Split Persona has released their first single of 2023 and they certainly aren’t messing around. After touring all of last year grinding through their local Reno music scene and clearing ground in other major US cities such as Los Angeles and San Francisco, they took the rest of 2022 after their tragic van accident in LA to record new music that lead singer Zander and the rest of the band had been putting together since 2020. From the sessions, they chose “Do It Again” as their breakout single for the 2023 season.
By Kamil Bobin
Discovered via Musosoup
Kamil) Hey Split Persona, super nice to have the chance to chat with you. What first got you into music?
My parents raised me on a wide range of musical influences as I grew up. It was ABBA, Rolling Stones, and Grateful Dead on road trips with my mom, and Metallica, Van Halen, and Foo Fighters from my dad. Guitar Hero was also a massive gateway introducing me to songs like Even Flow (Pearl Jam) and Knights of Cydonia (Muse), along with everything else in the catalog my dad and I used to jam through on weekends when he was home. One day, my dad and I watched the movie Whiplash together, and he chuckled after the ending saying, “if you want to see a REAL drum solo, I’ll show you”, to which he pulled up Alex Van Halen’s percussion-filled 10-minute drum extravaganza, which floored me. However, what sparked the musician in me was after he showed me Eddie’s solo, which blossomed in my brain like a new blooming flower. I wondered how he got so many unique and crazy sounds out of a guitar, and so my journey began calling up my uncle, a known guitarist, and collector in my family asking him if he had a spare guitar I could learn on, and the rest was rock and roll history from there. Although it was my journey with playing music, it wasn’t when I started songwriting. Songwriting started for me after seeing Foo Fighters play for the first time at Love Ride 32, a festival thrown outside of LA for the Wounded Warrior Project and Harley Davidson. Seeing the Foo Fighters put on that great of a show, with Dave Grohl engaging everyone while sitting in a seat with a broken leg inspired me more than anything to date. I instantly became a huge fan of theirs, and Dave Grohl became my biggest inspiration. After listening to their entire discography and watching their movie “Back and Forth” a good 150,000 times, I found my own identity in music and started demoing songs like Stay Away, Strawberries, and Keep It back in 2018-2019 with the intention of tracking it in a studio alone and finding the band later, to which I did. I never wanted to be a solo artist or write all the music. Although I like writing full songs, I love collaboration and getting more minds on an idea and watching it explode into something I never thought could be writing it alone. After a couple of growing pains throughout the years starting out, we feel we finally found the lineup we don’t wish to change, but rather grow and mature with, and we couldn’t be happier.
Describe your favorite and least favorite part about being a musician.
My favorite part of being a musician is the creative freedom to do anything musically and have fun with it. Personally, I don’t find us fitting in one specific genre overall with our music besides being a band onstage with musicians really playing everything. Music is music and I’ll always love backing tracks and other show elements artists use to enhance the live performance, but we’re pretty raw onstage basically “coming as we are” and plugging and playing at every show. There is something really special about seeing a band mess up on stage and being themselves behind the music, and we stick by the term “if it’s not perfect, it does not rock and roll” to keep that organic energy going for anyone seeing us live. My least favorite part about being a musician might apply to a lot of other things too, but it’s the money part of it all. For us musicians who want to make a living doing this, it’s almost like a deep-sea whirlpool that’s constantly changing and hard to keep up with. Getting a manager is almost impossible, or at least one that will not charge you directly for services. That goes for booking agents, record companies, and PR firms tailored to independent artists. Now a day’s you really have to become a businessman to operate as a touring/working band these days, and the only downside for us is we would just prefer to focus on the art and content aspect of it all, giving the fans and listeners the best possible work with the most focus.
Your latest song is 'Do It Again'. Can you share with us the background of its creation and did any unusual things happen during its creation?
Do It Again firstly is a song I never thought I’d write. Putting the first couple of chords together that would become the main progression, really solidified the lack of genre I hold as a songwriter. I took the progression to the band after a rehearsal when we were just jamming and mumbled my way to the chorus when I confessed to them that I felt this was a LOVE song and would fit a lyrical story about two people meeting and falling in love after never seeing each other again. After attending Danny Wimmer’s Aftershock Festival with the band last year I stumbled on an “Aftershock Missed Connections” subreddit, with the purpose of reuniting those who had an intimate connection at the festival but never got in contact with it. This was songwriting fuel for what became “Do It Again”, and after Brogan and I crafted the solo at the end, I put the whole instrumental demo together. It didn’t take long after that for me to chop up the lyrics to the song, writing from a true place of emotion while telling the exact story I wanted to throughout the track. Something else that came to be in the lyrics was the mentioning of “The town outside of Bakersfield” an ode to where our totaled van was taken and then seized when we couldn’t afford to fix it.
How do you differ from most other artists?
I feel like the difference for us is in our live shows and our discography as a whole. I try my best as a frontman regardless of the audience size to keep everyone listening and involved, preferably dancing and singing. As a band, we aim to make the whole performance itself memorable and cherishable for everyone attending, leaving us in their brain when they go home. We don’t use any tracks on stage when it comes to filling space or playing our instruments, although we’ve considered many times grabbing a percussionist/synth player to add more sounds and elements to our live performance (which we’re still planning on doing in the long run) but, every sound and note played onstage is us and us only, bringing that organic band energy back to the big stages. With our studio music, however, I aim to make every song an experience of its own as a producer. Working closely in the studio on our upcoming album knowing most of it will be released in singles with the full length coming after, I think of every song being its own world and memory, that will later coincide with the others naturally on a collection like an album. As a songwriter, I just write music, with no specific genre goals in mind which to me adds a lot of diversity to our sound, naturally appealing to a lot of different audiences.
Where are you from and do you have a stable home or do you prefer traveling?
We are all out of Reno, NV, and all work full-time jobs at home amongst pursuing this career choice with “all pedal and no brakes”.
How would you describe the music that you typically create?
Different yet familiar…
How do you nurture your own creativity?
Just by letting it flow and trying not to overthink!
If you could go open a show for any artist who would it be?
We covered this one in a past vlog, but here are the lists as follows for all of us although we definitely all share these picks:
Me: Foo Fighters, Mammoth WVH, Greta Van Fleet, Royal Blood, Jack White, Queens of The Stone Age
Brogan: Guns and Roses, Weezer, Shinedown, Aerosmith.
Jacob: Dance Gavin Dance.
Mike: Metallica, Nothing More, Beartooth
Who's your ideal musician to collaborate with and why?
Dave Grohl. No questions asked. Him being my ultimate inspiration for music, it would be absolutely life-changing to be able to create something with him or do something as simple as having a beer and talking some brisket.
What are your plans for the future?
The future is simple. Make music, play shows, and continue to Kick-Ass. We live for the music and the fans we make on the way, and our goals always come back to being able to pursue music full-time and continue to create and blossom as a band.