Conversations with Ryan Duswalt

Today we’d like to introduce you to Ryan Duswalt.

Hi Ryan, we’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
My path down music started when I was very little. My parents would influence my taste as they were both into classic rock tunes, and my dad was even on tour with Guns n Roses as Axl Rose’s personal manager between 1990-1994; my mom hired a piano teacher since she is a classically trained pianist herself, and after about a year, I couldn’t do it anymore. The piano felt boring to learn, and the instrument just didn’t speak to me as a young kid.

It was in 6th grade that I would pick up music again. I played trumpet in the middle school band for three years and enjoyed my time on the instrument. Towards the end of 7th grade, though, I started to find trumpet succumbing to the same fate as how I felt on piano. It was stale for my taste and did not play the music I wanted to play, for it was around this time that I started getting into rock and metal music.

It was around 8th grade when my musical journey really came to fruition. Having been a fan of the Guitar Hero series for many years, my brothers and I started playing the game RockBand since we could all play together as a band. My older brother took the guitar, and my younger brother took the bass in the game, and not wanting to do vocals, I played the drums.

I had played the game a couple of times growing up, but it wasn’t till this period, actively playing this game for a couple of months, that I got to the expert level. My ignorant self at the time couldn’t help but question how hard real drums were if I could already play the game on expert. So, when Christmas came around, I asked for a drum set and got my first electric kit so my neighbors wouldn’t kill me.

From here, I started to self-teach myself all the grooves I had learned in the game. It’s nice because, unlike guitar and bass, where the game and the instrument don’t translate, the drum controller has rubber pads and a foot pedal reminiscent of what a drum set and practice pads are like. YouTube was my best friend in learning the different drums and cymbals, as well as watching people play sections of songs that were out of my skill range, and I would play every day for hours without ever feeling like I was practicing. It was pure fun.

After falling in love with the drums and craving to play more, I dropped out of playing trumpet in my first year of high school. While I could have just switched to the percussion section, I wasn’t feeling equipped for the band just yet; I wanted to learn and develop my playing before I returned.

Well, at the same time, I was an avid golfer. I had been playing for many years, traveling on weekends for tournaments and practicing every day as soon as I got out of school. Golf had been my first love for most of my life, but I started to find as the years went on drumming and golfing I was dreading practicing golf and getting excited about practicing drums after I had gotten home. Even when hitting balls on the range, I used to blast metal songs to try and learn the parts. My focus was not on golf anymore.

Before my junior year started, my old band teacher had seen one of my drum videos on Youtube and said that I should come back to not just the concert band but the jazz band as the old drummer had just graduated. I was eager to play with a group of musicians again and said yes, and it was in this class that I would develop my playing every day and learn jazz techniques (which would surprise some to hear that they are effective in metal music).

When it came to the end of my junior year of high school, I was at the top of my game in golf but was dreading every tournament. It was that spring that I would deliver the news to my family that I wanted to pursue music full-time and quit golf. Keep in mind that at this time, I was ranked in the top 100 junior golfers in the state, had offers from some Division II and III colleges to come and play golf at their school, and had sunk countless hours and dollars into the sport. It was late in my high school career to make a significant change.

The thing, though, was that I was miserable playing golf. I would dread waking up early, the long rounds, the stress, and the pressure to perform well in tournaments and be away from my drum set. It wore me down doing it for many years, and I knew in my heart that it just wasn’t for me. So, when I told my family that I wanted to do drums and music, they were confused.

Let me just clear the air and say that I have the most supportive parents in the world, but at first, they were concerned that I would give up all the work I had put in for most of my life. But after explaining my reasoning for not enjoying it anymore and starting to get decent at the drums, they were there to support me.

From here, we quickly scheduled me to attend some summer camps about percussion, and the music business, to catch me up to speed. It was a busy summer attending over five two-week camps to where I was barely home, but I felt like I was starting to live the dream. When school rolled around again, I set up a local show at The Canyon in Agoura Hills to play a bunch of classic 80’s rock hits to raise money for the non-profit ManyMansions. I got a bunch of my musician friends to play with me and had some special guests from bands such as Air Supply and The Babys to sit with us. I felt on top of the world that night, getting to play one of my first live shows in the rock genre and support a good cause doing it. And this was only just the beginning.

From this fateful show, I met a guitarist from the local area named Anthony Laurie, and after he had seen me play at the concert and saw some of my online cover videos, he proposed we start jamming and form a band. Ecstatic to meet another like-minded musician, I said yes, and we got to work. We found other local musicians and formed our first real band, DedTeddy.

One musician, in particular, I connected with off the bat was a bass player we auditioned named Tye Trujillo. He was in another band called OTTTO, but he and I instantly hit it off playing heavier riffs. After the DedTeddy rehearsal, he expressed that he and I jam separately with DedTeddy and play thrash. I agreed, and another day we would jam out some thrash tracks and write our first song together. It felt like magic; it was with him that I would form the band I am actively playing with today, called Thredge.

DedTeddy was short-lived, as after playing only one show and writing a couple of songs, the pandemic hit and halted all concerts, plus the added complication of both Anthony and I getting ready to go to college AND my family moving to Texas. DedTeddy still released a single and music video, and while the song is more of a classic rock sound, it was still so much fun to make. During the pandemic, Thredge still made music and kept me sane despite being in quarantine. Wanting to show people what I was doing, I wanted to make an Instagram account to start teasing stuff, but we still needed a name. So, I contemplated many band names for days until I finally landed on our name: Thredge.

Even though I attended college in Texas, Tye and I remained in contact and even went into the studio to record what we had written. It was purely instrumental at this time because neither of us could find a vocalist. I even had all the vocal parts written lyrically and melodically, but no one could perform them, so these tracks never saw the light of day. And during college, I would gig around with various bands as a fill-in drummer to keep playing.

After about a year in college, coming up to the summer, I got a phone call from Tye saying that they were in a critical situation, that their former drummer had just quit his other band, OTTTO, and that they needed someone to play drums at their upcoming shows. I agreed and was on a plane the next day to Los Angeles to rehearse with the band. Since the shows were coming up soon, I knew that just because Tye offered me the spot to play drums didn’t just guarantee me the position, so I wanted to show up more than prepared to kick some ass. To do this, I learned their entire first album and the new songs they had been writing in 48 hours, so I was ready to play the entire setlist at our first rehearsal together. I was listening on the plane and got right to practicing the songs as soon as I got my electric kit set up in the AirBnB they had for me.

After a couple of rehearsals, I still had no idea when and where the shows were. They then revealed that the shows we would be playing were Lollapalooza in Chicago and BottleRock in Napa. I almost fainted on the spot because I knew how huge these festivals were, and it would be by far the biggest show of my career.

Coming up to playing these festivals, was I nervous? Yes. Was I excited? Even more so. There were maybe a hundred people in the crowd as soon as we hit the stage because the festival had many stages to choose from and ours had no music playing yet. While playing the first song, I zoned out in the music, but when the song was over, I looked up to see thousands of people in the audience; it had filled up so fast. A massive adrenaline rush coursed through my veins as the crowd cheered us on, and it went time for the next song. After playing such an influential show, I felt unstoppable, knowing this was what I was destined to do. My friends and family came backstage to congratulate me, and I was on cloud nine, especially knowing I would do it again the next month at BottleRock.

When BottleRock came around, things felt a little different, however. While being on stage was so much fun, and the performance went great, I felt disconnected from my bandmates. I couldn’t tell you why, but it was just something I felt deep down. After the show was said and done, I still felt the same blissfulness as the first but felt the energy from my bandmates that weren’t sitting right with me. I returned home to school, and the band and I would chat less… and less.

One day roughly three weeks later, our lead singer checks in with us and calls a band meeting over the phone. “Finally, a new show,” I thought, or some other good news. After picking up the phone call, I was delivered information that was the lowest blow in the gut. I was out of the band. In OTTTO, wanting to explore other players and other options, we parted ways. This news crushed me, as I felt like everything I had going halted; my game plan to make it in the industry was gone.

It took only two days of sulking to say, “screw that; I’m not letting that stop me.” I called Tye, expressing that I would be pushing Thredge full-time now and asking if he was in or out. He wanted to focus on OTTTO and communicated that he wouldn’t have the time for another full-time band, so I took Thredge entirely under my wing and he continued with OTTTO. I do want to be clear that there is no bad blood between OTTTO and me. They had a different vision for the band, and while it sucked at the time, there was no beef between us.

I needed a new crew. A crew that would be on the same page of wanting to dominate the music world as I wanted to. I had a fire ignited inside of me that was not going to be extinguished now, so I called up Anthony again, asking if he’d want to be the guitarist of Thredge. He had also just had a situation with a band not working out, which was lucky for me because he would have the time for our new project. However, he expressed his concerns about doing a band with me, living in Texas and him in California. Still, I assured him that with the lower prices of flights due to the pandemic, I would travel out there every other week to rehearse and write. Knowing he was on the same path of stopping at nothing to make music a career, he agreed, and we would start the Thredge you see and hear today.

One of the biggest things I wanted for this band was to be more than four dudes playing music. Some of my favorite bands have a theme, a story, outfits, or something beyond the music for the audience to latch onto, so this is where I developed Thredge to have the theme, The New Plague. Because the band had formed during the pandemic and it was something we all related to, I thought the band could be a statement about how we’re not going to let the virus stop us; instead, we’ll be our own virus that infects every wandering listener. We designed stage outfits of hazmat suits and gas masks with our Thredge biohazard logo on the back and a variation of the suits with lab coats that we recently used for our album release show. This theme took a life of its own, and we still rock the lab coats and gas masks today.

For some time, our writing process was all long distance. I would send him some drums, he would send guitar, and we would add our parts to each other’s tracks and send files back and forth. Finally, one day, I composed an entire track of just drums titled “Pilgrim State” and sent the track his way. It took him maybe a day to get back with the guitar laid out, and I felt songwriting magic I had never felt before in my entire life. The arrangement was unlike anything we had composed back, the vibe was exactly what we were trying to capture with a mental asylum-sounding song, and it was this moment of magic that I knew I was going to be okay and that this would be the band that does big things.

“Well, we need a bassist and a lead singer,” I told Anthony, so we started the hunt. We quickly found a bassist/backup vocalist named Christian Leyva, who we immediately got along with and added to the band. He was someone who was not attending college purely for the sake of pursuing music full-time, so we know he had the drive. Since we had three of us already, had some songs written, only needed a singer, and wanted to get going, we went ahead and booked our first show at the Whisky a Go Go. How hard could it be to find a vocalist?

We would go on to audition many vocalists. Some were good, some were okay, and others were not. But, none of them captured the sound we wanted to create, nor had the drive the rest of us had. Feeling like we were at a dead end with singers, running out of time for the show coming up, and tired of paying for plane tickets only to play with vocalists that wouldn’t be joining the band, I started to worry about the future of the band. I knew a vocalist was the final piece, but it was beginning to feel like we would never find the one. At one rehearsal, Christian mentioned that he remembered meeting a guy he was in a music video named Nero, who said he was a vocalist. I immediately told him to hit him up.

Nero agreed to an audition and came in a couple of weeks later, and we immediately hit it off personality-wise. I’m thinking, “Okay, that’s step one done, and we’re all good.” Next, we started jamming, and this guy was like no other. It was as if the guy was performing in front of thousands of people, yet it was only a rehearsal room with the four of us, which remarkably stood out to me. And don’t even get me started on his vocals. His ability to control high-intensity screams while balancing beautiful and melodic choruses was a fantastic feat to hear, and I knew this was our guy. Not wanting to promise anything too quickly and knowing we still had a few others to audition, I told him he would hear from us shortly.

After a couple more auditions, we all sat looking at each other, clearly understanding whom we were leaning towards. There was only one final test to see if he was the guy. I sent Nero our track “Pilgrim State” with the lyrics and melodies I had written and asked if he could record a vocal demo for us, and he agreed and said he would have it in a day or two. The next day, the band and I were talking when I got a buzz from Nero with the vocal demo audio on my phone. We all gathered around my phone and listened. By the time the chorus hit, we were all blown away and knew this was our vocalist. Not only had he killed the vocal performance, but he added so many layers and harmonies that we didn’t even initially ask for, which proved to me that he was hard-working, wanting what all of us wanted.

We would then play our opening slot at the Whisky-a-Go-Go. In hindsight, it was beneficial that we booked this show as it was pure motivation to get a solid lineup and write songs to fill a setlist. Who knows if we would have been on top of our game without it? And the best part was that this show was very successful. So successful that the Whisky asked us to come back a month later, only this time as the headliner. We all agreed and did an even bigger show with more bells and whistles performance-wise than the last. Throughout this time, too, we had been writing and recording demos to gear up to record our debut album during the summer. A friend of mine named Jake Abramson, who we previously worked with in DedTeddy on our single, offered to mix and master our album. We recorded the entire album at his home studio, and the album was released on October 7th, 2022. No day have I felt more accomplished than releasing that record, for it reflects the years of blood, sweat, and tears that have gone into my music career.

While the journey had many roadblocks, I owe it to my younger self for having the courage to drop golf and pursue the world of music and to my wonderful family for their support all along the way. I’m only 21, but had it not been for that defining moment, I would have never played shows such as Lollapalooza, wouldn’t be writing songs, wouldn’t have started my band Thredge, and wouldn’t have met all the wonderful people I’ve met along the way. While Thredge is still young and looking to make its big mark in the industry, I’m still so grateful for where I am today and am more eager than ever to keep going. We are just getting started.

Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
Yes, there were many obstacles along the way. Some of them include dropping golf (a sport I had played for many years) to pursue music full-time in junior year of high school, my former band OTTTO kicking me out after some of the biggest shows of my career with them, not being able to find a lead Vocalist for my current band Thredge for so long, and other obstacles as seen in my life story essay.

Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know about your work?
I am the founder/drummer/backup vocalist of Thredge. I formed the band in 2020 but had an entire lineup change and rebranding of the band in 2021 after a former bandmate and I parted ways. Thredge’s slogan is Welcome to the New Plague, as we, as a band, are The New Plague and infect every listener that comes our way. We wear hazmat suits or lab coats with gas masks on stage, and all of our songs, while dealing with many struggles in life, all have a common denominator of things that plague us as humans. Our debut album, “The New Plague,” was released on October 7th, 2022, featuring eleven original songs ranging from beautiful acoustic arrangements to short and intense metal tracks.

I am most proud of Thredge’s debut album, as I even stepped out of my comfort zone to sing the verses on the song “Symptoms.” A slow and emotional track, it was a very vulnerable performance for me and my first time singing the lead vocals in a song. That one holds a very special place in my heart. I am also honored and proud to have played at notable festivals such as Lollapalooza in Chicago and BottleRock in California with the band OTTTO. I’m also pleased to say that I am a self-taught drummer, except for a few lessons here.

The crisis has affected us all in different ways. How has it affected you and any important lessons or epiphanies you can share with us?
I learned I don’t have to be asleep even if the world is asleep. I’ve always had a jacked-up sleep schedule as someone who’s more of a night owl, working on ideas and songs late into the night, and I now use it as a metaphor towards my time during Covid. I didn’t stop writing material; hell, I only practiced and played more music with a much more free schedule. I had the determination that when the pandemic was over, I would be a different drummer, a better musician, and ready to attack any stage that came my way. Plus, it helped inspire the current theme of my band Thredge.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.thredgeband.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thredgeband/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Thredge
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/thredgeband
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCrJ5ay8mgcJEgO16kElVvfQ
• Other: https://open.spotify.com/artist/7iJWnpDB9Rw6MHvRrPpYN2?si=nT8oCftrStCVRuyCS6n3QA 

Image Credits
The stage photo with the red and green lasers and the feature photo were taken by Mathias Fau. All the other photos were taken by Jad Sleiman Biohazard Logo made by Joe Potter.