to say about that.

VB: Surface II Air Missive came out on vinyl for the first time, what was the process to get that off the ground?

TR: Well, it started last summer. These Australian kids messaged me. They work with a radio station in Perth and they wanted to do an on-air interview with me. And we did it and it was a lot of fun. I really liked those kids, they're good guys. They also had this label that they run called Another Rat Records and they were just starting out and asked if I wanted to do a vinyl record for that album. And I was just like, “sure.” Anytime anyone wants to press or put out anything, I usually just say, sure. If anyone wants to put the energy and resources behind that, then that's fine, go for it.

So we did it and it turned out great. I think it's cool that it's only 100 LPs. I think keeping things rare is very cool, the quality of the jackets is really good. Although a lot of them got damaged when they shipped a bunch to me to send out, and I'm not even really sure if we're going to repress, so actually, it might even be rarer than 100.

VB: I remember in the response you sent me, you said the first record was just fitting as many riffs as possible into songs. Then you move onto an album like AV, where you have those elements, but the songs also have that kind of baroque, atypical feeling. What brought that forth?

TR: At that point, I was really heavily into British folk rock, which is obvious just from the AV sound. It sounds like a British folk rock album, which is kind of funny. But I was obsessed with that stuff, like Fairport Convention and The Incredible String Band and Donovan and all those. I don't know what I was even thinking at that point, but it seemed like the obvious thing to do at the time. But now when I look back on it, I'm just like, “Why was I making British music?” The funny thing is, though, all those British bands were trying to copy Americans, so I guess it's just kind of come full circle. It came full circle with me.

VB: With just you. 

TR: Yeah, 50 years later, the circle is closed.

VB: Was there anything that kicked off Shelly's Gone and Shelly's Secret?

TR: Shelly's Gone was…Well, Swan's Chamber had just come out, Leaving Records put that out. They made, like, 500 LPs and, like, no one bought it. So bless Matthew David's heart. But I remember that came out, and it just kind of flopped big time. That might have been the beginning of me not caring about trying to make it. And I was just like, “Man, I kind of miss making rock music.” At least with rock music, you can kind of reap the benefit of at least going on tour and supporting the record, and at least going on tour to support a record is a victory lap in some ways, because touring is fun, especially touring behind a record, because you actually feel there's a purpose. You're not just, like, wasting gas, driving around the country to play to 15 people for no reason.

VB: Right.

TR: And with Swan's Chamber, I couldn't tour that stuff. You can't play that live. We actually tried. We played, like, an album release show, and it was a miserable experience. I don't think it was that bad. But it's just, like, so stressful to play those songs. That was the only time we tried that.

That's a long way for me to say that Shelly's Gone was just…I kind of cranked that out real quick. I was just like, “I need to make a rock album immediately, right away, because I want to have fun again.” And rock music is fun, and [Shelly’s Gone] wasn't really that great, but Shelly's Secret is really good. I like that one. Because Swan's Chamber took me, like, two years to make. It took me so long to make that, and it was just so much work. And so Shelly's Gone was just a quick, fun little thing I just kind of cranked out. But then Shelly's Secret was actually, I think, good songs. I got back into the groove of it again.

VB: Yeah, I think it's a wonderful album. I'm trying to push your music as much as I can on people just because it's just very great and inventive and it's just fun.

TR: Well, thank you.

VB: When I first listened to your music, it was great the way the guitar and the production sounded on all of the albums, it was really able to cut through. I was like, “This is fantastic. Let me push this on as many people I know, let me be obnoxious about this.”

TR:I always felt like I never quite figured out how to record guitar.

VB: Wow.

TR: I don't know, it just never pops out of the speaker. I like recordings where the guitar sounds like, just, gnarly and like, raw and kind of nasty. And I've never been able to get that, I don't know why.

VB: Are there any albums or guitar players that you're thinking of?

TR: Any 60s rock band? Everything just sounds so rough in the 60s. I've been listening to a lot of Jefferson Airplane lately,  and the guitars on all of those albums just sound so heavy and rough and it's 60s pop. That band was just so raw. They had a punk sound about it almost but that was Top 40 pop back then, it just sounds so heavy. That first Allman Brothers album, the production on that is wild. The guitars truly sound like there's something wrong with them. It sounds like something is broken, but it sounds great. I've always really liked Women, the way they recorded guitars and Cindy Lee too. I don't know how they get that sound, but I guess it's like a Telecaster bridge pickup just cranked to ten. But, I love the way those records sound.

VB: Do you think about a specific sound every time you’ve recorded in the past? Or is it more a process of trying to get a song as good as it can be?

TR: I’m not really sure if I ever think of it that way. I'm pretty obsessive about keeping all the songs sounding the same production-wise. I spend a lot of time before I really get started recording things in earnest, dialing in the sound palette and figuring out how I'm going to record things, like where I'm going to put mics, which room I'm going to use, and all that kind of stuff. So before I really even start recording stuff, I've already pretty much figured out the sound and how I'm going to record it. So it doesn't really leave a lot of room for changing things to fit certain songs, which may be kind of a bad way to do it now that I think about it.

Yeah, I don't know. It's a tough question, honestly.

Well, I'll say it this way: The last album I made, I was just like, “I want to make a pop punk album really badly,” and that didn't pan out. That's the thing, is that I do have a default, I don't know, songwriting style and recording style, and anytime I try to deviate from it, I usually end up just unintentionally coming back to that default. So I set out to make a pop punk record, and I ended up making another folk rock album. How does that happen? I don't know how that happens, but it did. [laughs] And I wanted to make just a straightforward electric guitar album, and it came out with multiple different acoustic guitars all over it. I don't know.

VB: Yeah, it's tough because you'll want to try and move away from a sound, and then just because of your sensibilities, you'll come back to what you think is a good idea over and over again. 

TR: One day I'm going to make that pop punk album, though. Although I probably should have got that out of my system when I was like a teenager. I always regret that.

VB: I wish I had gotten into pop punk.

TR: I still love it. I grew up with that stuff. I was like 11,12 years old when it was big in the early two-thousands. I saw Sum 41 play live, and The Starting Line opened up for them. That was like my first real concert actually. It was like 6th or 7th grade and it ruled and I still love The Starting Line. I was listening to them the other day. That band is awesome. My first band was a Blink 182 cover band in middle school. But I mean, I guess you grow out of it. And then I found indie rock.

I had my little indie rock band in mid two-thousands. That was like the glory days. That was when you actually could possibly make money back in those days. Because indie rock was actually cool back then and in demand.

VB: That era from 2010 to 2016, I think. Does that sound right?

TR: No, I'm talking like 2004 to nine, maybe eight probably.

I was also there during the period from 2010 to 2016. And that was a dark time. And it's even darker now. [laughs]

Actually the early ten’s weren't that bad. It was still fun. I really miss the blog era. That was really cool. That kind of ended maybe 2012. The whole Dream Love thing was 2011, that was right towards the tail end of it, but it was still pretty big, and that whole project just got on blogs and just blew up. All of a sudden I had multiple little record labels emailing me offering to put this album out on vinyl and that just doesn't happen anymore. I do lament that the era is gone because there's still a few little blogs left, but no one really cares about it. And you can't get a record deal just because your song gets on a blog now. But back then you really could.

VB: Is there anybody that you're kind of excited about currently who's performing? I know for me, I'm really into Omni and Klark Sound .

TR: Yeah, Klark sound, he's in Atlanta. He's kind of local to me. I saw him play at a coffee shop, just solo a couple months ago here in Athens and it was really really good. Yeah, he's really talented. I like him a lot. Did you ever hear of that band Red Sea?

VB: No.

TR: Klark plays with a guy named Mick Mayer who was in Red Sea. I really like Mick as a person, but also I like his music. He's one of the most talented dudes that I know. He's also in Atlanta. As far as other bands, those Australians got me into Ovlov.

I love that first album. That's a great record. I really like it because I think that they nailed the production. The production is just really fun and it's gnarly like what I was talking about. It sounds really heavy. They recorded it very well. And that's probably my biggest problem with a lot of new rock bands. I think a lot of bands record their stuff too clean sounding and it kind of takes the fun out of it because I think rock is supposed to sound shitty. That's the way I feel, and that's kind of what I've always been trying. I've always been trying to make shitty sounding records, but they always end up sounding a little bit better than that. It's kind of bold.

It's a bold choice to make a shitty sounding record because you're going to alienate a lot of people. A lot of people might even criticize you and say “Your record sounds like shit,” because they don't get it. They don't get that you made it to sound like shit. You know what I mean? So anyway that's my comment on the current state of music.

VB: Well, then I think that would be a good place to end it! Thanks so much for agreeing to do this.

TR: Yeah, I love Chicago, man. I haven't been there in a while. I always loved touring there. People in Chicago actually care about music. It's the best music town in the country, in my opinion.