Don’t Believe In Ghosts – It Started With A KISS

When Don’t Believe In Ghosts frontman Steven Nathan was nine years old he put on a KISS concert in his backyard that would’ve made Gene Simmons proud.

Joined by his brother, and two neighborhood kids, they painted their faces, and were ready to “Rock and Roll All Nite,” or at least until bedtime, for their small audience. “We were little kids,” he says, “so the only people that would come were the parents.” Nathan, however, still wanted to find a way to make the show grandiose.

“I’m thinking I want a big KISS concert with explosions, right? So everybody’s sitting there, and we have the music playing, and we’re doing the songs, and then I’m like we need the fireworks, so I grabbed the water hose and hosed down the entire audience. You’ve never seen adults scramble so fast in your life. They were flyin’.”

While family members fled, Nathan remembers the underlying thought behind it all, and how it’s still relevant to his performances today. “For me it was about the show. We needed something exciting, because when you saw KISS it was exciting, and the only thing I could think of was to hose these people down real quick.”

Thankfully, with Don’t Believe In Ghosts the hose has been put away, but Nathan says when the NYC-based indie alt-pop band hits the stage, “It’s very much about putting on a show, and making it exciting, and having fun with it.”

Guitarist Dan DelVecchio – who, along with bassist Alex Goumas, and drummer Ken Yang complete the band – adds, “We like to have a little bit of the pizzaz. At some of our past shows we had the rollerskating girls on stage with us wearing the same outfits that they did in our music video for ‘The Chase.’”

Nathan, who still has big KISS energy at heart, can’t wait to build on these ideas, saying, “If we ever get to the point where we have a budget to put on big shows, it’ll be ridiculous.”

In the present, Don’t Believe In Ghosts are packing indie music venues throughout the city, giving listeners a high energy good time with music that’s upbeat, while simultaneously dealing with serious topics.

With the band planning to release a bevy of new songs throughout 2023, I caught up with Steven Nathan and Dan DelVecchio to find out more about their music, their positivity, and what happened when one of them heard a song of theirs playing in a grocery store.

Your new single, “Always Right,” is about the internal battles and self doubts we all face. What kind of internal battles were you dealing with when you were writing the song? 

Steven: OK, so lyrically … initially when it was written, it was written about somebody.

Dan: This is actually news to me.

Steven: You didn’t know that, dude? Yeah, I’m not gonna say who because they might see this, but it was originally written about somebody not particularly close.

When we were sitting down to work out the concept of the video, people can always take different meanings on everything, and I was like – wait, there’s something else going on here, there’s a whole other thing. That’s where I tapped into it, and I was like, “This is kind of about that internal struggle,” rather than give energy to a negative person.

Dan: We turned (the video) into a fun thing, too, because it became like a characteristic thing of each member of the band, some quirky things that we do.

Pretty much anyone who knows me knows that I love food, so that’s why I was the guy with the burgers, diving through a tower of burgers.

Also, that’s a little bit of an allusion to Guns N’ Roses’ “November Rain” video, and the guy diving through the cake. 

Dan: I didn’t even think about that!

Many of your songs deal with real life topics that many would consider heavy, so how do you go about making these heavy topics enjoyable, and even joyous listens? 

Steven: It is a pretty heavy subject, right? Your internal battles, sometimes those can be absolutely debilitating. People deal with all kinds of stuff, whether it’s addictions, obsessions, all kinds of things. I think with this it was just about finding caricature versions of it for the video, and just having fun with it.

We all deal with a lot of stuff, each one of us, so I think when you can laugh at yourself, when you can laugh at things, that’s where you get your power back. What’s the famous saying? There’s nothing mightier than a laugh. If the biggest bully in the world is bullying you, but you can get he whole room to laugh at him, you win.

Absolutely. With that in mind, how do you view the joy of your music? How many purposes does it serve for you, and the listener? 

Steven: For me it’s about inspiring people, and it’s about giving people hope, and making people feel good, and feel like a part of something. That’s something that’s important, to feel like we’re a part of something, and to feel inspired to do things. Lyrically that’s where a lot of it comes from.

I’m not a person who’s gonna sit down and really, even with my closest friends, bog them down with a lot of my problems, because I know we all have problems. I’m mostly trying to look at – how do we fix this now? Instead of complaining, it’s like what’s the solution to this? How do we get back to good? For me it’s an outlet of that.

Where do you feel your positivity comes from? 

Dan: That’s definitely a Steve question, because he’s the positive glue of the band that holds everything together. If anybody’s ever thinking anything negative I feel like he puts me back into that positive place, and it’s a really good thing to have, for lack of a better term, a leader like that, somebody who always remains positive, and stays focused on that stuff. If anyone’s having negative thoughts he just veers them right back on track.

Steven: I think about it like this, and I kinda realized this when I was a kid – it’s not what happens out in the world, it’s how you interpret it. Are you going to take it personally, or are you going to say oh this person is dealing with a thing, and not take it personally?

We have a choice every time something happens to us to decide how we want it to affect us, and how much we let it affect us.

Negative things are gonna happen, crap’s gonna happen, it happens to all of us, it’s always gonna happen, that’s what it is, it’s entropy. The whole world is falling to crap, the universe is slowly deteriorating into crap, that’s where it’s headed, where it’s all falling apart, so it’s – how do you look at that? What do you take from that, and what do you allow things to make you feel, because that’s it – you allow somebody to make you angry, you allow somebody to make you sad, or upset. To me it’s like well, you can take that, put it to the side, and choose something else from it.

I’m a very positive person, and I occasionally encounter the phrase “toxic positivity.” Do you believe that’s a thing? 

Steven: I think that what happens is you can get somebody who’s overcompensating.

You want to live in reality. It’s not like oh, everything’s great. It’s not always great, but am I learning a lesson from this? Instead of harboring on it, you go – OK, this sucked, but what am I taking out of it? What’s the lesson I’m gonna learn from this, and how am I gonna move on, or am I gonna get stuck in the thing going back and forth about it?

You don’t want to ignore stuff, you want to take it in, you want to analyze it, you’re just in control of how you feel about it.

I’ve had plenty of absolutely horrible things happen throughout my life, like a lot of us. You want to take those things, and look at the positive out of it. Something good came out of every bad thing.

With that in mind, how difficult was it to write “Still Holding On,” which was strongly influenced by the passing of your brother? 

Steven: With that song, that’s something we had been working on for a long time. We’d had that song in different phases that we were dissecting, and rewriting, so there were pieces of that song that did exist before my brother passed. When he did pass, and when the whole world was in lockdown, it took on a whole different meaning.

We kept rewriting the music, and just happened to land at that point where it was like yeah, this is what we’re feeling right now, this is important.  

Is that one you get a lot of people coming up to you to talk about? 

Dan: The track “Upside Down” is more of a direct song about the passing of his brother. It’s a little bit more on the nose, maybe, but people definitely feel that one. We sometimes use that as an intro to our shows before we come out.

Steven: We did that the other night. We shut the lights out, and let that play. It was the first time that my parents, and a lot of family had come to a show since 2019, so it was a powerful moment to have that go, and then to kick in.

In addition to people hearing you live, your music has also been spun over 2 million times on Retail Radio. How would you react if you were in a store, and one of your songs came on? 

Dan: I’ve definitely gotten some texts and phone calls from friends, “Hey, we’re in this place in another state,” and they’re hearing our music. It’s awesome. I feel like when that starts happening you feel like you’re getting somewhere, you feel like you’re reaching more people, so it’s exciting.

Steven: I heard it at Stop & Shop, and it was the end of “Slow Down,” and the funny part about it is I didn’t know it was me at first.

Did you have to Shazam yourself? 

Steven: I was like … “What is this song? It’s kind of familiar.”

Because you’re not coming in from the beginning, it’s totally out of context. You hear it and you’re like, “What is this?” So it was kind of funny, and then I realize (it’s “Slow Down”), and I’m like oh shit, that’s cool!

Going back into your history, when you were kids, did you perform in school talent shows, and if you did, what do you remember performing? 

Dan: I did perform in the school talent shows. The first song that I ever played in a band was probably “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” It was at the 7th grade battle of the bands. We did that, we did blink-182’s “Stay Together for the Kids,” and we broke the rule and played “Stairway to Heaven.”

Steven: That rule doesn’t exist at that point. It’s OK.

For me, the first thing was dancing. It was breakdancing, and stuff like that.

Dan: You gotta show me what you know of that.

Steven: Yeah, it’s fresh as … not at all. It’s horrible.

Did your parents take videos of you breakdancing. Will clips from that show up in a Don’t Believe In Ghosts video at some point? 

Steven: Hey, that’s a good idea! We definitely gotta do that!

And literally that is how our music videos are created, just like that!

Finally, what would you like to tell that breakdancing kid who also sprayed down his neighbors as KISS, or that kid who was performing “Smells Like Teen Spirit” in 7th grade, about where they end up in 2023? 

Dan: I guess I would just say to dream big, and don’t stop doing what you’re doing.

It’s a weird thing, if I were to tell myself some of those things I don’t know if I would believe some of the things I’ve already done with music. It is a little bit surreal.

Steven: I was confident as a kid. I knew what I wanted to do, and I didn’t really care what other people were doing, and I never really cared how to do things the right way, I guess. Even as a kid, if I wasn’t friends with people, I didn’t care, I just did my own thing, so I think I could get some advice out of that kid.

Dan: Sometimes when I feel a little tired, or discouraged about something, I try to go back to my younger mindset.

Steven: You want to think back to when you’re living most in the moment. It’s an interesting time because the amount of time from then till now feels like forever, and like it’ll never come, so when you’re back there you’re living as in the moment as possible, and there’s a lot that we can learn from that.

You also don’t realize at that age that there’s this entire mantle above you holding everything up that could easily just collapse. It’s just held up by people doing the best they can. It’s such a weird thing, but you’re in there just as happy as can be. It’s perspective.

For more Don’t Believe In Ghosts, check out dontbelieveinghosts.com.