alltheprettythings Are Bringing Prose That Packs a Punch

With histories in well-established bands, including Alesana, Chiodos, and He Is Legend, there’s a good chance you’ve heard the members of alltheprettythings before, but you’ve never heard them like this.

The rock supergroup released their full-length debut, prose, last month, and vocalist Logan Tabor says, “It’s like a thing that had to get out of me, and it took a while, and I had to dig deep for it, and I know everybody else did, too.”

The everybody of alltheprettythings, which formed during the pandemic, is (photo: L to R) drummer Jeremy Bryan (Alesana), vocalist Logan Tabor (Mood Mechanics), and guitarists Tristan Matthew (former touring bassist for Chiodos), and Worth Weaver (He Is Legend). Their original bassist, Worth’s brother, James Weaver, passed away early in the band’s development in 2020, and the role of full-time bassist has yet to be filled.

Releasing nine of the ten songs on prose as singles in advance of the album, and having recently wrapped up a string of dates on the road with Alesana, alltheprettythings has been steadily building a following, and it’s one that will only grow once more people hear the emotional punch of prose in full.

Wanting to know more about the North Carolina-based band, I caught up with Logan over Zoom, and he discussed the unique rollout for prose, how they managed to outwit streaming, and the thrill of finding excellence in every genre of music by diving into unexpected YouTube rabbit holes.

You all have other bands that you’re a part of, or have been a part of, so what can you all do with alltheprettythings that maybe wouldn’t have been a good fit with your other projects? 

Well, we produce all of our own music. Me and Worth will sit here and produce all this music – we’ll spend hours upon hours writing it, and recording it, doing vocal takes, doing bass takes, guitar takes, experimenting with synthesizers, and string parts, and stuff like that.

We’re not in like a traditional recording studio setup where you’re paying by the hour, because the studio is in our house. I’m in the studio right now. This is what we like to do.

So we get to come down here and, like I say, use it for free. There’s obviously rent, and stuff, because we live here, but for the most part it’s not as daunting of a thing as when you walk into a studio and the clock starts, and you're paying by the hour, $60, $120, $200 an hour, whatever it is. So we have that kind of freedom, which is really nice.

Also, now we’re all here, and we’re bringing all of our years of having played in said bands into the same room together, and I think it turns into something really strange most of the time, but maybe likable. Hopefully likable, you know?

Strange, but maybe likable. I like that. Your full-length debut is prose, and you released all the songs except for one as singles before the album actually came out. What went into planning that rollout, and did the results match what you were expecting? 

Dude, I think they exceeded what I was expecting. This has been a really cool rollout. Everybody’s been so receptive.

I’m so grateful for everybody who has taken the time to listen to our stuff. Strangers all over the world, our friends and family, everybody’s been really receptive to it.

They’ve also been receptive to the other point you were asking about, which is what was the strategy behind that style of rollout. It started out as a marketing angle, because we wanted to give every song its day in the sun, essentially, but we quickly realized how people are consuming music now, so we gave them a month, or two, or three to digest each song as it came out.

One thing that I’ve been incredibly surprised about, but delighted to see, is that we rolled out all these songs individually, so everybody heard them, but they had never heard them in order on Spotify, with all the same artwork, like a cohesive look, and in the order that we intended for them to hear them, and we got just as cool of a reaction when we dropped the album as we did with all the songs.

People went back and started listening to the songs they’ve already heard, because now it’s packaged, and it’s nice and neat, and it’s in the order we intended, which I think is like an 11th track all on its own. It’s the track sequencing, because if people actually want to know about your band, know where you’re coming from artistically, I think the order of the songs on your album is another insight into how you operate artistically.

And it was always an album from jump. It wasn't, hey, we released nine songs, let’s throw on a 10th and call it an album. This is an album, and this is how you released it. 

Yeah, we’ve had basically all these songs done for a very long time, and we intentionally rolled them out slowly, but they were always intended, from a creative standpoint, and a logistical standpoint, to be one thing, one piece of work.

That rollout makes so much sense for streaming. It gives each song the potential to be on a playlist before releasing the album, because I know Spotify treats an album as basically just a song dump. 

Right. Yeah. Like let’s say you release 20 songs all at once on the same album, they only let you choose one of those to pitch to playlists using their internal mechanisms. Obviously, you can go out and hire whoever you want to pitch individual songs to playlists, but this is the Spotify internal. The gears that are turning within Spotify and Apple only allow you to pitch one of those songs.

That’s why (the rollout) was (originally) a marketing angle, but like I said, halfway through we realized people might actually enjoy the way that we’re doing this, because they can focus on each song individually. I think people … when a song comes out that they like, they want to beat that thing into the ground just as badly as we do, and if you give them ten to listen to, something might get overlooked.

Now with a title like prose, is it safe to say the writing process was especially important to you? 

Oh, for sure.

Because of the way we did this, you know, it started out in COVID, and I was living far away from everybody, so we kind of had this funny little remote relationship where we were throwing ideas back and forth.

I was essentially writing in an isolated situation for the first however many months. Then I moved here, got my feet back on the ground in the same area as Worth, and the studio, and then we were able to start recording.

Then I moved into Worth’s house, which is where the studio is.

So it happened in tiers, so it really did feel more like writing a novel than writing poetry, or something. It felt like by the end of the thing I was like, shit, I just wrote The Lord of the Rings four. I mean, I don’t mean to sound like a total douche, because I love The Lord of the Rings, and I’m certainly no Tolkien, but you know what I mean, it was a journey for me to go on.

Are any of the songs especially emotionally challenging to perform? Do you have one or two where you’re like – “I was really going through something. I can’t believe I’m going to sing this every night”? 

Yeah. The one song that we didn’t release as a single, “In Quotations,” is a pretty heavy song for me because it deals with loss from a number of different angles. One verse is about losing a lover, the choruses are about losing people from a mortality standpoint, and parts of it are about losing a career, or losing a part of yourself.

It’s a big song that encapsulates a lot of the thoughts that were going through my head about loss during the course of the year or so that we were writing and recording this album.

That one’s tough, and then “Every Now and Then,” which is the second single we put out, and actually the first song we ever recorded, and finished. That one … when I sing that song, and when I hear that song, I’m reminded of all the things that were going on in my life. It was a strange time, and it hits me, but the overall message of the song is supposed to be a hopeful one, so while I’m actually singing that song, I don’t get all choked up. I get happy. I get gleeful.

You got through it. 

I got through it, and that’s supposed to be the message.

There’s a brief moment where I dip down into a verse, and things are dark, but at the end of the song, I’m like, yeah, alright, this feels good.

Rock radio isn’t really in a good place right now, and I know streaming hasn’t been as helpful to rock music as it’s been to other genres. So other than the rollout you had for the album, what are some creative things you’ve been doing in order to reach people with your music? 

It’s funny you ask that. We’re trying to figure out the angle that we want to take with that sort of thing, because I think it’s extremely important to always be thinking about a creative, hip way (to reach listeners), and I don’t mean like a creative, hip way as in copying the latest trend on TikTok, which is creative, and hip, but it’s not your thing. We want to figure out what our thing is.

We’re kind of taking our time with it, because I think once we establish something, we really want to stick with it so that people can rely upon it, so it’s been an ongoing conversation.

There’s so many things I would want to do, but like half the stuff I want, I’m a really fantastical person, so it’s like half the shit I would want to do I would need way too much money for, so the rest of the folks are trying to reel me back in basically.

You recently completed a summer tour with the band that is on your t-shirt, Alesana. 

Oh, that’s right. Look at me. Doing a good job. {laughs}

Did Jeremy have an energy drink sponsor for this? Because isn’t he the drummer for both bands? 

He’s the drummer for both bands. I don’t think he had an energy drink sponsor. The guy’s just a beast. Plain and simple, man.

Yeah, two sets every night. 

And one of them is Alesana. Our stuff, while it is taxing to some extent, putting that next to Alesana, man … we would play every night, and we’d be like, “Jeremy killed it,” and then we would go watch Alesana, and be like, “How is he doing this right now, man?” It was absurd.

One thing I love to ask artists who are in bands is how they’ve been influenced by the other members of their band. So give me an artist or a band you’re now a fan of because someone else in the group turned you on to their music. 

Bring Me the Horizon.

I gotta be honest, and this is going to sound so bad, I, for a while there, until I joined this band, was so out of touch with where scene rock had gone that I didn't even know about Bring Me the Horizon. I had heard the name, but the guys in the band literally had to be like, “Logan, what the hell’s the matter with you, dude? Go listen to this band.”

Incredible.

Me and Worth will sit around all the time, because we live together at the studio now, and I’ll get on like a YouTube tangent, and start showing him the weirdest stuff in the world. Some of it he’s into, most of it he’s not.

What’s one of the weirder rabbit holes you’ve gone down? 

I like to take people down Peter Gabriel rabbit holes.

That’s my upbringing coming out, and that guy’s got a lot of really, really non-traditional music. I’m not talking about the Peter Gabriel “Sledgehammer” rabbit holes, I’m talking about the deep cuts, the B-sides on his albums. I get way into that shit, and most people are like, “What are we listening to right now, man?”

I remember there was one night we were chilling in here, and I cannot for the life of me, nobody judge me, but I cannot for the life of me remember how we got down this rabbit hole – we did not start with Celine Dion, but I know for a fact that we had another dude musician friend coming over to hang out, and by the time he got there Worth and I had gone so far down whatever rabbit hole that we were watching live performances of Celine Dion just absolutely crushing it. But it’s like when your dude friend walks in, and he’s like, “What’s going on in here?”

He walked in with a six pack, and you’re listening to “It's All Coming Back to Me Now.” 

Dude, I think that might have been it.

She’s got a hell of a voice. 

Sometimes, I think when you’re searching for inspiration, regardless of the genre, you just need to see excellence, right? From a standard of excellence standpoint, we’re not messing with Celine Dion, dude. Nobody’s coming close to that. She’s an angel.

Yeah, I mean, her voice is amazing. 

It’s ridiculous.

 

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