Crying in the West Village and Other True Stories by ok, tyler
By Emma Hug Rosenstein
New York City-based band ok, tyler writes music through the lens of relatability. Each song the band writes and performs differs from the last, whether that’s the tempo, the focus on depth of sound, or the lyrical message. ok, tyler includes Tyler Evanson Moore (vocals and guitar), Daniel Lerner (guitar), Luke McCrosson (bass), Ian Jorge Miller (keys), and Alex Alfaro (drums). ok, tyler has been releasing music in New York City since 2022; their latest single, “A24,” was released on October 18th.
Before you moved to New York, you were an LA-based singer-songwriter, and now you play in your own band. Can you talk to me about your music origins and how this specific New York City band formed?
I grew up in Tennessee. My father was a musician. He played 13 acoustic instruments and he did Appalachian Celtic music. So it was a really fun musical house, and he got me my first guitar when I was young. I picked it up and started there and just mimicked things I heard on the radio. I loved rock music, but I also loved Ray Charles and Stevie Wonder. I was a huge John Mayer fan for most of my youth. But then I ended up moving to LA. I looked at a lot of the trajectories of the artists I admired and they all ended up in LA, so I thought, “oh, I should just cut out the middleman and just go.” And also, I just wanted to move out of my hometown. So I moved there. I lived there for six years, and I felt like the entire six years I was just trying to figure out what I wanted to do. I experimented a lot.
And I don't know what happened. Something just clicked and I started writing pop. And then I even got farther away from that and started writing the indie rock stuff that I'm writing now. I don't even know if I was getting in my own way, I just figured out who I wanted to be. I think it takes some people longer. Some of the artists I love got popular at 21 or 22, I don't know, it's like the luck of the draw you get. I had to swap out some of my cards, and I like the hand that I'm dealt now.
I moved to New York four years ago. Always wanted to live here. I always wanted to play music. I moved here during Covid, so I was kind of locked in for a long time. And then once it opened up, I was like, “oh, I'm going to die one day. And I missed out on so much time playing music for people. I need to do this as much as I can before I kick the bucket.” So I started saying yes to everything, to every show, any opportunity.
I found my band through coworkers. I think when I first moved to the city, I had four or five jobs my first year. Just things not working out, not enough money, so you have to pivot, find something else better. And I found all my bandmates through my coworkers, and it is the original band. I played our first show in November 2022, and it's been us four ever since, almost two years.
You have also been performing under the name ok, tyler for a while. When you started here in New York, why did you choose to keep that name for this band? Or was there any thought to start a new band?
I thought about that for a while, and then it was just too daunting of a thing to change my Spotify profile, my handles, et cetera. And then I heard my bassist Luke saying, “oh yeah, we're in a band, ok, tyler,” to somebody at a party or something. He just said it that one day and I thought, “okay, that sounds cute.”
Your last single “POWERBALL” is a little bit more of a ballad, a bit slower than some of your more recent releases. So lyrically, how was the song written? Was there anything that this single helped you process in life that you wanted to come out through the song?
Yeah, I really struggle with the idea of success. There's two pieces of me that take up my creative brain: I have to do this because there's no other option, it's just who I am and I'll do it forever, no matter what the outcome is, whether it's success or I stay at the exact level I am now for the rest of my life. Who cares? And then there's this other half of me that is very hardworking - I want what I want and I'm going to go work and get it - that doesn't let go of, “Hey, no, you can be successful.” It's like letting my ego have a healthy size and say, “no, you are deserving of this. There are bands that are huge that you could be not even better, but more transparent and honest.”
And that's what I hold dear to me is that I want my songs to be an open diary where you know my exact thoughts. I feel like transparency is hard to find in our digital age, we're all trying to appear as something online. And so we're worried about our image to where it's like, what is your image? Is it you or is it this thing you've constructed? So that's what “POWERBALL” is about for me, is that I do want success, but I don't want to spend my whole life chasing it.
I think “POWERBALL” is just me wrestling with those feelings of releasing a song. You promote it, you try to get it to pop off, it doesn't. You do the next one, you promote it, you try to get the pop off, it doesn't. You book the next show, you do the next thing, and the ball doesn't feel like it's moving. We're meant to create, to fulfill ourselves and our people. The song just kind of started off as a stream of consciousness. The first lyric is, “begging a computer to say yes to me, so I can give myself a couple drinks for free.” I remember saying that either in the shower or some free brain moment and I was like, “oh wait, I need to write this down.”
But yeah, it is just about wrestling with my desire to work hard and get what I want, and also my desire to be content with what I have and create from a place of purpose, and let that be enough.
“Hoping for Heaven,” seems to use a lot of dark humor. And it's more upbeat and rhythmic, but very dark humor lyrics. Sonically, can you just talk about what the process was like of creating this single.
I had the hook in my back pocket for a really long time. I just couldn't hit the verses. And it sucks having something that you know can be cool, but the lightning is just not striking. I sit at my studio desk, I'm like, “okay, I'm ready. I'm ready.” And you try and you write verse after verse and nothing's happening. It came up very patchy. I'd get a line, and then the second one couldn't come. So I'd go to work, I'm doing voice recordings on my phone and writing stuff down on my hand, and finally all pieced together, and made the song. I think things can be so bleak for humanity that we can't just make bleak songs. We have to be cheeky about it at some point. And so I did use dark humor. I take a lot of stabs at religion and government as to controlling mechanisms to keep all of us down.
I've already kind of done some emo sad songs about that this time. It needed to be more uplifting, like, “hey, at least we're all going to die. At least we get relief at some point.” And when I went to the studio, it was a fun session. We got to just have the floor open and see what happens. We had a lot of instruments at our disposal. It was really fun. And I'm glad that was the energy behind the song, and it was more leaning on the humor side than the dark side.
You released your last EP, “God of the Gaps,” just over a year ago. And you said that the EP was made just for the music. One quote that you wrote that I love is that “there are no compromises in these songs.” Can you talk about the inspiration for this EP and how it really came together?
All those songs were the first songs I wrote in New York, and it was just a culmination of my first few years here. “Crying In The West Village,” literally the opening lines are a story my coworker was telling me. He said, “so I have a broken foot. I'm a little high and I'm crying in the West Village.” And I wrote it down on my phone. It was a song for him and just other realizations of my time here. When I moved here, I felt like, “oh, this feels like home. I want to stay here as long as I can.” I never felt that before. I was also discovering myself as an artist, what I wanted to write, how I wanted to say it, how I wanted it to sound. No compromises on anything, which I felt was probably the first in my life.
Do you feel like you're still taking that with you?
Absolutely. Life is too short for compromises on your expression, no matter what that is. Expressing what you want and who you are should never have any compromises. This was the first time I realized that and actually executed it. It was sweet, and it was super rewarding. I love listening to that record. I'm so proud of it. Top to bottom feels good.
Any new music coming?
Yeah, we have a song called A24. It is about the dark state of the world and how you have to deal with scrolling on your phone and looking at your brother's new baby and then also going to Palestinian children dying and your own country funding it, but calling for a ceasefire. And all this juxtaposition of desires within the world and also within yourself of, I do want to just look at pictures of my brother’s cute baby, and I don't want to be bothered by the news from across the world. But I also have a responsibility to stay updated so I can vote properly and protest properly or whatever I want to do.
So, just about trying to balance that in an age where news is just constantly getting sent to your phone. But I'm really excited. And then we got another one in the pipeline that I'm working on, but that'll be TBD.
Your songwriting process. A few years ago you said that you started by “experimenting on every little detail of being songwriting in production, finding what works by trial and error. And I still use that same format today.” Does this process stay true today in the way you write your songs? Or if not, how has it changed?
I'll just start spewing whatever is coming out and, I'm like, “okay, we're getting there.”
And I guess that is a form in itself of trial and error. So I'll spew anything, and it's all about lyrics first, melody second, and chords third. Melody and lyrics take priority. I can write whatever chords I want to around it, but if the melody isn't seeing what the words are saying, this won't work. It is all trial and error.
One sentence to describe ok, tyler.
Probably transparent and self-aware to the point of self-destruction.
How has your experience in the New York music scene been different from LA?
In LA, art in general is such a commodity over there that most things that you're listening to, someone's trying to sell and make a ton of money on. Whether it's their own artistry or songs they're writing for other artists. So live performances, in my experience, weren't as important to the scene. It was mainly who you know, who you can write with, and who you can produce with. And that's all great and builds community. But I do feel New York is at least music for music's sake. I love finding bands that aren't even trying to make a career out of it. They're just playing music because they don't have another option. It's their thing. And some of them are really good, some of them are really bad. And I want everyone to have an opportunity to play bad. People deserve to play. Good people deserve to play. And New York has that.
One secret that you want to share.
I used to make hip-hop music when I was in LA. I did white boy rap, and it wasn't that bad, but it wasn't that good. We made awesome music videos. I have a lifelong friend who I just went camping with when I visited them in LA who I met during that time of my life. And we just made dope music videos and I experimented a lot and discovered myself through the process. But I used to rap, and I'm not ashamed.
What is one goal you want to accomplish?
I really want music to be my full-time job. And I'm not asking for fucking world tours, million bucks a year. If I make what I make now, but I'm just doing music, I'd be so good with that. I just want to be able to have more time for it and to be able to be present and to give it all of my attention, rather than just a piece of it that my job lets me have. I just want to make a living off my music. It has been my dream since I was eight years-old. And it's going to happen.
