In Conversation: Grady Allen of Anxious
He's been working on a band called Anxious since he was fifteen. Almost a decade later, Grady Allen already has a lot to look back on—and even more to look forward to.
If you’ve never been in a rising band, there are things about the journey that no one ever tells you about. No one ever tells you that your life is about to be swallowed up whole, that your capacity to do almost anything else will be compromised. No one ever tells you about that awkward stage when the public perception that you’re “making it” clashes with the reality that you still can’t always make rent. No one ever tells you about how this stage will affect everyone in a band differently, and how things can get tense without the kind of communication that requires real listening on every side. Most of us go through this stage feeling young and alone, and if it sounds like I’m speaking from personal experience, I am.
Anxious are one of the most promising bands around right now, and their stunning debut album, Little Green House, swiftly carried them to that frustrating middle-state at some point last year. When they released a new single called “Down, Down” last month, Grady Allen offered this explanation with its accompanying press release:
“Around this time last year, I… started wondering whether Anxious was what I needed currently. Having that internal dialogue is stressful—but it came from a genuine place. Where it gets complex, though, is once you have to share those feelings with your bandmates, your friends. Then you’re faced with anger, frustration, and feelings of betrayal—all for emotions that are ultimately out of your control. The song is about having those conversations and deliberating over whether your emotions are relevant or ultimately out of touch.”
In the process of talking about Grady’s life in general right now, the fact that we eventually circled back to this struggle was, perhaps, inevitable. I am grateful to Grady for his candor and willingness to go deeper into this familiar conflict with me, among so many other things.
I was realizing this morning that you are officially the youngest person I’ve ever interviewed for Anti-Matter—at least since I was your age [laughs].
GRADY: Is that true? I’m proud to hold that title!
I’m only mentioning it because I’ve talked about generations in hardcore a lot this year, and I’m really appreciating how we are connecting in these conversations. Because when I was your age, I don’t think there was actually anyone my age now in the hardcore scene. The scene wasn’t that old yet. But right now you’re in a position where you’re in a band and you could be playing a show to people in the forties and fifties even, because that’s how old hardcore is at this point. Is that something you ever think about?
GRADY: I find myself thinking more about how there seems to be more of a codified set of rules and stuff in a way that, looking back at interviews or videos from 10 or 20 or 30 years ago, I think [were] less prevalent. Like, thinking about what it means to be a hardcore band. In some ways, I think that it’s a little more free now. I think there are plenty of bands that don’t sound like the textbook definition, but by how they carry themselves in the world that they operate in, and through their ethics, they can exist within that space. I mean, Anxious doesn’t sound anything like Youth of Today or Agnostic Front or anything like that, but because of the way we’ve chosen to carry ourselves—what we’re all individually interested in and the things we believe in—we are allowed to exist in this space.
Does that give you any hang-ups when you’re playing a show with a bunch of quote-unquote “hard” hardcore bands?
GRADY: Sure. I mean, I don’t know if “hang-ups” is the right word. I’ve tried to separate myself and think a lot less about the ways that hardcore or the scene have made me feel kind of insecure both about myself and the things that I’ve created. I’ve had and continue to have plenty of positive relationships in hardcore, but I think there are a lot of negative voices, and I try not to pay attention to those people who are trying to sit around and define it—like, you know, “It’s hardcore that Anxious is doing this, but it’s not cool that they’re doing that tour.” Or even the people who make statements about other bands like Drain or Scowl or whoever. Do I have some internal dialogues about it? Yes. But at this point, I’m trying to separate myself from the people trying to define what is or isn’t this thing. I’m just trying to enjoy the experience of being able to create music and have any sort of platform and audience for it.
Let’s go back for a second and try to source that, try to figure out how you get to where you are. So one thing is, you’ve described your upbringing as “charmed.”
GRADY: Did I describe it that way? [laughs]
You did. What does that really mean to you?
GRADY: The last five or six years in my family life, maybe longer, have been pretty tumultuous, but I would say that my upbringing was very happy. I had two loving parents and a brother, who was equally as loving. Parents who were very supportive of anything that I wanted to do, despite the fact that I think they chose very conventional and rigid paths—both my parents are lawyers. But both my parents have a love for music and the arts, and I felt like I was exposed to a lot of that at a very young age. When I think back to being very young, it felt like, even then, I had the space to be creative. I had the space to be anything that I wanted to be. So thinking about that now, and arriving at this path that I kind of arrived at now, when I think about being charmed and fortunate, that’s one way I was very lucky.
You’ve been involved since you were very young, and I find it so interesting how your approach with engaging with the community is almost anachronistic for someone your age: You’re known for being a vinyl collector. You published a newsletter that was sort of an archive of Connecticut hardcore. You kind of work inside of these “old world” hardcore ideas in a lot of ways.
GRADY: Thank you. It’s really funny that we’re talking about Dying Tradition, my old newsletter right now [laughs]. I think that sort of format and mindset, I think it’s just way more attractive to me than any other way of operating. With the newsletter, I was so invested in Connecticut hardcore and the stories and lore that surrounded it, and I was so fanatical about it that I wanted to share that, and I wanted people to have that same fanaticism I had. So even though a [printed] newsletter is a little archaic, and maybe an outlier, I think it has way more of a personal touch. It allowed people to have this intimate connection that I felt like I was lucky to have.
What is it about a physical artifact that’s important to you?
GRADY: I just think the experience of interacting with it is far more meaningful, and I think it feels more substantial. It takes more work to seek out a physical zine or a release. Even if it’s as simple as ordering something or reaching out to somebody on the internet and giving them your address, there are a few more hoops that you have to go through to ultimately receive this thing and interact with it. And on the other side of that, I think when you’re done interacting with this thing, it sticks with you a lot more. It has a larger capacity to resonate with me because I’ve experienced it in a more physical way, and I think it’s so easy now—with your phone always being on—for you to experience something and then for it to fade completely. I just think it’s a more meaningful way to consume something, ultimately.
A lot of people from my generation say things like, “Wow, I’m glad we didn’t have the internet when we were teenagers”—mostly because we’d hate the idea of having a semi-permanent digital footprint at that time in your life. But you did have the internet as a teenager, so it was easy for me to come across, for example, a Darien Times article about the first version of Anxious, when you were like sixteen years old. I know that's recent history, but it still also feels like, don’t you deserve to have been sixteen in private?
GRADY: That’s a really cool question. Honestly, I’m super thankful for it. Even the output in pieces about Anxious that I’m not super proud of, I think it’s cool that I have this biographical output for my life starting when I was sixteen. I don’t think of it often in the context of saying, like, “Maybe one day some kid from Connecticut will have this as a resource.” I tend to think of it more in that I look forward to one day having kids of my own. Like, I am completely obsessed with my dad’s life, and I really love getting to hear his stories of growing up and turning into who he became today. I would be so thrilled to have any sort of biography or journals or some sort of output where I could gain a more intimate sense of who he was then. I have a video of his high school graduation speech, and that’s about it. So when I think about it, I’ll be thankful that I can hopefully share it with my own family someday, and be able to give my child a better idea of who I was at this time of my life.
That checks out with your archival impulses.
GRADY: Yeah, I guess so [laughs].
You’re not in college right now, are you? Weren’t you studying history?
GRADY: Yeah… That’s kind of a contentious question at this point. I finished two and a half years of school, but I’ve been on a leave of absence. As of right now, I’m currently not in school, but I applied to go back to school next year and that exists in a weird limbo right now anyway.
OK, then. I wanted to talk a little bit about theater.
GRADY: I would love to talk about theater.
You’ve said before that theater was really your thing in high school, and I sort of love the dichotomy there. What was it that turned you on about it?
GRADY: A lot of things, I think. I was exposed to a lot of it when I was younger through my mom. She was so emphatic about theater. But I think I gravitated towards it because I found it to be really, really freeing. I felt like there were no rules, and even if there was a history or a school of thought about how a role was [supposed to be] played, it still had this potential to be something that was so entirely your own. I also just found it to be very welcoming and free of judgment in a lot of ways. I enjoyed the people that I got to do it with. I think it’s also at the intersection of storytelling and music—at least as far as musical theater goes—and I think that’s unlike anything else. But mostly, I enjoyed that it felt very free. Even though I was never playing myself, because it didn’t feel like it had rules, I felt like I could give a very genuine reflection of myself through doing it.
One of my biggest regrets in my life so far is that once I started getting really invested in hardcore, [theater] became distinctly uncool to me, and I really pushed it away. And I wish I hadn’t done that because I do miss it. Literally, before we did this interview, I was listening to Next to Normal. So it’s still something I enjoy a lot.
I was listening to Company this morning, so there [laughs].
GRADY: Also great!
But I sort of want to get at the root of that idea, that there was almost this shame that was attached to the theater when you got into hardcore. Where do you think that came from?
GRADY: I think a lot of being a young person is feeling a bit lost and not knowing exactly what your thing is. And on the flipside of that, when you finally discover what you really resonate with or what you really like, you become a fanatical soldier for that thing overnight. That’s really cool. But the downside is that in an attempt to get fully integrated into that thing you found, and to fully connect with it, you kind of start to put blinders on—and everything else gets shut out. That was definitely the case for me.
Even though my whole young adolescent life was spent doing theater and really enjoying the people I was doing it with, suddenly I had nothing in common with them. Suddenly, they didn’t understand at all. Everything hardcore tangentially touched was cool, and everything else wasn’t cool. I put these blinders on, and I think that was a really, really huge mistake. And I think it’s a mistake a lot of young people make. But the biggest way that I find myself regretting this, at least within the capacity of theater, is that I was interacting with a lot of people who felt different from myself. And to the extent that they were different, I found myself learning a lot from them. When I got into hardcore, I felt like I started losing a little bit of that. Even though I was relating to a lot of people, it felt like my life was getting a little less broad. So now that I’m in my early twenties, I’ve tried to make an effort to really reconnect with a lot of interests in that realm as an effort of diversification or something. Because I think that by getting into hardcore, I got really ashamed of that element of my life, and I missed out on an opportunity to connect and learn from a lot of people that I would have otherwise really loved and enjoyed knowing.
I bring it up because I realized this wasn’t just a passing interest. Like, you’ve won awards for this.
GRADY: Is that on the internet?
Yes, I read all about Billy Flynn [laughs].
GRADY: Oh my gosh, there you go.
But the point being that, apparently, you were good!
GRADY: Yeah, I thought I was gonna go to college for it for a second. My mom’s heart is still broken about the fact that I didn’t. But now I make horrible music that she can’t stand to listen to [laughs].
When I was much younger, and specifically when I started playing in bands that were drawing larger audiences, like Shelter, I remember there being a moment when I started thinking more about “playing shows” as actually “performing.” Like, there was a moment when I thought, “Hey. People are paying for this. You should probably put some thought into how you look, or what your movement looks like” [laughs]. I think there’s this punk attitude that you should just show up in whatever you wore that day and just fucking play and somehow that’s the most authentic thing you can do. But for me, I wanted to respect the audience enough to care. I’m just wondering if that idea of going from “just a player” to being a “performer”—did that happen for you? And did theater have a role in that?
GRADY: I think for a long time, and maybe it was reactionary to the stuff from middle school and high school from doing theater, but yeah, I totally shared that same attitude about punk and hardcore and doing the band like, “I’m just gonna show up. No, I’m not gonna warm up or put this effort into the performance because that’s not real. What’s real is how I am right now.” And I think that was shortsighted and maybe a little bit rooted in the insecurity of maybe even being afraid to try. You can hide under this guise of being “real” when maybe the truth is that you’re a little bit scared to think about yourself and the ways that you could be better. But more recently, as the shows have gotten bigger and more people are paying attention, I think I’ve not only felt pressure, but I’ve felt a desire to be better and to put more effort in. If any of that is informed by theater—like, maybe how I’m speaking to the audience or how I’m moving a little bit—it’s not something I’m thinking about.
What we’ve been talking about all seems to keep coming back to this… I was fascinated by this quote that you put out in the press release for “Down, Down,” because I’ve seen a lot of interviews with you where people ask about the name Anxious and seem to be trying to ask you to make some sort of comment on mental health about it, and you’ve always shrugged and dismissed that. But then this statement comes out and we’re seeing the first time where it feels like you’re in some sort of struggle in terms of your experience in this band and how you’re feeling about the recent successes and growths and demands of being in a band. So I don’t know how much you want to talk about this, but I am curious to know more specifically about the point where you’re talking about the band bringing you to a place where you started to wonder if Anxious was even the right thing for you to do right now.
GRADY: Yeah, I mean, I would love to talk about this. I think this is the biggest thing that’s been on my mind for a long time now. It was this time last year that I realized I was pretty unhappy doing Anxious, and that was for multiple reasons. The first being that my life seemed like it had become entirely homogeneous. My social life, my creative life, and now suddenly my professional life were all the exact same thing; instead of these Venn diagrams that other people have, it was just one big circle. Everybody in my life was a musician or had a zine or does a label or is a booking agent or is a kid that books shows in Ohio. And that was compounded with the fact that even though Anxious was making a lot of leaps and strides forward, my life outside of it wasn’t. It’s really hard now that Anxious can go on tour for six weeks, and the shows can be incredible, or we’re doing support and we’re getting the approval of our heroes, and it’s like, “Wow, this is amazing!” But then you come home and you’re still in your bedroom that you’ve been in since you were 17 or 18, and you barely made enough on the tour to afford to pay rent on an apartment. That’s really hard.
So I took a lot of time thinking about that. I started to think: What do I think I need to do to make this work? Does this work? Does Anxious need to be done or do I need to be done with Anxious? What I ultimately decided was that I wanted to apply to college again. I was thinking back to when Anxious felt most fun to me, and that was when my life felt diverse and I had several things going on. So I started applying to schools, and I started hearing back last spring, and then you arrive at one of the hardest parts about it, which is then you have to have a conversation with everybody about it. And it’s really difficult because it’s not just how you’re feeling, but the plans you have to maybe potentially correct it. There were definitely feelings of betrayal and hurt to tell your closest friends that you’ve been working on this thing for forever with that I’m not happy, and that I think I need to go do this other thing, which has the potential to alter or maybe even harm [our] thing. That was a really hard conversation to have.
Where do you feel like you are at this moment? Is there a resolution?
GRADY: Not exactly. I told the guys, “Hey, I’m sad. I think I want to go to college.” And reactions were varying. Some of the guys understood it, some were more frustrated by it.
It kind of reminds me of Snapcase in the nineties. Their drummer Tim [Redmond] went to grad school while playing in the band. Both sides made some sacrifices to make it work, but it worked. Snapcase were one of the biggest bands in the scene at that time. They were probably selling 100,000 records at a time when hardcore bands weren’t selling 100,000 records, and they just toured as much as they could. Tim would go on tour with a bag full of books sometimes, but they did it. He got a PhD. They kept going. It was hard, but it’s not unprecedented. It just might require some work on both sides for that to happen.
GRADY: Yeah, I think it does. What was really hard about it was [that everyone brought up] Tommy, our guitarist. Everybody said, “Well, he’s in school. He’s taking online courses and he’s getting his degree.” I think that’s a model—for him to go on tour with a backpack full of books, and having the laptop open, and writing papers in the van. That works for him. But I think for me, it goes back to shutting out the theater and everybody that were my friends in high school in exchange for this new world of hardcore. It wasn’t just the academic experience I was craving, but to have people [around me] that were existing in a different block of life than just this one thing. So I think I want to be somewhere on campus, where I have the potential to connect with people. I think a compromise will be reached, and I think there is a way to make it work. I just think it exists in a little bit of a state of ambiguity right now, and that’s OK.
When I was finally hitting that threshold of feeling like, on a personal level, I had to come out, one of the hardest things for me was that I was in Texas is the Reason at the time, and I was worried that coming out was basically going to destroy our band. I was convinced that it wasn’t possible for someone in our position to be out and to be successful. So instead of having that conversation with the band, I blew it up. I didn’t consider that my personal needs were worth having a conversation over. That’s on me. The fact that you are even having this conversation is amazingly positive for the whole band, and I don’t think you should feel weird or guilty about it. People in bands have needs. That’s a thing. So keep talking about it. You’ll find the compromise.
GRADY: Yeah. I appreciate you saying that. I think that’s an easier thing to think about and realize abstractly, but in practice, it can be really difficult when it’s a team of five people who you know for a fact feel very differently than you do. I think recognizing your own needs is something a lot of people struggle with, and I’m certainly no different in that regard.
Right. And there absolutely will be a point when other people in the band will have needs, too. Everyone has needs.
GRADY: Yeah, I mean, being a group of people in our twenties, there will obviously be a point where, in some capacity, life will need to come first. Whether it’s school or relationships or personal choices elsewhere or personal desires elsewhere—whatever it could be. All I can say is to the extent that I am extended grace and I’m given understanding, all I can do is promise to reciprocate that whenever the time comes for whoever else.
OK, one last thing. Take your time with this one before you answer. There’s a famous aphorism that says, “We are what we repeatedly do.” So I was wondering if you could give me an example of something that you do regularly that you think says the most about who you are.
GRADY: Yeah, I might need to take a second to think about that. [He pauses.] OK, I think I have an answer. I think that I am dreadfully nostalgic and incredibly afraid of the future. And in that, I think you kind of lose an appreciation for the present. So I find that whenever I’m doing something—and I’ve historically done this all my life—I lose appreciation and understanding of what I’m doing at the moment and, instead, wish that I was doing something else completely. When I was doing theater, I was like, “Ugh, I wish I could just be playing music and playing in punk bands.” And in that, I think I totally lost sight of what I was doing that was special in that realm. Then, similarly, when I was in college, I was like, “If I could just be spending more time touring, more time playing music, then that would be good.” I totally lost sight of why that experience was really special and worthwhile. And now, here I am, playing in a band, touring all the time, and I’m going, “Ugh. If I could just be in school, then I would be happy.”
I think it’s some version of self-sabotage. I almost entirely refuse to realize and pay attention to what I’m doing now, and why it’s important, and why it’s special, and why I love it. Instead, I’m fixated on something else that I could be doing, or that I’ve done before. Like, “Oh, this is horrible. If I could only go back and do that one thing, then I would have realized how special that was, and I would have done that to the fullest capacity. I need to be done with this, and I need to go back and do that.” I have repeatedly done that to myself since I was probably fifteen or sixteen.
Where is that fear of the future coming from?
GRADY: I think I exist in a state where I’m perpetually fretful that if I’m not meticulously fretting over every single detail or every possible outcome that the future will arrive, and that I will have made the wrong decision, and I will exist in some state of insecurity. It’s a fear that if I’m not carefully contemplating all the ways that could go wrong, that they will.
When you think about this as it pertains to nostalgia, the first thing that pops into my mind is that the past is always “perfect,” but the future is unknown. So in one way, that’s what you’re saying: Nostalgia soothes you because it’s there and it’s perfect. It’s the past. It’s held in that place forever. And what’s driving you a little bit crazy is the idea that anything can happen in the future.
GRADY: It does. It drives me crazy. I wish that what I’m doing right now—who I’m supposed to be, who I’d like to be—one of my goals right now is to realize that this is not an immediate question, or even an existential one. I wish that I could feel that it’s more so just a process, and one that I think is conquered most naturally by not trying to address it directly, but just by existing and being and trying to appreciate and love what I’m doing right now, and just trusting that will ultimately place me where I would like to be.
All I can say is that the life I have right now, I could not have invented this for myself when I was your age. There’s no way to manufacture the future. It’s just one step after another, and you wind up where you wind up.
GRADY: I hope that I can grasp that more. I think approaching life with very specific goals, that naturally sets you up for disappointment. When you’re trying to manufacture things, like you said perfectly, so you can arrive at this specific goal you have in your head, I think that’s a very dangerous mindset to live with. I am striving to more so just approach it one step at a time, and just have a system to keep moving forward, and trust that that will take me where I’m supposed to be.
Trust me. You’re still in the middle.
GRADY: That’s a hard thing to realize sometimes.
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I was so excited to see this interview pop up this morning! I stumbled upon Anxious at the start of summer and was instantly digging on them.
Norman you mentioned that the drummer of snapcase got his phd while in snapcase didn’t one of the members of resurrection got to notre dame while he was in resurrection how did they make that work out? Also I was listening to a interview was Ian Mackaye and he thought that going to college was the least punk rock thing one can do. Also I was listening to an interview with Lyle preslar and said before ever minor threat lyle”s mother who criticize him for the way he dressed saying “you’re going to wear that on stage.” What I always thought was that lyle showed up for his audition for Samhain wearing a polo shirt and Danzig laughed at him.