Sitting Down with the Next Biggest Band in the World, Secondhand Sound

Interview by Gabriela Margarone

Secondhand Sound is an indie-rock 3 piece hailing out of Nashville, Tennessee. Second Hand Sound consists of Sawyer Estok, Vocals and Guitar, Teagan Proctor, Bass, and Collin Plank on Drums. I had the opportunity to sit down with the band at the Space Ballroom in Hamden, Connecticut to talk about all things tour, inspirations, as well as their upcoming EP, Courage. 

Ease Up: For those who don’t know you, what’s your story? How did Secondhand Sound take shape?

Sawyer: Plank and I started the band together in our hometown in Maryland.

Plank: It was in highschool, about 2016-2017. 

S: There were a few other kids that played music, but we were the only two that wanted to do it for real. We weren't like the most popular dudes around. I got a lot of shit for being bad at guitar for a long time, which made me want to get good. Nobody wanted to join our band.  

Ease Up: Was there a big music scene where you grew up?

S: Oh no way. It was a very smothering environment, artistically. 

P: There was a small punk scene, but we’re more into blues music.

S: They didn’t really like us [laughs]

EU: What about you, Teagan? I know you didn’t meet the other boys until college so you had a different experience than them.

Teagan: Yeah, it's like in a movie where it's like during the same time, it's like “Somewhere in Orange County” and I'm living my life while they do all that. 

EU: [Laughs] They're forming the band and you’re just in California all by yourself.

T: Yeah; I share similarities in the sense that Orange County (California) did not have a thriving music scene, and if there was one, it was nothing that I wanted to truly create myself. I’ve just been a bassist, it’s all I've ever been since I grew up playing in church. I would try to get music projects together but they would usually fall out after one song recorded together, and was never lingering. But, if I did get a band together back in OC when I was in high school, there was nowhere to play. There was no “scene” unlike Nashville. I wanted to be part of a bigger machine. 

EU: So in terms of music inspiration, was it the music you were listening to that made you want to play? Or did you always just *know*

S: I can only speak for myself, but personally I always knew I wanted to do it for a really long time. When I met Plank I already in my head was like “I’m gonna form a band in High School.”

P: My dad is a drummer so I grew up and I would sneak into the bars and help set up his drums, so it was kinda from an early age.

EU: How did you all end up in Nashville? I understand Plank went to Middle Tennessee State and Sawyer and Teagan, you were at Belmont, but how did it all come together?

T: Yeah, so we all went in (to college) for music business. I wasn’t going to tell my parents “Hey I want to go school to pursue bass playing”, I think we all just wanted to find a way to get to Nashville.

EU: That's kind of the way you go around it.

S: I had a deal with my parents that I would try college.

EU: Did you finish college?

S: We all dropped out after 2 years.

T: But my goal wasn't to join a band and like, drop out or even join a band in general. I was really committed to getting a music business degree. But I just stumbled across Secondhand Sound. It just kind of felt like the right fit. “You guys (Sawyer and Plank) are a two piece, I'm a bass player.”  You can add a whole lot of level to that kind of project by simply adding a few more members.

EU: Did you guys live in the same dorm?

TP: Yeah, across the hall from each other.

P: I would sleep at Sawyers dorm, like, every weekend.

EU: How was the music scene at Belmont? I've heard it can be, like, pretentious at times; it can be kind of overwhelming in that way.

S: The way I would explain Belmont is if you've seen Camp Rock. It’s that, but rated R, which is why I personally wanted to leave. You sit in the classrooms and you look around and everybody's, like, looking at each other, like, “who's going to blow up?”

EU: That's definitely a very stressful environment to be in.

T: People think that someone else's success takes away from your own, and that creates the competitiveness of, like, you can't do well because if you do, I'll somehow not do well myself. But that's not true. It's a big industry.

EU: Do you think that competitiveness drove you to do more? 

T: Yeah, but I do think we stay in our own lane.We never stoop to someone else's “lowless” if that makes any sense.

S: The way that I look at it, I love the history of music. I was thinking about, like, Van Halen opened for Black Sabbath on their last tour, and it was the reason that they broke up was because Van Halen opened for Black Sabbath. They stole the entire show and then Black Sabbath had to go on after that, and they were all drugged out and stuff. So that's like, a perfect example of, like, Van Halen was so good that they left it all on the stage. They didn't stoop to anybody's level or anything. They were so good that they made Black Sabbath break up. That's the kind of competition that I'll admit to. None of it's, like, personal or anything. We want to be the biggest band in the world.

EU: Who are some of the artists that you guys look up to? Who are your “Greats”

S: We all have different ones, but there are overlaps. Ones that we agree on are Kings of Leon, The Strokes, The Killers, Paramore, Inhaler, Fontaines D.C, and Sam Fender.

T: We really love UK Rock right now, too. I feel like there's a weird kind of divide where for some reason the UK is making such more innovative rock right now than the US. When you say rock to someone in the US, they think classic rock.

EU: Getting more into influences, what are you guys playing on the road right now? What’s on the aux?

T: Whoever is driving basically gets the right to pick what we’re listening to. So I was driving yesterday, and I just love listening to (John) Mayer records top to bottom. So I think we got all the way through Heavier Things and Continuum. There's a place called Buttzville, New Jersey that we drove through that we thought was funny. So basically, Savannah (Conley) looked up a Spotify playlist called “buttrock” and we just played that. It was awful, like it was Smash Mouth and stuff. But yeah, It's a little bit of everything on the road.

EU: Do you think seeing new places will inspire your writing? What is your writing process like?

S: Well, our first record was like, I kind of took it and ran with the “You have your whole life to tell with your first album”: I wanted to get that out of the way. I didn't write for like a couple of months and I kind of slowly got back into it last summer. It can start with the cliche things like heartbreak and everything; bad feelings are pretty powerful for art. Or, I'll be inspired by a song. We have a song on our new EP, going to be called Courage in the Growler, and the EP will be called Courage. But there was a song, a CCR (Creedence Clearwater Revival) song that was called Lodi. Usually your like, run of the mill song will be like, intro, verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge, chorus. But this song is set up in three verses, and there's two first verses, and then there's a key change, and it's another verse. But the third verse is a bridge because it's in a new key. Like, that kind of shit gets me going. So our song Courage in the Growler, I modeled the model (of the song) after that.

Lyrical content, it's all just from my real life. I'll write down lyrics in my notebook. I don't really journal, but I'll just write a bunch of shit. It looks kind of crazy if you look at it out of context, but it's just a bunch of random stuff. I always try to find chords that feel like what I'm trying to get across that feel the way that I feel. That's why a lot of our songs have so many chords, because I don't know, it just kind of snakes through. I love Paul Simon because he does that kind of shit, for sure. It’s not the same every time. 

EU: Yeah, I've heard that comment. You ask about the writing process and they're just like, it happens differently every time.

S: You can't force it. Neil Young describes it as like, you just have to be there as an antenna for the song to come. Rick Rubin will say that, too. If you're open to it and you're, like, ready to receive it, you can't force what you want the song to be. Neil Young will be, like, talking to somebody and he'll get an idea and just disappear and go to his guitar in another room.

EU: Have you ever done that?  

S: Yeah, somebody will say something to me and I'm like, that was sick, and i’ll write it down.  A lot of it is just like it's a lot like showing up to your job. You're not just going to sit down and be like, I'm going to write a song right now. It's a lot of, like, sitting in the same place playing guitar for 5 hours and nothing comes for like two months. Maybe you get something that you like. I mean any art form really is just like sculpting.

EU: Do you guys (Teagan and Plank) ever get into the writing process at all?

T: We found that if we all try to sit down and kind of be like “Let's just throw a bunch of abstract ideas at the wall” it just becomes chaos. But that being said, I feel like what we call a “finished song” is still a song that has yet to be really molded. When Sawyer brings a song, that's kind of when the fun begins, when we can really shape out our parts from our respective instruments. I feel like lyrics are very intimate, sacred thing in a lot of ways. 

S: Usually it always ends up better once I drop into the band setting or like my parts will just become so much clearer. On a new song for the EP, I sat over a riff for three months or something, and then I was like, “All right, we just need to go out there and try to play it.” And as soon as we tried to play it, I was like, yeah, I should be doing this instead.

EU: Do you think that this EP is the one where you feel like, okay, this really is starting to feel like my baby, in a way? Kind of like “this is more concrete” to who we are?

T: The way I kind of describe it to people in conversations that I've had over the past month or so is that it feels like every single project which we released before, which we're all, in a lot of ways proud of and stuff; there's always hesitations. There's always, “I wish we had more time on that chorus for this song.” or “I wish I'd played bass better” because two months later, I got a way better part that I now play live, but the recorded version was set in stone. This project largely feels like the first time that every single thing we've asked for has been granted to us. We got an amazing studio space, with more than enough time. We recorded more songs than we needed so we could pick the best out of them. We have a team that we're actually happy with, a dynamic that there was no fighting within the studio, but we all understand what the project needs to be. Then even beyond the recording, it's getting mixed by somebody who we are super stoked about. It's awesome. All that being said, this definitely is a project where it's like, man, we really do hope people recognize the significance of this project in particular, because it is the first time that it's like us in our fullness. 

S: That's part of the reason it's called Courage. On the business end, we had a ton of shit go down in the past two months. Just within that, we knew that we had this tour coming up where we could still play music, we knew that we were going to the studio. There are so many points in this band, honestly, any good band where it just feels like it's about to go off the rails at any time. But I feel like you could compare it to, like, an explorer exploring, like, the frontier. Stuff is always trying to get you, but that's how it should be. As soon as you start being safe, you're done. And to get through that, you need courage. That's what a lot of the EP is about.

Secondhand Sound will be on tour in July supporting Savannah Conley; you can grab tickets here and keep up with them on Instagram and Discord