You recently released a song titled “When We Were Young,” which has gotten quite a lot of buzz recently. What’s that particular song about?
Anndy: It’s all about nostalgia. That’s the whole thing. I wanted to write a song that was really nostalgic to when I was getting into music, which is like 2003-2004, based off the bands that got me into it. That’s the whole thing – being nostalgic as a person in their 30s about the music that got me into making music. I kind of used a lot of lyricisms and quotes from when I was a little kid in grade school, like “Shoot for the moon, and even if you miss, you’ll land among the stars,” and the “Hang in there!’ cat… just stuff that was on the walls in grade school. I took a lot of those quotes and turned them into lyrics. It’s just a nostalgia bomb. Total nostalgia.
Your YouTube and TikTok channels have a lot of content about recording and production. Does your knowledge about this help you as a songwriter and musician, or vice versa? If so, how?
Anndy: I think it helps. I’ve been doing my own self-production for a long time. I learned how to do it back in 2007, and I went to school for it, and I’ve just been kind of doing it myself since then and occasionally working with people when I want to learn more or get outside hands and stuff. Having the ability to sit down and make my own music at my own whim has been pretty great for me because it saves a lot of money, saves a lot of time, and I don’t really have to answer to anybody. As an artist, it’s kind of nice. It definitely helps me a lot, I think, as a songwriter.
Speaking of TikTok, how has that app impacted your career as a musician, especially with this new song?
Anndy: It’s turning into a huge thing right now, which is really, really crazy. I’ve been on the app for about two years with basically no real traction, but that’s fine, that’s pretty standard fare for being a musician on social media. Then all of a sudden, something catches people’s attention, and then people will start paying attention to you. This one has been a lot of negativity towards the song. It’s what’s pushing the song forward so much. I try to find the good in bad things all the time. So, people don’t like it, and they talk about it, and that pushes it out further so the people that do like it get a chance to find it – people who wouldn’t have found it before. I’m very much of the mindset that polarization is a really powerful thing when it comes to creating art. Having people either really love it or really hate it is better than people not caring or just feeling like, “eh, it’s fine.” I’d rather be on either end of those things than in the middle. So, for me, polarization is great because people hate it, so people love it. That’s just what I’m seeing anyway.
You’ve dropped a couple of albums, but lately, you’ve been primarily releasing singles. Is that your plan for your releases in the near future? What sort of impact do you think singles will have on the music industry? Do you think they will become the leading release format?
Anndy: I love this question. I’ve been doing music for a long time, but the first Anndy Negative release was a gapless, punk rock opera album, which was a lot of work/ It was an unreasonable amount of work to do. I did a lot of promotion and then it was over. I was like “Now what? I’ve got to write another album?” So, I started focusing on singles, because I could do one, put it out, spend a couple of months really just pushing it as hard as possible, and making some cool content, and then I didn’t feel like I was like, “Now, what next?” as much. There’s another song next, one at a time. I feel that now, it makes a lot more sense to focus on that kind of release strategy. You put out an album, it’s got, say, ten songs on it. You’ve got your singles from the album, maybe there are three of them, that get a lot of attention – one before, one during, and one after. Then there are those other seven or eight songs on the album that maybe people literally never hear; they never really get a fair crack. You never know if maybe some of those songs are better or will connect with people in a different way than the ones that you think are the best ones. When you release singles, every single song has a chance.
In addition to writing music, you also write novels. Is there any correlation between your music and the storylines in your books?
Anndy: Yeah, for sure. So, I was talking about that gapless punk rock opera that I did. I did a novelization of that a couple years later, just because I liked the story I’d written, but I didn’t feel like an opera was the best way to tell it. I felt like there was a lot left on the table, so I just wrote it. Since then, now I’ve just been writing short stories – short horror and stuff – more for fun and interest than anything [else].
So, would you say the album was a concept album, then?
Anndy: For sure, one hundred percent a concept album, yeah.
I guess you had that storyline in mind when you were writing everything?
Anndy: Oh, yeah. It’s very narrative. It’s a character going through the hero’s journey, ups and downs, dealing with a lot of problems. Stuff gets worse and worse for them and they have to try and struggle through.
So I assume that the tracklist is in a very specific order for that reason.
Anndy: Yeah. I wrote it all to be more of a concerto or symphony kind of thing because it’s one piece of music that’s about twenty minutes long. I released it so it’s broken up in a way where you can skip songs, but then at the end, you can listen to the entire thing as just one twenty-minute long piece of music with no gaps in it. Every song leads into the next one. There are motifs that repeat and change as the story goes on and stuff like that. I was trying really hard to do the hardest thing I could musically.
Are there any books you’ve read that have inspired any of your creative projects, whether that be your writing or music?
Anndy: Absolutely. Books are probably one of the biggest inspirations for me outside of other music artists I find. I read a lot. My bookshelf over there is full of stuff. I try to read a little bit of everything, but there’s a book by Keith Buckley, who is the vocalist for Every Time I Die, called Scale, that I was really influenced by. 1984 is a book that really influenced me, and just so many others. It’s hard to pick and choose, but those are just a couple of my favorites. Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett in that it’s a lot of satire and making fun of storytelling, and I liked that idea. I like when authors can poke fun at what we’re doing, and I really liked the concept.
I’m curious about the correlation between maybe the stuff you read and your work, whether that’s your actual novel writing, or music, or both because I know that sometimes, whatever media you might be consuming could inspire something you’re currently working on or about to work on.
Anndy: Around Halloween time last year, I lost my Goosebumps book collection from when I was younger, but I went to the thrift store and found a bunch, so I bought them for fifty cents or whatever. So, I read a bunch of Goosebumps books, which is probably what kickstarted that nostalgia thing in my head. I read a lot of things from when I was a kid, and maybe that was a big part of why I’m on this little nostalgia kick for this song specifically. I started thinking about the things that I was stoked on when I was younger, and then was like, “You know what? I should write a song about how being old and being young are… I don’t know… similar through nostalgia glasses.”
Circling back to music – what can people expect from future material? Will it sound similar to “When We Were Young,” one of your previous releases, or something totally different?
Anndy: I have pretty much my year’s worth of songs just about done at this point, which is the nice thing about a single release. You can kind of batch stuff, and you’ve got your entire year’s worth kind of sorted out. It’s going to be a lot of upbeat punk rock/pop-punk with a little bit of that theatrical emo influence. I feel like there will be a fair amount of positivity in it, a lot of satire, because that’s a big part of my life, poking fun at the thing that I’m doing. Hopefully, just a lot of fun, that’s really what I’m going for. I feel like what has been kind of “in” for the past six months to a year is darker, and I totally get it, I can one hundred percent connect with that. I wanted to go [in] the opposite direction. Art is doing this thing where it’s very dark and depressing right now, and I want to just go the total opposite. When things are happy, I go dark. When things are dark, I go happy.
Anndy Negative’s latest single, “When We Were Young,” is available now. Listen to the track here:
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