WITF Music: Stillflow

Rituals, baby newts and coping with depression.

• Joe Ulrich
  BioRecent Stories

  

  Joe has been interested in audio and music since he was a kid. What started as a fascination with his parents’ vinyl records and cassette tapes turned into a love of both performing and recording. He grew up in Elizabethtown, Pa. and moved to Pittsburgh in 1999 where he majored in Photography at the University of Pittsburgh.
  
  In 2004, he attended the Conservatory of Recording Arts & Sciences in Tempe, AZ. He returned to Pittsburgh to work at a recording studio.
  
  In 2008, Joe arrived at WITF, where his skills have found a good home as an on-air host, audio engineer and producer of WITF Music. In 2016, Joe earned a National Edward R. Murrow award for Best Use of Sound.

Stillflow performs on July 30, 2024. (Jeremy Long - WITF)

Stillflow is a progressive indie rock band from Lancaster that formed during the pandemic in 2020. It began as a duo between singer/guitarist Thunder Smith and guitarist Alex Hart. The band was rounded out by Hart’s brother, Nate, on bass and Aaron Criswell on drums. 

Joe Ulrich: [Give me] a high level overview of how the band came to be.

Thunder Smith: I got really back into writing music during COVID because the crushing loneliness.

Then I was just like, I wanna write music with somebody, and you [Alex] were the first person that I hit up, and we’ve been doing it ever since.

Alex Hart: I had to bug out of Lancaster, go back to Delco. So we would write songs on FaceTime late into the evening. We would jam and just work through the latency to get the songs written.

Joe Ulrich: Were you able to play in sync with the latency?

Thunder Smith: It depended on the day.

On the song “Cup”

Thunder Smith: My family lives overseas most of the time. If you listen to the lyrics, they literally talk about missing my mom and stuff that we would talk about all the time. Just wanting to be able to provide for her, but also she’s so far away.

Aaron Criswell: I do think that song is interesting. The lyrical content is very sad, but then the music is uplifting and kind of upbeat. And it’s like, how am I supposed to be feeling? So I feel like a lot of our stuff is like that, like “Ritual” also.

Thunder Smith: I’ve had depression for as long as I’ve been alive. I’m way more comfortable writing about what I know and what I know is being sad.

Joe Ulrich: It almost seems like the music is the consoling part of the song. The lyrics are like, here’s the problem, and the music’s like yeah, but we’re moving along.

Nate Hart: I like that a lot. It’s a nice relationship between the music and vocals.

Alex Hart: I came up with a lot of instrumental music. So vocals to me are secondary to what the band is doing. And that’s why we write together so well, because I didn’t really have a frame of reference for vocal stuff at all. But having [Thunder] really secure in yours opens up a lot.

On the song “Ritual”

Alex Hart: Ritual started as a guitar riff. I like riffs that are loopable and that you don’t get tired of. And I feel like “Ritual” is ear wiggy. And that was not in my wheelhouse, because I come from a progressive background.

The circular nature of the riff is about the things we do in our lives to care for ourselves or just the things that get you through the day.

Thunder Smith: Lyrically it came from a point [of] deep depression. This is like the height of COVID. Everybody that I loved was across the ocean from me. I got laid off at work because nobody was working. And it was just like, how do I light lampposts for myself to not go absolutely fucking insane.

I started getting into vinyls back then. My boss gave me his old record player and that would be my thing. I’d go out and I’d buy a record, I’d come home I’d listen to it. I’d make coffee in the middle of the night, anything to break the routine and the monotony of being alone.

On the name of their EP, Eft

Joe Ulrich: I read that [the word “eft”] was one of the beginning stages of a newt. But when I first saw the name I thought it was like, “I f’d up” or something like that.

Nate Hart: We went with the frog thing. If you look at our album cover and some of our merch, we really liked the combination of frogs and mushrooms.

It’s called Eft because I didn’t want to call it tadpole essentially. They wanted an infantile amphibian, but tadpole didn’t have the same ring to it.

Thunder Smith: It also made sense for where we were as a band at that time. We were very adolescent. We had just started writing music together. We were little efts.

Joe Ulrich: What other methods do you have for dealing with depression?

Thunder Smith: If you have the ability to see a professional, I highly recommend it.

Alex Hart: It’s different every day. Affirmations. That’s a huge thing.

But that doesn’t work every day. Really thinking your thoughts and feeling them and not falling into that cycle of really negative thinking. For years that was something that I had no grasp on whatsoever. I had zero coping skills. And so over time, you figure out stuff that works. It’s a process.

Nate Hart: I always find it’s a balance of mindfulness and distraction. Be aware of your thoughts, but you don’t always have to give in to them. These thoughts pass.

Thunder Smith: The concept of grace for yourself is important. Like not to dwell on the fact that you’re having a bad day and see it as a personal failing. It’s okay, I’m human. This is the hand that I’ve been dealt, and just figure out how to be okay with that.

Aaron Criswell: We all want to be in control of our own lives but there are certain things like money or friends or popularity, whatever. Being able to let those things go or not just not stew on them so much.

A collection of interviews, photos, and music videos, featuring local musicians who have stopped by the WITF performance studio to share a little discussion and sound. Produced by WITF’s Joe Ulrich.

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