Intro by Erin Christie
Body by Brendan Wright
Rutland, VT - Allston, MA transplant Brendan Wright is on a crash-course collision with greatness, a fact that is made ever-more transparent via their current endeavors under their alias, Tiberius.
Most recently, Friday January 15th saw the release of Tiberius' third full-length LP, a labor of love entitled Lull. The record — which follows a string of excellent singles — finds the 20-something-year-old multi-instrumentalist caught between adolescence and adulthood, grappling with the concept of the self, past demons, and learning to love. It's an introspective and ultimately vulnerable body of work that exhibits a great deal of self-awareness and growth.
Below, Tiberius wrote about Lull's long gestation period, as well as it's various points of reference, starting when the writing process began back when they were in college, through quarantine, and up until today. While you read, make sure to check out Lull, as well!
At its core, I wanted Lull to draw a stark contrast to my last project, A Depressing Optimism, which was written from a place of pure fear. At 20, I had anxieties and intrusive thoughts that I just didn't understand how to deal with, and I found myself painting this nightmarish abstraction of how I processed reality at my lowest times. Years later, that album feels like a drunken night of unfiltered ramblings from a twenty-year-old kid who needed therapy more than he needed a microphone. On the contrary, Lull was developed at a point where I began to understand that art about self-hatred doesn’t do anything but lead to more pain and agony.
While I started working on this project in the fall of my senior year of college, I didn’t finish until after I graduated, moved to Boston, started working for a year, and eventually, was forced to ruminate in a state of serious reflection during the initial stages of the quarantine this past spring. For me, the purpose of writing a Tiberius tune is to create a vehicle for working through my more intrusive trains of thought in a way that usually helps me quell my anxiety enough to sort out complex or overwhelming feelings. In 2020, I faced the self hatred that kept me from accepting and loving the people who cared about me most, and began to finally hold myself accountable for neglecting to seek help with that for so long. While I did a lot of personal work to engage in therapy and live in a more mindful way, I also began to compose a series of tracks that would help me turn my meandering period between college and adulthood from a time characterized solely by an aggressive sense of uncertainty, to one that understood and embraced love and care.
Towards the end of it all, these songs became my most intimate friends, watching me age and change, as I watched them do the same. When the overwhelming sense of existential dread began to kick in, I would listen to the drafts of these tracks as a reminder that I had an arc to complete for myself. By far, my favorite part of Lull is that each one of these tracks has different pieces of myself from the last few years in them, and not just in a figurative way. For me, writing, recording, and producing all happens at the same time. As someone who plays and arranges all the parts themselves, I’m able to use each step of the process to inform how the song is written. Going into the pandemic, every track on the project was at the very least started, but none of them were finished until this past August. For an album about contrasting growth, it feels only fit that there are vocal and guitar tracks from 2017 or 2018, recorded in my college room, contrasted with drum and bass tracks that were recorded in my Allston room only days before I sent the album in to be mastered.
I’m proud of this record like no other I have produced. Upon Lull’s release, I’m overjoyed to finally share the little world I made in a series of bedrooms, bathrooms, and backseats over these past few years with the people I have around me. I feel extremely blessed by the engagement and feedback I’ve gotten with Lull, and while I only set out to make a record that helped me process my growth, I’m happy to hear that so many individuals have connected with it. My only hope is that the next one won’t take quite so long to make.
For more insight into the process behind Lull, you can check out a conversation Tiberius had with Care Package (Noah Mendell) below.
Additionally, view a pre-recorded Tiberius live set, including the debut performances of a handful of songs off of Lull, below.
Make sure to keep up with Tiberius via their socials.
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