Dad Talks #4 Nyles Lannon
In conversation with the veteran rocker, composer, and, of course, dad.
Going back to his college days in the mid-90s at the University of Pennsylvania (Quake ‘em, Quakers!), Nyles Lannon is a veteran of the indie rock trenches.
After heading west to San Francisco, he joined the band Film School. And though the band signed to Beggars Banquet shortly before or after (I can’t remember. Those are hazy years) I started working at Matador Records and the Beggars Group, our paths never crossed. (Or maybe they did. I don’t remember. Hazy years).
Since then, Lannon has been making music under his own name while developing a career scoring film, commercial, and television productions.
And, for the purposes of this newsletter, Nyles is a dad and one who is officially living the dream of making music with his son in a band called Nyte Skye.
How did your relationship to making music change once you started having kids?
It changed completely, but probably not for the reasons one might think. I spent most of the year leading up to my son’s birth freaking out about what I was going to do to make more money. I had finally been living the ‘music life' - getting signed and touring all over US and Europe with my band Film School, releasing a couple solo albums, playing a lot of local shows. But the fact was I simply wasn’t making enough for us. My wife as knee deep in graduate school and we were about to have a baby. This was back in 2007-2008, and we were living in San Francisco. I had already burned many years in my twenties in tech jobs that led pretty much nowhere for me so I was trying to resist the urge to fall back into that—there were plenty of those jobs in SF at the time. I was just really at a crossroads. I wanted more time to live the bohemian life. I had a Trader Joes application half-filled out on my desk.
Out of nowhere I get a call from a small music agency in the East Bay, run by a composer, who was looking for someone that could help him write jingles with a more indie rock slant. He specifically needed help on a Sprint commercial he was working on (this was many years before Sprint and T-Mobile merged obviously). He heard me on the radio, I'm assuming it was either KALX of KUSF, the college stations in the area. I had never written for a commercial before. We hit it off, and he would end up mentoring me in a sense, teaching me a lot of the basics with sound and commercial-friendly production. Out of freakin’ nowhere! So I jumped into this job, threw a bunch of ideas at him, pulled a few all-nighters; I went bananas. Although I didn't get the commercial (the licensed a track by the band Architecture in Helsinki) the ad agency ended up using my tracks for a few other things for Sprint—the Jumbotron at football stadiums and some ads online. I got my foot in the door basically. It turns out, around the same time, I got another call from an agency down in LA. Then another in NYC. It took off. It must have been something about the solo album I had put out, because all of this happened when my album Pressure—which came out in 2007—was starting to get out there a bit. It was incredible timing; all this was happening in the months leading up to my son being born. I could work from home, be flexible, be around, while still playing music. It was perfect.
That basically was the start of my musical career in any real way. I was able to ride this for the last fifteen years or so, through a lot of changes in the music industry. It's been a good run! Needless to say it completely changed my relationship with music, as it became more of a job and less about my own self expression. Getting into the mode of writing albums can sometimes be hard for me now, creatively. Doing commercials all the time warps your brain and you lose your perspective, your own voice.
Sometimes it takes a few days to find it again. But I never lose sight of how awesome it has been to make a living playing music. I fully embraced it.
Now that you're making music with your kid, what has that done for your relationship with them?
We have always played music together, since the moment he started to take interest. I have a very early recording of us playing a song he called “Music of Space”, he was six and playing the synth and I was playing guitar along with him. It’s on my Soundcloud page. I still love it:
It’s just a little thing I recorded on my phone. But it was clear to me even back then that he was drawn to music and had an ear. He soon jumped into piano, then got absolutely crazy obsessed with the drums, dabbled with guitar, got into Logic and recording software, modular synths, then back to piano relatively recently. He was writing a lot of music starting when he was eight or so. He has always just been really obsessed with it, self-motivated. So I knew it was a matter of time before we made an album together. The pandemic hit right at the perfect time really, he was ready.
We have the same ups and downs as most other father/sons I think. We have our moments. Parenting is freaking hard, especially now that he is a teenager. Fasten your seatbelts! I am still always trying to be a better dad, like we all are. I think, if anything, our music fills us both with pride and gives us all these experiences together, which I cherish (and I think he will too eventually). It’s our own little world, we have built this band from the ground up, and it will always be this thing we did during that crazy moment of the pandemic. Now that we are playing shows and getting it out there, it is giving us all these opportunities to connect, to learn, to evolve. I think its great for him right now to have these experiences in the real world. We are still very much in this journey.
Even if you took the album and band out of the equation, I love playing music with him. He is a pretty great musician; it’s fun and awe-inspiring to see him develop right in front of me. He is a very confident player, cool as a cucumber on stage, solid as a rock when performing or recording. It’s just freaking cool to see and it makes me proud of course... But… I need to chill. The fact is, putting out an album, playing shows… this is kind of a different mode than writing the album and recording at home- which we did during lockdown/early pandemic days when it felt like we had all the time in the world to work on music. It was pretty relaxed when we recorded this stuff. Now that we are preparing for shows, practicing more, doing interviews, touring.. these things are a lot more stressful and take more of a commitment. Sometimes it feels like we are on a traveling sports team or something and I’m the barking coach, and I don’t want that. So I just try manage that, keep it fun and light, and try to spread commitments out,. Take long breaks. Donuts at practice. :)
How do you carve out time to focus on your creative work? And how has being a father impacted that, positvely and negatively?
Our bond is creative, it overlaps with my own songwriting of course, so right now being a father affects my creative work in a hugely positive way. I seem to have an extra creative muscle kick in when I’m working with my son. It’s like a whole new layer of motivation takes over for me; I want this music to exist. I also seem to have less of those annoying “I suck” “this song sucks” thoughts—the self-doubt shit that we all have to deal with as artists. It just seems to flow easier and I enjoy the process. It helps that he is almost always is a positive force when we are working on something together. This all seemed to really blossom when we worked on this album, and to have that while the whole world seemed to be imploding outside of our house, it was a crazy dichotomy. I write about it in our song “Doing Time:”
Days blur into days and I cant take the news anymore
Put a record that takes me far away, a different time, lost in space
Tell me about the dream you had
Let me hear that easy laugh
Keep me playing and not folding
Keep me looking for a horizon that is golden
The albatross, a country lost in this fight
But you keep this house full of light
Doing Time for no crime with no end in sight
Write pages of your life, thrown into the fire, stare into the fire
But it wasn’t always like this obviously. When he was a toddler, running around our apartment in SF, I found it pretty hard to focus sometimes! I ended up renting a studio across town to get away so I could focus. But interestingly I got very little done in that studio! I now had full days of uninterrupted silence and I found it really hard to work there. I was miserable being away from the family banging my head on the walls of my little studio. So I embraced the crazy home life. We got into a good rhythm with the toddler. I was able to find a way to work while also helping out to give her needed breaks during the day. It helped that my wife was very supportive of my work once those checks from commercials started coming in! We needed this to work.
When it comes to being creative I always try to embrace what is going on around me and let creativity just happen as a by-product, like just a reflection of what is going on. So I think of this in terms of being a father - lots of times being a good father means I am available and around, and of course sometimes that comes at a cost to my ‘free’ time. But when I finally get some time, I suddenly have ideas, and I sing about being a father and what’s going on. It’s all right there. I have several songs about my daughter that were written like this on my solo album Falling Inside. Without that experience and feeling, I dont have much to say, and it's harder to write songs for me.. It's just a perspective that I try to have, especially when I felt like my time is being eaten away by trips to the playground, tedious playdates etc. Just embrace the chaos. You can write an amazing hook at any moment.
How do you use music (generally speaking, not yours specifically) to bond with your kids?
In our house, music is everywhere, all the time. Skye goes to concerts with me, which is always nice. Olive, my ten-year-old daughter, is more into musicals, music theatre. We enjoy The Sound of Music, Hamilton, plays, dance performances—this is more in line with what my wife likes. Olive is also more into pop, so she will school me in what is hip right now.
What kind of father was your dad? What lessons from him are you taking forward? And which have you actively tried to avoid?
My dad was very patient and very soft spoken with me. He rarely raised his voice. I try to bring that same calmness to any situation with my kids.
One thing I am trying to do differently than my parents is in how involved I am with my teenager’s life. When I was in high school, my parents had no idea what I was going through. None of the parents had any idea, there was a giant divide. There was drug abuse, depression, suicide, risky behaviors all over the place, troubling relationships. It was way too much for a sixteen-year-old to handle. Looking back, I could have really used more guidance and support. Teenagers pull away, it’s normal, but I will always try to be involved and try to be there when they need it. Luckily, music provides me an easy in with my son. I hope we can continue to play music through his high school years and that this bond will just get stronger!