A conversation with Tyler Costolo from Ghost Fan Club.
Tyler Costolo from Ghost Fan Club on biking, TikTok, aquariums, and his new EP.
photo courtesy of Tyler Costolo.
As both Ghost Fan Club and Two Meters, musician Tyler Costolo has explored topics like depression and grief, always remaining brutally honest with his listeners.
This July, the self-titled Ghost Fan Club EP was released. I had the opportunity to chat with Tyler about the EP, his influences, and more.
Evgenia Anastasakos: What influenced the new EP?
Tyler Costolo: I'm a big Told Slant fan. And a lot of Attic Abasement. And any time someone gives me an opportunity to talk about music, I'll mention how much I love Mount Eerie. I'm super into the non-traditional song structure kind of stuff, and a lot of that comes from listening to Mount Eerie all the time. It's kind of Phil Elverum's thing. I started working on the EP in 2021, and that's when I first started my Duster, slowcore phase too, so there's a lot of that in there.
It was actually really funny, I feel like something like that song “Brave” in particular sounds kind of like I was aping off of Sign Crushes Motorist. But technically, I started working on that before they were. It’s like, “Yeah, that's the kind of thing I'm going for.” I love all of their projects.
EA: Where do you tend to draw creativity from when writing?
TC: Venting is a better word than complaining, but complaining about life, I guess. I bike a lot, and, when you’re doing that, you’re in your head, basically the whole time. If I have a little thought that'd be a nice little lyric, I'll pull out my phone and write it down. And then I'm like, “Okay, I have like five things that are related. I can then put it together.” It's just drawn from what's going on in my brain when there aren’t many distractions.
EA: In other interviews, you’ve talked about getting responses from listeners saying that they relate to your lyrics.
TC: Yeah, it's really sweet. Once every couple of months, I'll get a DM from somebody. It's usually the song “Speak to Me,” which is about the idea of forgetting a loved one's voice after they've died. Someone will send me a nice little message. And I’m always like, “This is very sweet. I'm sorry that you're going through that too. That sucks.”
EA: “Speak to Me” did really well on TikTok, right?
TC: Yeah, it did. There are not a lot of people using that as a sound, or whatever. I made a post in 2021. And it was like, “I wrote this song about forgetting my mom's voice. Here are the playlists that it's on.” And it was like, “skate vibes,” “hanging out with my friends,” and “chilling out.” And that kind of blew up. Since then, it's done pretty consistently well, based on that initial surge.
EA: What's it like being an artist with an online presence and having fans interact with your posts?
TC: I would say it's probably fewer people actively interacting with newer stuff, to be totally frank. It's hard to stick to it.
One thing I do like about using TikTok and stuff is that, at least for me, I get a lot more people interacting with those [videos] versus a tweet. It usually seems like Twitter is, at least for me, just 10 friends of mine liking my posts, whereas on TikTok, you just send it out into the world. It's a lot easier to interact with people in that way versus just shouting into the same void that everyone else is. You know, I've had people just ask me about tape recording. And you can say “Oh, this is how I use a tape recorder. And this is that, blah, blah, blah.” And then you can build off of that and have a whole separate video chain going about it.
Ghost Fan Club EP cover art, courtesy of Tyler Costolo.
EA: Could you tell me a bit about the process of making the EP?
TC: It was basically all recorded in bits and pieces. I wasn't stably living anywhere. I was doing stuff while I could. Just like, “Okay, I can record guitars today,” or, “Oh, I'm somewhere quiet. I can do vocals.” And then I had the bones of all the songs done, but I wanted to do the drumming.
I contacted Tom and I was like, “Hey, can you do drums?” That process took a while because he recorded everything and they're okay, just like this tape, you know, that was like a collaboration. And then, you know, between that and having Ross do the mixing, that took a while. So something that normally would have taken a couple of months ended up taking three years to do, just because of how drawn out it was. And that's the other thing too. When you're having people, you know, friends and stuff, do things, you're not going to put them on a super strict schedule. It's like, “Oh, yeah, if it takes you three months, that's fine.” So everything just took way longer.
EA: This was your first time with drums in an EP, right?
TC: Yeah, I’ve never had actual drums before. I wanted this to be the most professional-sounding stuff I had done. People who are good at mixing can make fake drums sound good. I am not good at mixing. I wanted to have the actual punchiness of real drums and stuff. And the sound of a real band. And they just sound better. I had seen Tom post online at some point, saying “Yeah, if you want me to drum on stuff, I'm available.” And I was like, “Oh, that's good.”
EA: Aside from Ghost Fan Club, you also have Two Meters which is very different. What’s it like going between these two very different registers?
TC: Two Meters started out basically trying to do what Ghost Fan Club is doing now. I went through a really heavy Deafheaven phase, and I was like, “That's what I want to be doing.” Honestly, this whole thing is basically a product of COVID, if anything, because I had all this time during COVID. So I started working on things like Two Meters and metal stuff. And then I was like, “I still want to be making more quiet, subdued stuff.” And that's when I started the second band.
Mostly it's the same subject matter. I think any of the songs could work for either one, and it just depends on how I was feeling that day. A lot of the Two Meters songs, I wrote right before lockdown. There's a lot of nihilism in that. I was working at a hotel in South Florida and, at that point, we knew COVID was a thing and it was dangerous, but I was still working at this hotel with tourists and stuff. And I felt very expendable for the world, just hanging out, having to work while people were coming down to Florida for vacation. I was like “We should not be doing this.” So that's where a lot of that stuff came from, which is that feeling of “I'm just a cog in a wheel more than anything.”
EA: You post a lot about your aquariums on Instagram. How did you get into that?
TC: I can talk about this all day. It’s just been a lifelong thing for me. I think I was four the first time I got an aquarium. I was a little, little fella. It was a 20-gallon aquarium from PetSmart. I think it was my birthday present. And when I was a kid, I wanted to be a marine biologist more than anything in the world. And then I took a biology class in college and I was like, “Okay, I'm not cut out for this. It's way more intense than I thought it was going to be.” But yeah, I love it.
This is my office, and one wall over is my room. We just moved. So I have this big rack set up with aquariums. It was actually a little bit of a disaster when we moved. Unfortunately, I lost most of the fish in the move. It's a bummer. But I set everything back up and I'm kind of letting things chill for a bit before getting back into it.
It's just peaceful. It's nice how you can create a little slice of nature, a real little ecosystem. I'm really into live plants, too, in the tanks and stuff. It's a combination of all these nice little peaceful things, and it's just nice to look at.
EA: Do you have any music recommendations for anyone who might be reading this?
TC: I've been listening to this band called Agriculture, and they're kind of like a black metal, shoegaze combination. And then I’ve been really, really into—this is kind of funny since it sounds like the kind of thing I would have been trying to imitate, but I just found them a couple of weeks ago—this band called Hello Shark. I think they're incredible. And that's like exactly the kind of stuff I would like to continue making. Those are my, those are my two big ones lately that I've been really listening to a ton.
EA: I do know Hello Shark, I think. I was really into Delicate.
TC: I found a singular copy of that album available on Discogs and bought it. I think the first song of theirs I listened to was off the album Break Arms. There's this song called “Seven Hundred” and it has that sort of repeating, kind of chorus-y refrain thing that Told Slant does a lot too. And I was just like, “Oh man, they're so good.”
photo courtesy of Tyler Costolo.
edited by Camille Cypher.
photos courtesy of Tyler Costolo.