Q&A — Shady Oaks Argues With the Past on New Single “Broken Mirrors”

Ty Gallaway: We have only been together for 4 years but our band has evolved so much since the beginning.

Right now, our lineup consists of the OG drummer, Jonah Samp; our crazy but loveable secondary/slide guitarist, Isaac Vance; our latest and hopefully permanent bassist who is also the owner of Mean World Records, Hunter Bates; and our most recent addition, the wonderful and charismatic violin player, Sarah Hubbard. Last but not least, I am Ty Gallaway — the one who is yelling, sometimes singing and throwing my body and guitar around the stage, trying to get a rise out of the crowd for my own self-validation as a musician.

I met Jonah back in 2019 when I was starting to get my demos together in order to form my project. He has a weird talent for living in my brain when we play music together and instantly knew what I was trying to accomplish. Originally, we were way quieter and were doing an indie soft rock kinda vibe with a few more bluesy and twangy folk tunes. Then I bought a pedal from Gamechanger Audio and Third Man Records called “The Plasma Coil” and we went from Modest Mouse to The Dead Weather almost immediately. I turned up the amp and Jonah started playing the drums as if they had wronged him and the real Shady Oaks was born.

After a few lineup changes, we picked up Isaac and that was when things really started to change. He is an absolute monster on guitar and he has a very large personality in his playing and in life. I try to tell him what I am thinking for a part, using words and noises that wouldn’t make sense to any normal professional musician, human, or computer. He will kinda look at me funny as if the equations are moving through his head and the idea comes out perfectly almost every time. It helps that we spend a lot of time together in our home studio, on the golf course or bopping around Boulder in an attempt to taste every margarita on Pearl Street.

Hunter came to me in a dream. I saw him wandering around in the dark woods with a bass and a pedal board larger than mine looking for a band after his previous band, Magnolia Grove, split up. Not really. I saw on their Instagram that the band was breaking up and I slid into his DMs. We held auditions even though he was the guy I intended to hire and no one showed up but Hunter. After he got comfortable in the group, he also took over management and took our band to the next level. I am first to admit that I hate the business stuff but also have a lot of opinions which makes me the worst manager. We are much better off with Hunter leading that front and I can stick to writing.

That brings us to Sarah Hubbard. I was at a show watching my 2nd favorite local act, Mr. Knobs — Dayshaper will always be #1 —  and was expecting to see the usual Vidushi and Steve Lamos extravaganza when a third character began setting up a theremin and a little purple, alien-looking electric violin. Then the set broke out with the most beautiful melodic noises my ears have ever heard. A little fairy began dancing around the stage, in perfect synchronization with some of the most sophisticated pop/folk music I’ve come across. She absolutely stole the show with her presence and that little purple violin. At that time, I started pondering the notion of asking her to jam with Shady but was almost positive that she gets asked to be in someone’s band at least once a show.

I eventually reached out to her when it came time to get back in the studio because I knew I wanted to “southern-ify” our sound with some fiddle from Hubbard as well as some organ courtesy of local artist, Ian Arras. We all had a great time recording and then played a show together a few weeks later. Following our set, people came up to me afterward saying she had to be in Shady Oaks. Thus, you have the new and improved post-modern Shady Oaks.

303: There’s always been a touch of twang to your music but it feels like you really leaned into the rowdy southern rock on this EP. Was this a conscious decision or just a natural evolution for you?

TG: I think of playing guitar as various styles of martial arts. Like most guitarists, I had a “master” and I was the apprentice (if you are the Star Wars type). My guitar master, Dennis Fallon, raised me in the art of leaving the pick aside and playing electric leads with the fingers. The style’s almost like classical guitar, but this style was called “chicken pickin’.” It allows you to be way more expressive by leaving the pick and allowing your guitar to be more of an extension of yourself instead of just using a piece of plastic to rip out as many notes as possible. Doing this creates those old-timey blues/folk-sounding guitar tones that drive my creativity.

Being from Texas, I grew up around southern rock and country music. My first CD was Lynyrd Skynrd’s greatest hits. Our previous release, MAD, has the same undertones as our upcoming EP but it revolved around anger and depression. The music became a little cleaner and lyric-focused once we got out of that mindset. Sometimes, you kind of have to ditch the fuzz pedal in order to get the emotional point across.

I have to admit that I bought a cowboy hat, boots, and a western-style shirt for a gig that we played in the mountains. We discovered that we really thrived in a more southern-driven sound, and I really liked wearing boots. They just make you feel like drinking whiskey, smoking a dart and singing about love and all the emotions that go with it.

Since MAD, I really got into bands like TK and The Holy Nothings, the Wood Brothers, and Chris Stapleton. I had a vision of gospel music that was still true to Shady Oaks with huge organs and violins. I wanted to make music you can still get down to at times but can hit really hard on your emotions when slowing it down. I want to get away from the anger and hate of MAD and delve into the drunken serenity of sophisticated bar rock. I just don’t feel that way anymore so naturally, we are evolving.

TG: For one, we are taking ourselves seriously. Not only that, but we’re starting to put a foot down on some of the unfortunate downsides of the local scene. We are trying to get out of that “big news coming soon” local band mindset that relies on a handful of people to come out to your show or stream your song. But we also don’t want to spam Tik Tok for the sake of “well everyone else is doing it so we should put out some shitty content.” We are still a bit of a way from where we need to be but we are working so well as a team these days. There is little to no band drama and we all treat one another with respect and accept each other for who we are as individuals. I used to stay up at night worrying about inter-band relationships and wondering when that one tremor would cause everything to fail. Now, I sleep at peace knowing that everything is going to work out.

A lot of this comes from individual growth, especially my having to face my own ego. I have pretty much let go of everything but the music. I love that I can focus on the big ideas and general direction of the band while feeling comfortable that everything else is getting taken care of behind the scenes by a group of extremely talented and passionate teammates.

We’re sounding the best we ever have. I think we are onto something with everything we will be releasing in the next few months and I can’t wait to see how everything turns out.

TG: This is a fun question as I used to think differently about this but now I have a much better understanding of musical evolution. I think it’s impossible to stay stagnant in your sound, especially as you move through the hardships and ever-changing cycles of emotion and experience.

I also really like ability as a point of evolution. I am not getting better at guitar necessarily but I did get some vocal lessons for a few months. Being able to “sing out” a bit more has changed the way I think about writing. I want to be able to showcase my voice or at least let it drive the emotion alongside my guitar.

Time has always been a central theme in all of our music. Time is everything. One day you can be working your normal Joe-Schmo 9-5 gig, going home, watching TV, gaming, going to happy hour, living a routine day. The next day, you get a text that you need to go home because you lost a loved one. You jump from contentment to despair in a matter of 8 hours. Time never stands still but is always constant, always waking you up when your eyes start to glaze over.

I could write a love song on a warm summer day after day “marg-ing” on Pearl Street with my partner. The next day something could happen and the next song will be about grief. In both instances, I would be drawing on the current style of music I would have been writing at the time. That takes us to your point of familiarity. In the time of MAD, I would be gearing my writing to that current familiar style. I’d probably write a heavy fuzz blues tune with thundering drums discussing my hatred of loss and grief. Today, a year after MAD, I would pick up my acoustic guitar and use more power behind my voice for emotion, not relying on energy from instruments alone.

Naturally, evolution and change are inevitable. To my first point, if you listen to the first album and the fifth, you will find a completely different band. Hopefully, the roots will remain but they’ll still be different. Musicians are humans too, so obviously everyone is changing with the times. Life imitates art?

TG: Songwriting in Shady Oaks has stayed pretty constant throughout its life. I thrive on being alone during the writing process and I write best when I should be doing anything else. It is rarely one of those experiences where I am on my couch with a guitar strumming and writing music/lyrics. Most of it is engineering-based. I usually mic up my amp and have a podcast boom stand with a Warm Audio U87 plugged into my computer. I pull up Logic Pro and create a drummer track and two audio tracks named guitar and vocals, respectively. The Logic Drummer program is pretty much an AI computer drummer that can be altered based on a number of parameters and styles of drumming. They also have different names as if they are people that match different styles of playing. It’s one of the most genius creations to this date in my opinion.

Once everything is set up, I usually start noodling on the guitar in the key of G as that is the first place my hands go on the fretboard for some reason. I like to think that is the best key for my voice, but the truth is that I learned way too many classic rock songs as a kid where the first chord is a G. Once I come up with a riff that sounds interesting, I record it to a metronome and start matching up the drum beat to the riff. Once that is grooving, I put it on a loop and start making melodic mouth noises that will resemble the melody of the voice. I’ll then loop the musical phrases that are recorded and start writing lyrics.

I tend to try and think about a story or recent experience that I want to write about. For me, it is always music first and lyrics second. The song just progresses after that and I will get deeper into the producer/engineering mindset during the process. Thus, the demo is born. I really put my whole heart into this process because I want the rest of the band to get the whole idea without too much instruction.

Sometimes the song works and sometimes it doesn’t and if we really like it, we make it our own. We work the best when I bring a track that I want to learn for the gig that week. I like to think we work better under pressure and I think whiskey drinkin’ is our most common theme.

TG: Most of our music comes from my personal life. MAD was about the times leading up to my intense and slightly humorous 3-month marriage and divorce. It speaks on themes of confusion, subconscious truth, numbness and anger. You might guess what “Broken Mirrors” is about. I like to think of that song as the climax of it all. I also like writing about the good times and happenings of a hilarious night on the town. I’m just getting into writing more love songs but I think I’m better at writing about hard times.

As far as musical inspirations, I really dig all of Jack White’s projects, as that is what Shady Oaks was built on. But lately, I am diving into warmer sounds of folk and folky/blues-oriented styles of rock music. Shakey Graves has always been a big one, especially since we have similar approaches to guitar. Musical inspirations drive the general tone of the instruments while personal experience inspires the music itself.

303: I’d really like to talk about the single. At first glance, it comes off almost as a standard duet but when you look closer, there are some real unique aspects of it. Most duets are conversations, two lovers or friends or whatever working towards the same relative goal. “Broken Mirrors” on the other hand feels much more like an argument, two opposing sides trying in vain to get the other party to listen to them. How did the song and its structure come about? 

TG: Woof, this song is tough to sing sometimes. I wrote the main guitar lick when I was 12, and could never put words to it. This track is one of three songs in our catalog that Jonah wrote the lyrics to. Jonah has always been a close friend of mine and we spent a lot of time together when I was with my ex. I am not sure that he saw a lot of the turmoil but I think he could always tell we were not happy. Especially me. After the fallout settled, he told me he had an idea for that guitar lick.

**Side note: At this time, Loren Dorland was a member of the band as well as the engineer for MAD and our upcoming EP. She would sing backing vocals and then lead vocals during choruses that she wrote. We parted ways after MAD was released but she is the one singing on Broken Mirrors.  

The duet aspect came a little later but he knew it would be sort of an argumentative piece, telling the story of a relationship that was crumbling. When we decided to make it a duet with Loren, that is when the song really came to life. The first time we played it live, I was on the brink of tears as it hit a little too close to home. The yelling, the fire, the back and forth was just how it was at the end of the relationship. The perfect piece for two people who deep down knew they were stuck in a bad place. I like that it isn’t anyone’s fault because it wasn’t. It was the fault of both of them/us. When I sing it alone now, it is a little more one-sided which is an interesting note. Not sure I need to elaborate on that. The song was written with Loren’s parts so we wanted to keep it that way for the recording even if she isn’t in Shady Oaks anymore.

TG: We have plans for a ton of music in the future. We are tracking with Taylor Hahn in December, and doing some classic Shady-style, aggressive, guitar-heavy tunes that are leftover from the before-times. And maybe some softer acoustic tracks to come.

Isaac and I built a studio in his basement where we are going to experiment with the idea of doing all of the future recordings DIY. We also started a little production company called Shady Audio where we will be recording and producing any bands that want to work with us as well as offering live sound services for small to medium gigs. Hunter started his record label Mean World Records. He will be fighting for a better life for all of the local bands as well as assisting with distribution, management, and booking services.

Last but not least, we are booking our first tour for the winter where we will be traveling from Texas to Nashville.