Sleeping At Last // An Interview with Ryan O'Neal

A few weeks ago I was able to catch my friend Ryan O’Neil of Sleeping At Last and ask him about beauty, his craft and the intersection of the artist and the church. Not only is Ryan a superb songwriter and performer, but he's one of the nicest guys you'll ever meet: sincere, fun and unveneered. 

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Ryan's Yearbook project earned him very little sleep as well as a song placement ("Turning Page") in the third Twilight film. If you haven't checked out his Yearbook project, do so immediately! In the meantime, enjoy this little interview and share with your friends.

Tim: Ryan, thanks for sharing your time and thoughts. Let's jump right in. How do you define beauty?

Ryan: Beauty is hope. The overwhelming feeling of awe. The cause of goosebumps. Light. A combination of things that resonate deeply somewhere within our souls. Beauty is the remnants of God.

Tim: How does beauty factor into your artistic rubric? That is to say, is beauty part of or the lone indicator that your art is "good"?

Ryan: I've always been inspired by very visual and emotional music, so beauty became the goal and the mile marker, right when I started writing songs. When I was really young and falling in love with music for the first time, I would notice that on many of my favorite albums, there would be one or two songs that would be so beautiful that they would give me goosebumps. I loved that and it stuck with me as a goal as I began to write my own songs—I wanted to write only songs that delivered goosebumps.

So even now, I still use the goosebump test ... if a song I'm writing gives me goosebumps at one time or another, that's how I know I'm on the right track. If it doesn't, I toss it away.

"Turning Page" can NOW be purchased on iTunes as a single!! (+ the instrumental version!!) - http://bit.ly/turningpage Featured on FOX's SO YOU THINK YOU CAN DANCE, & The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 1 Sleeping At Last performs "Turning Page" live at Electrical Audio Studios in Chicago, IL.

Tim: How do you reconcile the tension of commercial viability (making a living at what you do) and your own artistic integrity? Or is there even a tension?

Ryan: I'm really fortunate in that the opportunities to make my music more commercially viable have come without the requirement of compromising my music in any way.

Maybe that's a result of me being very, very stubborn in my music from an early age. Not sure, but I've never felt the persuasion to write anything but the music I want to write.

Tim: What obstacles do you encounter during your creative process?

My self-consiousness gets in the way pretty often, and trips up my inspiration from time to time. I also psych myself out pretty good sometimes. For example, if I'm about to begin writing a song, a voice in the back of my mind will whisper something to the effect, "Do you even know how to write a song anymore?" or "What if this song isn't any good?"

Thanks to being stubborn, I'm mostly able to jump those hurdles over time, but without fail, I always derail a little when it happens.

Tim: Briefly describe your "Yearbook" project. Why did you choose to do that? What can you say about focusing too hard on a work you're involved in? Is it possible to be too critical with a song? What makes a song fail in your opinion?

Ryan: "Yearbook" was the concept which challenged my (at the time) very slow song-writing schedule. Rather than writing a few songs a year and releasing one full-length record every few years, I decided to commit to the Yearbook project, which consisted of writing, recording, and releasing three songs every month for one year, thirty-six new songs in total.

I knew that it would be a very difficult year, but I also knew that even if it went terribly wrong I'd come out a better songwriter for the experience of the project. Thankfully, I was able to complete the project and I feel very proud of it. In fact, I learned that there's something really special about diving in headfirst and not having too much time to over-analyze everything.

It meant the songs were most true to their source of inspiration, which perhaps made the songs even more genuine.

So that was a really special surprise. The only criteria I had for each of the songs was that I had to be really proud of it. That small rule really held the whole thing together.

As for the downsides of such a life-consuming project, it required me to lose a bit of balance in the other areas of my life: family, friendships, health (exercise, nutrition, etc.). Being so consumed in any "job" will make those other aspects of life balance more challenging, so the project made it difficult to find that balance.

As for the end of the question, "What makes a song fail?" I'd say not being truly proud of the song, knowing it is not in line with my own best quality in my writing. And there were a few songs that I tossed out because of that feeling. Not being proud of a song, for me, is often directly related to something about the song not being genuine, something forced or an approach I caught myself applying from an outside intention rather than from following my intuition.

So, every once in awhile, I'll have to be honest with myself and trash a song that required a lot of work but just didn't end up being true.

Tim: We are called to be "makers" according to the so-called "creation mandate." What is the relationship between your art and your calling? How do you see yourself fulfilling your calling through your art?

Ryan: I believe that God gives us passion and abilities for very specific purposes. I am beyond thankful that I found music so many years ago and that I've been blessed enough to get to call it a "living" ever since. It's literally my dream job and what I believe I was put on the earth to do.

The struggle that comes with that is to do it well, to love people well both inside and outside of music, and to live a life that is balanced and constantly able to calibrated differently, if necessary.

Tim: How is truth related to beauty, in your opinion?

Ryan: The beauty of beauty is that it comes in all shapes and sizes. But I feel like beauty is a direct result of truth. Whether that's a personal truth, or a divine truth, beauty is absolutely intertwined with truth.

Tim: What can the church do better with its artists? How do you see churches working to foster deeper interest in the arts? Or do you?

Ryan: Due to the fact that artists are, more often than not, extremely sensitive people, love and nurture from people closest to them results in massive and vital encouragement. To push forward in the arts is a vulnerable and sometimes foolish-feeling pursuit of which to dedicate one’s life.

So, having a community of people rooting for you in a profession, which is so lacking in guarantees literally means the world. It makes artists brave, which in turn encourages bravery in their art.

If nothing else, that is "church" at its best: a community, which nurtures and encourages others to live bravely.

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Check out Sleeping At Last here!

This interview was used by permission from the Catalyst Conference. You can read this interview, and others, in the recent edition of the Catalyst Groupzine.

*Cover photo by Jeremy Cowart

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More Interviews You'll Love

Young Man Follow Prt.3 // An Interview with Eric Owyoung

For the past two weeks I've shared installments of a conversation I had with Eric Owyoung of Future of Forestry. Today, I share the last installment where Eric shares his thoughts on the church as venue and personal calling. 

Eric’s band Future of Forestry has made a name for itself since 2006, with it’s nine studio recordings (original and collections) and Christmas DVD, Solstice. Eric has garnered a reputation for creating awe-inspiring music with a live concert experience that is beautiful and almost otherworldly.

If you haven't picked up Young Man Follow, Future of Foresry's latest of recorded offering ... shame on you. Go here and download immediately. 

Thanks for stopping by the site and enjoy the final conversation with Eric.

Studio musicians shown in order of appearance: Aaron Tucker, Logan Snell, Matt Slaven (engineer), Marta Blalock, Erdis Maxhelaku, Josh Jeffers, and TJ Hill Camera: Arthur To and the rest of us

Tim: Tell me about how the church can be more involved and get behind artists and help them along?

Eric: Worship leaders and pastors who are the lead people for the arts in the church are my key supporters when I’m on the road touring. I have the choice every place, every city I go whether I’m going to play a venue that is secular with a secular promoter or a church. A lot of bands have a hard time playing churches, which is understandable because they want a neutral—kind of common ground—venue so that a non-Christian or a Christian or a person of any religion could still go to their concert and they could still influence those people.

But I think the church is an amazing partner for artists when they understand the vision of the artist. If the vision of the artist is to do an overtly Christian concert where there’s worship, an altar call, and things that are expressly religious in nature, that’s one thing.

I like when the church makes itself accessible as a music venue. And, since we’re talking about beauty, I want my concerts to be an awesome night filled with beauty and power for Christians and non-Christians (or a person who’s thinking about the faith) alike.

So, when I go on the road and have youth pastors or college pastors or worship leaders come alongside me and say they want to support and promote the show by selling tickets to their group and getting the word out there to colleges and schools, then I’m going to build a substantial crowd who are new to the music, as well as tap into the Future of Forestry fan base. That’s the biggest thing you can ask for with regard to the church coming alongside and helping out. 

I literally have a few guys across the country who I know personally and are huge fans and supporters. I call them up and say, “Let’s do a show,” and they say, “Just give me the date,” and I know that show is going to be sold out.

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Tim: So you, in some respects, prefer the church as a venue even though—and you can speak to this—I see your music as having love songs and creative songs and worshipful songs. So it’s like a best of both worlds. Is that true?

Eric: Yes, there’s a lot of everything. Everything has been honest from my life in terms of the things that I feel. I don’t only feel things in a Christian sub-culture way. I fall in love with someone and I write a love song, but it may not be what you hear in the Christian sub-culture a lot.

But, in my opinion, it should be because that’s a daily part of my life. There are songs that are about very specific Christian things or themes and there are songs that are about falling in love. To me they’re just an outflow of my life.

So yeah, when it comes down to venue, I always feel torn between the church versus the secular venue. I think what I’ve evolved into is doing my best to transform the church venue into a place that doesn’t feel like a religious place. By doing that I’ve started touring with full sound and lighting production so no matter where I go I can make it feel like a great quality rock concert.

I’m not dependent upon a really good venue, but I’m not going to lie—the vibe that comes from a secular venue is a lot of fun and I understand why bands want that most of the time. I would say that about 25% of the dates I do are done in a secular venue—and on my current Young Man Follow tour I’m doing two dates out of 10 that are secular dates. And I enjoy that. But like I was saying, when it’s a secular venue you don’t have the support that you really thrive on from the church.

Tim: Eric, thanks for the great conversation and for your inspiring music. The new album is fantastic. Would you give the readers a parting thought? A lot of people deal with the calling on their life. Tell us about when you knew you were called to make music.

Eric: I tend to look at calling very loosely in that I don’t know how it works. I don’t know how people have any prescribed destinies. I believe more that it is our job to look at our hearts and our desires and what inspires us.

Saying that, I don’t know if I ever had a moment where I thought, Hey, this is my calling and I’d better do it whether I want to or not. But I had a lot of feeling in music, and as I leaned into the feeling, I saw things happen. I try to encourage people in that. I don’t understand the concept of obedience in the sense of “I really don’t want to do this but God’s going to make me have a career that I hate,” or something like that. I don’t think He works that way.

I think that if we are close to God’s heart that the concept of Him sharing His desires with us is something that overtakes us so that we want to do those things. That we don’t go and do missions because it’s some sacrificial burden of misery, but it’s something we want to do because we love to watch other cultures be embraced by God. So it is our desire.

For my life, I just thought I wanted to do something and as I continue to grow I want to do those things and other things. I feel that if I woke up tomorrow and decided I really wanted to be a film director, I don’t think God would hesitate to say, “Hey, let’s make sure you’re doing what you love.”

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This interview will be printed and distributed in its entirety at the Catalyst Conference in Atlanta next week in the Review of Leadership Thought & Practice, of which I am the editor. All content here used by permission.

Visit Future of Forestry

Youn Man Follow Prt.2 // An Interview with Eric Owyoung

Eric Owyoung is a great example of a person chasing that God-echo within. You know, they sense God’s desire for their lives and they wake up each morning, have a cup of coffee and work. Hard. The life of a musician is often viewed through rose-colored lenses. But, like anything worth doing in this life, there’s a rigor to it.

Eric’s band Future of Forestry has made a name for itself since 2006, with it’s nine studio recordings (original and collections) and Christmas DVD, Solstice. Eric has garnered a reputation for creating awe-inspiring music with a live concert experience that is beautiful and almost otherworldly.

I spoke with Eric in the early morning hours to discuss the rigor of doing the work that you love, the beauty that comes from pain, and how the church can get behind its artists. In Part II of my interview Eric talks about the reality and rigor of the musician's life and our "treeless" culture. 

Tim: Describe your “everyday” and the inspiration that you receive from it. How we can find beauty in the everyday?

Eric: My everyday is filled with the mundane, sitting at a computer answering emails. It’s about doing the most boring, non-musician things anyone would ever have to do. But that’s real life. I think if you’re looking for those “awe” moments constantly and that’s the only thing that’s going to fulfill you, you’re going to be very unfulfilled.

The older I get the more I realize the beauty of life is found in those mundane things, such as being around the people you love and having a family. I would say those moments of beauty, they are seldom those “awe” moments, but when I do have them, whether it’s listening to someone else’s music or watching a movie or just realizing something beautiful or seeing a sunset, I realize how blessed I am to be alive and to have the life that I have.

It’s that one moment that takes all of the crap that happened that day and washes it all away and puts value and meaning into my life. So even though my day may be filled with the mundane, those very, very short moments tend to overpower the length and hours of my mundaneness.

Tim: Let me tell you what I hear you saying. It’s a beautiful thing, I think. You just finished telling me about the shadow part of life and coming out of it in the twilight and then growing into life. Then you explained the misconceptions about the artistic life. I always tell people there’s a rigor to the writing life and I know there’s a rigor to the musician’s life as well. You said it perfectly; there aren’t these constant “awe” moments. It’s the little moments.

What I heard in your thought-thread here is you went from this place of pain and into realizing who you were as just a fragile human in light of who God is. And then you became content, filled with gratitude for where you are in life. And now, when you talk about beauty and about what you do, you’re overwhelmed with the awe of gratitude and contentment and the Lord. Even that little journey you’ve talked through looks beautiful to me.

Eric: You finished exactly my feeling and my story. You filled in the blanks and you’re exactly right.

Tim: What do you think of our culture—we’re not a contented culture, we tend to be always wanting more and more. And yet, people are having “awe” moments at your shows, so you must give them a breathing space to say, “Man, God is great.”

Eric: Don’t get me started on the generation thing—it’s very sad to me where we’ve come with all of our iPhones and computers and what our lives look like. When we talk about shows—people won’t go to shows now, which is very sad, too, because it’s a lot harder to get people to go to concerts. Why would they do that when they can just click on a YouTube video by themselves for free?

It’s interesting because I picked the name Future of Forestry from a C.S. Lewis poem called “The Future of Forestry.” The concept of that poem is about a treeless world that exists because all of the trees have been cut down. Lewis is looking at our lives as being treeless and wondering what our concept of beauty will be if we don’t have “trees” in our lives. He was using the idea of trees metaphorically.

I think he was being literal in some sense, but I think for the most part he was talking about the state of our minds and souls. He had no idea what things would be like or how bad it would be.

I hardly have anybody I can hang out with that isn’t going to pull out their iPhone while we’re talking and be doing something on Facebook. Some of my friends, especially the younger ones, don’t get it. They wonder why I don’t care about Facebook and how can I know stuff if I’m not on it. I say, “Why would I do that? You’re right here. I don’t want to talk to anybody else, I want to talk to you.”

Anyway, the meaning of the band was really rooted in that. I don’t think I knew how relevant that subject would be, but it is. I struggle with it too. I can be at the table and suddenly feel the urgency to pull out my iPhone, and I don’t even know why. And then I think, What should I do on my iPhone right now? I don’t even know what I’m doing with it.

I do believe that we feel connected through that and it is a connection. A lot of the guys I tour with keep up with each other that way and they know what’s going on. In some ways, that’s cool because we know what’s going on in that person’s life, but when it comes down to it they don’t really know what’s going on because you don’t ever post what’s really going on in your life on your Facebook page.

If you do, you’re an idiot. You don’t want to give all your secrets away and tell people all the real things you’re dealing with. So it’s been a struggle of mine to figure out what to do with my life in this day and age, and what to do with other people who are feeling the same way about technology.

Tim: I read an interview where you mentioned that you work “quick and fast and intense,” talk about that. Why do you think that’s good? And then talk about your process.

Eric: The reason why I think that creativity comes from working fast is looking at the opposite of that would be doing something painstakingly long and slow. For example, if I sit down and think I have to make something absolutely beautiful and I have ten years to do it, I’m just going to sit there and beat my head over concrete to try to make something beautiful because I’m trying too hard and not letting it be an outflow of something.

I think a lot of it has to do with expectations.

When we feel a high level of expectation on ourselves and the pressure of that, we unfortunately don’t allow it to be us anymore, because we tend to not see ourselves as containing that kind of “perfection.”

So when someone says, “Just make some music, it doesn’t even have to sound good,” you start making all this music and you listen to it later and it sounds pretty cool. But if it has to be perfect, it warps. We don’t see ourselves as perfect and flawless, and so when we try to do something like that we are actually attempting to make something that is outside of who we are as people.

When I sit down and just throw some stuff out there, whatever sticks sticks, whatever doesn’t I just throw away. With that attitude, I just speed through creating. Instead of thinking here’s my one idea for a chorus, I’ll write 20 choruses within just a few minutes.

I’ll hit record and sing a chorus, throw it out, try another one. I just keep doing that and later I’ll think, These three are good, or They all stink, and I’ll just try again tomorrow. With that attitude, it relieves me of the pressure.

Tim: Do you ever get caught over-editing yourself?

Eric: Oh yeah, and that’s the problem. The more I grow in music, the less I get stuck in that process. I used to record something, spending hours on this one tiny part. I’ve tried to mature as much as I can and step back from it as much as possible.

“The Future of Forestry”
by C.S. Lewis (first published in 1938 under the pseudonym Nat Whilk)

How will the legend of the age of trees
Feel, when the last tree falls in England?
When the concrete spreads and the town conquers
The country’s heart; when contraceptive
Tarmac’s laid where farm has faded,
Tramline flows where slept a hamlet,
And shop-fronts, blazing without a stop from
Dover to Wrath, have glazed us over?
Simplest tales will then bewilder
The questioning children, “What was a chestnut?
Say what it means to climb a Beanstalk,
Tell me, grandfather, what an elm is.
What was Autumn? They never taught us.”
Then, told by teachers how once from mould
Came growing creatures of lower nature
Able to live and die, though neither
Beast nor man, and around them wreathing
Excellent clothing, breathing sunlight –
Half understanding, their ill-acquainted
Fancy will tint their wonder-paintings
Trees as men walking, wood-romances
Of goblins stalking in silky green,
Of milk-sheen froth upon the lace of hawthorn’s

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This interview will be printed and distributed in its entirety at the Catalyst Conference in Atlanta next week in the Review of Leadership Thought & Practice, of which I am the editor. All content here used by permission.

If you haven't purchased Future of Forestry's latest release Young Man Follow, do so here.

Visit Future of Forestry 

Young Man Follow Prt.1 // An Interview with Eric Owyoung

Eric Owyoung is a great example of a person chasing that God-echo within. You know, they sense God’s desire for their lives and they wake up each morning, have a cup of coffee and work. Hard. The life of a musician is often viewed through rose-colored lenses. But, like anything worth doing in this life, there’s a rigor to it.

Eric’s band Future of Forestry has made a name for itself since 2006, with it’s nine studio recordings (original and collections) and Christmas DVD, Solstice. Eric has garnered a reputation for creating awe-inspiring music with a live concert experience that is beautiful and almost otherworldly.

I spoke with Eric in the early morning hours to discuss the rigor of doing the work that you love, the beauty that comes from pain, and how the church can get behind its artists. In Part I of my interview Eric talks about the relationship between beauty and pain. 

Tim: You said that some of your songs communicate or delve into your everyday life. Those stories and thought sketches express tension and beauty. In The Weight of Glory, C.S. Lewis says that when we see or hear something beautiful that we really are longing for that “thing” behind it—that we’re longing for God.

So give me your definition of beauty and then maybe comment on whether or not you feel Lewis’ statement is true. When we hear your music, for example, and experience the beauty and power of your concert are we really experiencing God?

Eric: I don’t have a definition of beauty. It’s not something I think of cognitively if I’m in the process. But in just talking with you and thinking about it, beauty is such an intangible concept. When you hear a song and it’s warm and uplifting, it can be just beautiful and can bring you to tears.

Then sometimes you listen to a song that’s haunting and almost frightening, but at the same time, it’s beautiful. It’s strange to me that you can have such a wide variety of what is beautiful. I think because of that, I definitely haven’t tried to sit down and define it.

But in its application to my work and to my creative process, I’m sure that in every aspect of creating that I am striving to attain beauty, whether that’s through a dark haunting song or through a warm, embracing song. I equate beauty in many ways to the emotion I feel, that intangible emotion, and I used to be afraid of that.

I grew up in a Christianity that was all about a cognitive process and that frowned upon emotion. In my high school years I began discover how much of an emotional person I was and still am. I felt things very deeply. I could try as hard as I could to make that a purely cognitive process but I never succeeded. So I began to lean into the emotion and I think that’s why I started music because with all of those feelings that I had, that I could never explain or give anybody a definition of beauty, I felt in such a real way that music was the only way that I could express those things.

I always knew from the very beginning that those feelings were about God, it embraced God, it involved God, it was God. So no matter how I look at beauty, I know God is that pain and aching that is in my music all the time.

Tim: You went through a “pain and aching” time in your life. How were you able to find beauty and come out of the pain of the shadows of that life period with such a grasp on creating something that is beautiful, that has dissonance, and yet is melodic and can really soar? Was there anything specific that happened to you or in your spirit?

Eric: During the first Future of Forestry album, I had just gone through a really painful divorce. I was feeling such pain, and that kind of pain is really different from the pain you feel as an ache for God, just a simple ache for the glory and beauty of God. This is more the ache that you do not want to have. But with that ache I always knew and saw around me that there’s basically only two choices when you go through something like that. It’s either to draw closer to God or to get angry at God.

I knew there was a part of me that wanted to get angry at God because you’ve got to blame someone for your pain, and the easiest place to go is to the guy who’s supposed to be in control of all this and who is supposed to protect me and somehow didn’t do His job.

So I’m going, “Well, I can do that,” but I knew deep down that would never be a road to take me to a place that I would find fulfillment. It would just take me to more emptiness. I knew God well enough to know He was a friend and I knew I had to work some stuff out with Him through that. I just dove in. I’m an all or nothing guy and I don’t ever do anything halfway. I go for it, whether it’s music or any other project I’m working on.

When it came down to healing, I literally took that at full steam. I said, “If I’m going to heal, I need to face this hard thing and go straight to God.” And so, I took several trips by myself. I knew it wasn’t going to be through finding some advice from a pastor that would be the only answer for me. I knew it was between me and God, that I needed to work things out.

I took a trip to the Redwood Forest. I even took a trip to Maui, and it was a very barren experience. I was sitting on the beach by myself, talking to God. It was painful, but a lot of songs came out of that, a lot of grief and healing came out of that.

Tim: So often you hear people quote Lewis’s “... pain is a megaphone to rouse a deaf world.” Did the pain in your life arouse something in you that catapulted you to something else, some other place, a place that you understood God even more than you did before?

Eric: Yeah, I not only understood God, I understood myself. I understood the concept of love. The whole album “Twilight” was written around that aspect. The song was written in a twilight time of change because I was in the process of healing, and I also fell in love again with a childhood friend who I ended up marrying.

That twilight stage was this in-between stage, but one of the lines at the end of the chorus says, “In this twilight we are pale, in this twilight nothing else could be so real.” The idea of being real is exactly what you’re saying about the megaphone. It’s like going through that experience left me so raw and so human, so not what I felt before.

I felt untouchable before; I hadn’t gone through anything like that before. Things just weren’t real, I was living a fairytale life. When that happened it was like I got to be the guy in the movie who was just going through it and it stripped me of everything I had and left me with just me.

It was gruesome but at the same time, it was beautiful because I got to see myself as a frail, fragile, needy human being.

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This interview will be printed and distributed in its entirety at the Catalyst Conference in Atlanta next week in the Review of Leadership Thought & Practice, of which I am the editor. All content here used by permission. 

If you haven't purchased Future of Forestry's latest release Young Man Follow, do so here. 

Visit Future of Forestry