Vespera on "The Thoughts That Plague You": Reclaiming the Past, Building What Comes Next
The independent trio talks survival, sonic evolution, the five years that changed them, and giving their unfinished chapter the life it never had.
photo credit: Cody Travis
Formed in a gloomy Seattle basement in 2016 by four musicians who had never met before, Vespera quickly grew from an independent experiment into a band attracting attention from Billboard, Revolver, Kerrang!, Rock Sound, Alternative Press and beyond. Today, the lineup is Casval Wolfe (vocals), Jonathan Schwartz (drums) and Cairn Tse-Lalonde (guitars), and after nearly five years away from the public eye, Vespera is moving again. At the centre of the return is The Thoughts That Plague You, a 14-song record originally conceived as one continuous journey before circumstances split it across three EPs.
In this conversation, Vespera look back without rewriting their past: from the tours that vanished and the setbacks that eventually forced them to step away, to the gear and strange recording experiments behind the album, the lessons learned on the road with other artists, and the very different future they are now building for the band.
Chris Roditis, Musicngear: The Thoughts That Plague You was originally written and intended to be experienced as one 14-song album, but circumstances eventually turned it into three separate EPs. Now that you’ve reconstructed the original sequence, what does finally hearing the record as a complete journey reveal about it that wasn’t possible when the songs existed in separate pieces?
I think the biggest thing is that there was always a narrative there that became much harder to see once the record was separated. I was still a kid when I wrote a lot of this, and much of the record is me trying to understand things that had happened to me before I really had the language or distance to understand them.
There are songs about exploitation, addiction, nostalgia, self-sacrifice, anger, recovery, and eventually learning where your responsibility for other people ends. When you hear individual songs, you get pieces of that. In the original sequence, you can hear the emotional progression.
It also makes the musical extremes make more sense. Vespera can be very atmospheric and restrained and then suddenly become extremely heavy. Across three separate EPs, that can sound like the band changing direction. Across 14 songs, it feels more like tension being accumulated and released.
That was always the record. We aren’t pretending it’s a new album now. We just finally have the ability to say, “This is what we made. Listen to it in the order we intended.”
Musicngear: Vespera built considerable momentum independently before the pandemic derailed your touring plans, including tours with Monuments, Skyharbor and NateWantsToBattle, and then you faced a series of setbacks that went far beyond COVID. Looking back, what was the hardest thing you had to overcome as a band, and what did those experiences teach you that you would pass on to an independent artist facing their own seemingly endless run of obstacles?
The hardest part wasn’t one event. It was the accumulation. We spent years building Vespera ourselves and had finally reached the point where things were beginning to compound. We had press, industry attention, Spotify support, touring opportunities, and it felt like the work was beginning to connect.
Then tours started disappearing. COVID obviously changed everything, but even when touring started returning it didn’t magically become easy. We eventually got back on the road with NateWantsToBattle and then much of the touring party got COVID. Around that period there were rising fuel costs, our vehicle getting hit, and eventually our trailer being stolen. At a certain point you stop asking, “How do we overcome this one problem?” and start asking whether continuing under the same conditions is actually responsible.
That’s probably the biggest thing I would pass on to another independent artist: persistence doesn’t mean repeatedly destroying yourself to prove how badly you want something. There’s a romantic idea in music that if you sacrifice enough, eventually the universe rewards you. I don’t believe that anymore.
Sometimes the strongest decision you can make is to stop, survive, learn, build resources, and come back when you can actually give the thing a fair chance. Vespera going quiet wasn’t us deciding we didn’t care anymore. In a strange way, it may have been the decision that allowed Vespera to exist now.
Musicngear: During the five years when Vespera was largely out of the public eye, you weren’t actually standing still: the members were working on the road with artists including Demi Lovato, KT Tunstall, Matt Corby, Jutes, Phem and Scene Queen. How did working on the road with such different artists change the way you now approach Vespera, both creatively and professionally?
Completely. The funny thing about calling it a hiatus is that professionally it may have been the busiest period of our lives. We got to step outside of our own little ecosystem and see how completely different artists build shows, crews, audiences and careers.
I ended up working in a lot of different capacities on the road, so I wasn’t only watching the artist side of things. I was seeing how decisions made upstream affect everybody downstream. You learn very quickly that a great show is the result of hundreds of boring decisions being made correctly.
Creatively, it also reminded me that heaviness isn’t just distortion. You can learn something about dynamics from a pop artist. You can learn restraint from a singer-songwriter. You can learn something about communicating with an audience from an artist whose music sounds absolutely nothing like yours.
Professionally, Vespera is much less naïve now. The first version of this band was essentially: make something we believe in and figure everything else out through force of will. I still believe deeply in the first half of that sentence. I’m much more interested now in building the infrastructure around it so the second half doesn’t have to be true.
Musicngear: Music gear is a big part of what we do at Musicngear, so we have to ask: what gear, instruments, pedals, amps, plugins, production tools, or studio tricks were absolutely essential to creating The Thoughts That Plague You? And has anything in your current setup changed dramatically since the record was originally made?
The entire album started on my TE-407 seven-string in Drop Ab. I wrote everything on that guitar, and Cairn ended up using it for a lot of the record as well. We went through a ridiculous amount of experimentation trying to find the guitar sound. We were messing with Bogner tones, Marshall JCM 800s, ENGLs, different modeling approaches, all kinds of things, and somehow after all of that we ultimately landed on Metal Amp Room for the final album tone.
The bass was completely real too. I actually recorded the entire album using the Warwick bass that had been used on Periphery’s P2, which is still a pretty surreal sentence to say. Everything was written and recorded in Pro Tools.
Vocally, there were several setups depending on where we were working. The main vocals were recorded through this rare Gefell microphone that I unfortunately cannot remember the exact model of anymore. I just remember that it sounded incredible once we started hitting it with tape saturation. There were Pultec EQs and an 1176 involved, but so much of the rest of that chain is honestly a blur now. I did most of the harmonies and background vocals alone in the B studio, usually through an Aston Spirit into a Vintech 1073.
I was the sole writer and producer of the record, but several people helped translate what was in my head into the finished thing. Spencer Sotelo engineered my vocals on “Paradise” and “Obsidian Dreams.” Taylor Larson and Will Beasley recorded a lot of the topline work.
For the drums, I had written the original ideas out in this ancient program called TabIt, and Ernie Slenkovich took those ideas and really gave them life. One of the stranger things we did was put different microphones in rooms behind closed doors while recording drums. We weren’t necessarily trying to capture a beautiful conventional room sound. We wanted these strange pockets of ambience that we could tuck underneath the kit and make the drums feel physically heavier.
The biggest difference now is probably that I’m much less afraid of technology replacing the traditional role of an instrument. Back then, guitar was almost sacred to me. Now I’m completely comfortable putting the guitar down if an electronic element communicates the idea better. I use electronics much more freely, and weirdly enough, if I made this album today I would probably program the bass. I love playing bass, but I’ve started hearing sonic advantages in programming that I would have rejected outright when I was younger. I think I’ve become much less concerned with proving that something is “real” and much more concerned with whether it creates the feeling I’m chasing.
Musicngear: When revisiting older material after almost a decade, how do you decide what deserves to be changed and what should remain untouched as a snapshot of who you were at the time?
I’m increasingly resistant to correcting the past. There are absolutely things I would write differently now. My lyrics have become much more minimal. I trust implication more. I don’t feel the same need to explain every emotion to the listener. But I was a kid when I wrote a lot of this. I’m an adult now… kind of.
If I went back and rewrote those songs according to who I am today, they wouldn’t be honest anymore. That younger version of me was trying to understand things in real time. Sometimes he said too much. Sometimes he was dramatic. Sometimes he was absolutely certain about something I would describe very differently now. That’s part of the artifact.
There are practical things I’ll change. If something works better live in a slightly different arrangement, I’m not precious about it. Technology changes. Production changes. The way I use my voice has changed. But I don’t want to George Lucas the emotional history of Vespera. If something makes me slightly uncomfortable because I can hear how young I was, that’s probably a reason to leave it alone.
Musicngear: The Thoughts That Plague You is now getting the chance the complete record never really had. Does returning to this record feel more like finishing something unfinished, reclaiming something that was interrupted, or letting go of something from Vespera’s first chapter?
Reclaiming is probably the closest word. It doesn’t feel like finishing it because the record was finished. We knew what it was. What was unfinished was its opportunity to exist.
For years, I think I associated these songs with everything that happened around them. Tours that disappeared. Plans that collapsed. The circumstances that eventually made the band disappear.
Coming back to them now has been strange because I’m able to hear the songs without immediately hearing the failure of the circumstances around them. I’m proud of them again. And I’m also not asking them to carry Vespera forever.
Giving this record its proper chance is actually what makes me excited to move beyond it. I don’t want to spend the next ten years trying to recreate something I wrote when I was a kid. I want to respect it enough to put it back into the world properly, then show people what Vespera sounds like now.
Musicngear: Now that Vespera is moving again independently, what would make this chapter feel successful to you? Is it reaching a certain audience, getting the songs in front of the right people, playing particular shows or festivals, releasing new music, or something else entirely?
Momentum. I don’t think there’s one number anymore where I would suddenly say, “Okay, this worked.”
Right now I want people to discover the band and genuinely care. That’s why we’ve been spending so much time reaching out directly to radio shows, writers, reaction channels, curators and people who still care enough about music to champion something simply because they heard it and liked it. We’re preparing Vespera to tour properly again. There is new music coming. There are much bigger things I want to build. But I don’t want to manufacture the appearance of momentum before the underlying community exists.
If this chapter results in enough people caring that every next step becomes a little more possible // the next song reaches farther, the next show has more people in the room, the next tour is healthier than the last one // that’s success to me. I want something sustainable.
Musicngear: If you could build a completely unrealistic Vespera tour from scratch, any artists from any era, living or dead, and any venues or festivals anywhere in the world, who would be on the bill and where would you want to play?
This question is almost impossible for me because so many of the bands that made me want to do this in the first place would qualify.
Deftones, Radiohead and Tool are probably the obvious childhood dream answers. Then there are bands like Karnivool, The Contortionist, Meshuggah, Gojira, Chevelle, Thornhill, Northlane, Sleep Token, Loathe and Polyenso that I have a genuine appreciation for beyond simply thinking our audiences could overlap. That’s probably what the dream bill would need for me. I don’t necessarily want four bands that sound exactly alike. I think it’s much more interesting when every artist has a very distinct identity, but there’s some emotional or artistic thread connecting the entire night.
If I had to build something completely unrealistic, I’d honestly still put Vespera first. We’re a small band right now. Opening a tour like that and having the opportunity to earn an audience in front of artists who helped shape the way I understand music sounds far more exciting to me than imagining we’ve suddenly skipped every step and become the headliner. Maybe you start with Vespera, move into something like Loathe, Thornhill or The Contortionist, and then somehow enter the completely absurd part of the fantasy where Karnivool, Deftones, Tool, Radiohead, Meshuggah, or Gojira are above us.
At that point we’re obviously breaking every known rule of touring economics, so we might as well keep going. As far as where, I want music to take me everywhere. Red Rocks, The Gorge, Budokan, Wembley, festivals across Europe and Japan // all of it. But selling out Madison Square Garden is one of those ideas that almost feels too enormous to say out loud. If Vespera ever walked onto that stage and the room was full because people genuinely cared about something we made, I don’t know that I would need a more complicated definition of a dream coming true.
Musicngear: You built Vespera independently from Seattle and Los Angeles, gained some serious early press, had tours announced and then lost, disappeared for years, and are now returning independently again. What does being fully independent mean to Vespera this time around? Has your definition of independence changed after everything you’ve experienced?
Definitely. When I was younger, independence meant proving we could do everything ourselves. Now I think that’s actually a dangerous definition. Vespera is fully independent in the sense that we own the music and control the project. Nobody outside of the band gets to decide what Vespera is.
But independence shouldn’t mean isolation. I want managers, agents, publicists, labels or label-services partners, promoters, crew, visual artists, producers and other people around this band who are exceptional at what they do. I just want those relationships to make the project stronger rather than gradually taking the project away from us.
Doing everything yourself because nobody will help you is not necessarily freedom. Sometimes it’s just doing twelve jobs badly. The goal now is to remain independent in thought and ownership while becoming much more collaborative in execution.
If we can preserve the thing that makes Vespera ours while giving talented people the resources and trust to help us take it farther than we could alone, that’s a much healthier version of independence to me.
Musicngear: There’s something fascinating about the idea that a younger listener can discover The Thoughts That Plague You today without experiencing it as nostalgia. Does that change how you think about the record? And is there anything you hear in those songs now that you think a listener discovering Vespera for the first time might understand differently than you did when you made them?
That’s probably the most exciting part of doing this. To me these songs are inseparable from very specific rooms, people, years and versions of myself. I know what happened before a lyric was written. I know what happened the week after it was recorded.
A person hearing it today has none of that baggage. They don’t know which song was supposed to become something bigger. They don’t know which tour disappeared. They don’t know which release didn’t get the push we imagined. They just hear a song. That’s incredibly freeing.
It also reminds me that music doesn’t experience time the way the people making it do. Something I wrote because I was trying to survive a very specific chapter of my life can become attached to a completely different experience in the life of somebody discovering it now. And they may understand parts of it better than I did.
When I wrote some of these songs, I thought I was writing conclusions. Listening now, I can hear someone who was actually still in the middle of the question. Maybe that’s why the record still feels alive to me. I’m not the kid who made it anymore. But I understand him a lot better now.
I really appreciate the space to talk about all of this.
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About Chris Roditis
Chris Roditis has been an active musician since 1995 in various bands and projects across a variety of genres ranging from acoustic, electronic to nu metal, british rock and trip hop. He has extensive experience as a mixing engineer and producer and has built recording studios for most of the projects he has been involved with. His passion for music steered his entrepreneurial skills into founding MusicNGear in 2012.
Contact Chris Roditis at chrisroditis@musicngear.com
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