Let’s Live a Life Better Than This by A. Swayze & the Ghosts is an album born from chaos but refined with remarkable clarity, embodying a sonic rebirth that fuses grit, groove, and growth. In our conversation with the band, they share insights into the journey behind their latest release. With dynamic and vibrant rhythms from Zac and Ben, and Andrew’s raw and unfiltered delivery anchoring the album’s themes, they create a powerful blend that urges one to reflect and, as the album title suggests, live a life better than the one before.
ATN: From self-destruction to liberation, how does the new album showcase this shift in mentality?
ANDREW: I think you can hear it within the sounds themselves, and the general feeling of a lot of the songs—not all of them, but quite a number of the songs are kind of uplifting, coming from a positive energy rather than our previous material, which is often, I guess, filled with frustration and angst, and that really came out in those recordings. So that’s one aspect. The other thing is tied in with the lyrics. I mean, the lyrics are both kind of melancholy at points and positive at points.
ZAC: Just being different people at the same time. Like Andrew said, a lot of everything came from a pretty gnarly, angsty place originally, but all of us have kind of settled a bit and matured out a bit. We’ve really thought about what self-destruction is and how being destructive doesn’t do much for you in the long run. I think everyone goes through it, but to then be able to represent it in an artistic way while still keeping the feeling of the band relatively similar, you can see a progression, you hear a progression, and you hear a maturity.
ANDREW: Wisdom.
ZAC: Yeah, a lot of self-reflection. I think that’s been one of the big things between the three of us: constantly having conversations on where we moved from and where we’re moving to, personally and professionally, as friends and as individuals. It permeates through everything that we do, whether it be band-related or not.
BEN: It’s reflection instead of projection.
ATN: What have been your favourite or at least favourite liberating moments?
ANDREW: I would say our least favourite was that through this process of reflection and growth, we had to really look at ourselves and decide to change. Some of us did. Unfortunately, our guitarist, who is a very good friend of ours, grew in a different direction. That was really challenging, and that he no longer plays in the band. That was like the hardest thing by a long shot.
ZAC: I think probably one of the most liberating things, which sounds counterintuitive, but coming into this record and doing it entirely DIY was so crazy for us. Previously, and especially pre-pandemic, we had a big team behind us. There was a group of people that were really pushing us along, and then, just out of the nature of a lot of different factors, that stopped. It went back to being just how we started. We were like, ‘oh, whoa, we got the reins’. That’s been challenging but really liberating in terms of finding our feet professionally again. We come from a DIY scene in Tassie. That’s where we started, but to be back into that but to have a bit of weight behind us because we’ve already gone through it is sick. I’m very sentimental about those kinds of things, so, yeah, it’s a great place to be back in for sure.
BEN: I think in recording it ourselves, like around the first album, we were this up-and-coming punk band, and we were like, ‘we’re gonna to be punk and we’re gonna be angry, and this is how we have to write songs’. But then, doing this being it’s just us, we realised we can do what we want.
ANDREW: It’s like our whole team fell apart when the pandemic hit. And with that came this liberation in our art, and we were like, ‘wow, we are no longer bound to follow a certain path, and it doesn’t matter anymore’. So that influenced our record hugely. We had no limitations, and that’s why throughout the record you hear so many different bits of instrumentation and feelings and things that maybe otherwise wouldn’t go together, but we just allowed them to happen.
ATN: It does fit. When you’re listening to Let’s Live a Life Better Than This, it all fits together. There’s no confusion, just cohesion.
ANDREW: Thank you. We just sort of followed our impulses as we listened back to songs. We were like, ‘well, crazy idea but I think that’s gonna work’.
BEN: There’s a lot of bands that write in solitude. Where it’s like, this is Andrew’s song. He writes it, and then we just play it, and then Zac has a song; we play it, and I think that’s where you get an album that’s all over the place. Whereas with us, there are definitely songs that Andrew has written or I’ve written or whatever, but then we arrange them as a band. There’s different stuff going, but it’s passed through a few filters.
ZAC: It’s not synesthesia, but we used colour and thought about what mood that set in the ten tracks. And I think that created, ‘a what is this missing’, is it the purple part or is it the blue part or something like that. I think that quite helps create some cohesion at a very basic level that meant we could explore around that, but still it has an intrinsic similarity in there as well.
EDITOR’S NOTE: the audio from our interview cut out at this point of the conversation and returns at the last question of our 3 Questions We Always Ask.
ATN: Artist / band that you would like to tour with and why?
BEN: We’re very open to touring with a lot of people. I feel like maybe we would’ve been a lot more close-minded years ago.
ANDREW: Bruno Mars.
Band erupts into laughter.
ANDREW: It would be so weird touring with fucking Bruno Mars.
Read our review of Let’s Live a Life Better Than This.
Album is out now and available on streaming services.
Photo by Lousy! Creative Agency
