Vethaken – An Xperience Review

Vethaken – An Xperience Review – by Liam Sweeny.

RRX: You’ve more or less dared people to put Vethaken into a genre, because it’s not happening. When I listen in, I struggle too. And it’s the real deal. It’s its own sound, it’s not just some retread of someone else’s thing. Is there effort in sounding unique, or is it more effort to just fall into a genre?

PT: It’s kind of hard to answer that and not sound pompous. I’m gonna try. The way I write, it’s not like I have much intentionality behind it, like, “Oh, I haven’t heard this done before, let me do it.” A lot of it, I’m just trying to, like, see where the song or the riff or the composition goes naturally. I’m not trying to control it very much. I listen to a lot of types of music, and I’m a big jazz dude, I’m a big post-hardcore, emo guy. I also love Tool, Porcupine Tree, and all these prog rock bands. When I was super young and developing and most malleable as a kid, I was just like, “So the three cornerstones were metal and emo, prog rock, and jazz.” So I think everything I do inevitably falls somewhere in the middle between those three worlds.

RRX: This question is really about the individuality in your sound. I mean, it’s good and it grooves, but then there’s a risk, isn’t there? I mean, you’re putting yourself out there viscerally. If someone doesn’t like your sound, it’s not because they prefer techno to blues. It’s more a direct hit because it’s that unique. How do you deal with that?

PT: I was lucky to have parents who don’t like anything that I do. That might sound insane. I love my mom, but when it comes to music, she’s such a church lady, and that’s all she listens to. No one has been more like, “I don’t like this,” than my mom. I haven’t seen a single internet comment that has hurt more than my own mother. So a lot of it is just that. If you go through the comment sections on a lot of those videos, like, the people who are trying to hurt me are usually very metalhead dudes who are like, “your guitar sound isn’t clean” or yada yada yada, and I’m like, “whatever, I don’t really care about that,” but no one, no one, no one hates it more than my mom, so it’s just like what can you do or say? You can’t do anything; I feel quite invincible with that.

RRX: That’s a pretty good point. Yeah,

PT: My dad likes my music, though, so like it balances out.

RRX: You got one person in the family. That’s cool.

Creating music (or anything); it doesn’t require an audience, but an audience adds to it, even from the beginning. When you look at your audiences, who are we seeing, and are there any audience members you think you wanna give, like, a quick 15 minutes to?

PT: Oh my gosh. I would say the audience has become, in the last two years, especially, so important. I’ve been working on music since I was 13, and I’ve been working on this project for 10 years, and the first, like, five or six years were just, “I hope people like this.” You’re just kind of doing it, and you know, the way I write, I don’t wanna control it. So much of it is just, like I really hope this resonates with people deeply, and not just like “Oh that’s impressive guitar stuff’ or ‘What a cool solo.’ We have a Discord server for fans, and it’s so awesome to talk to people, and it’s so funny because a lot of my fans remind me of my friend group from high school. I feel like this music and the branding and everything about this project is a tribute to this found family mentality that I had growing up. It’s funny, I see a lot of late millennials my age who were going to Warped Tour and going to Bamboozle and all these metal festivals. I see a lot of – and this is a huge honor – a lot of queer and LGBTQIA+ community people. I’m part of that community too.

I see a lot of people who represent parts of me that I was so scared of as a high schooler. I see this music and this world turn into a safe haven that didn’t quite exist for me when I was a young kid, and it’s cool. I would say most of my fans are in their mid-twenties to my age or older, and there’s definitely a lot of people who are older and coming out of the Grateful Dead world, which is cool. I don’t relate to that as much, but I love seeing it. I love that that’s a part of my world. There are so many fans I have that I can’t wait to hang out with, especially because we’re starting a tour.

RRX: Your discography belongs in an art gallery. Amazing work on all your albums. What goes into deciding on a cover? Is it a process or is it something more like a lightning flash?

PT: It’s definitely a process. I’ve been working with this incredible, incredible artist, Anita Inverarity. She’s Scottish, she’s awesome. I never know if I’m saying her last name right. I hired her, and she’s so collaborative and so fun and awesome to work with. But a majority of our artwork is done by Celeste Silva. She’s a friend of mine I met in Montreal years ago, and she’s one of my best friends over the last nine, ten years. And it’s funny, it’s fun to see her art style evolve with us over the last ten years. She designed my website ten years ago, and she helped me figure out all the branding. But it’s always been a process, and it’s always been interesting because I’m not a visual artist, so it’s a lot of me literally sending her poems and descriptions and thoughts. I’ll send her a mood board and the artwork for the new EP, “I’m All Out of Beautiful Thoughts,” – that probably took three to five months. It took a long time … there’s a lot of things going on with me. There’s a lot of things going on with Celeste. She feels like a secret band member cause the artwork is important. I love good artwork. So it definitely is a process.

RRX: What are you working on right now? Are you in the studio or are you on tour?

PT: I have 10 new songs that I wrote in 2023. I’m … in the process of arranging them and slowly dripping them to the band, and we’re gonna record. We’re gonna record a full-length in the fall, late summer or fall; that’s definitely happening. I feel like this record is the first like full-length since “A Thoughtful Collapse,” so that was what, five years ago? I feel like this is a new milestone. I’ve been teasing a new direction. And this is, like, a more solidified … this is our sound, this is who we are. And I’m very excited about it for a lot of reasons. It’s a very emotional album. “A Thoughtful Collapse”; I love that record. What that record means to me is my identity crisis in New York, and it’s me trying to really figure things out. Figure out where I stand and what I like. I needed to write this record because I was just not in a good place emotionally, and the only way to get through was writing this album. So this feels like more of, like, this had to be written in order for me to be who I am.

Photo by Darell Day.

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