met in school, joined Vinyl Thief as the band’s vocalist about a year later. The four became known throughout their hometown of over 34,000. Outside of Columbia, however, no one knew the name Vinyl Thief. “We were awful, [but] every kid in town would come to see us,” Grayson recalls the band’s earlier days. “It gave us a false sense of how good we were.” It wasn’t until the four friends moved to Nashville that they realized how much work they had ahead of them. That’s also when the band became more serious about making a record. In the end, Vinyl Thief turned to Kickstarter to raise money for studio time and to pay their producer, among many other costs. It was a decision the band was initially reluctant to make. “I was really wary at first. I remember not wanting to do it,” Grayson admits. But since the band had no money and still wanted to produce an album, Kickstarter seemed like the best option. “There’s only so much money your parents will give you,” Grayson added, laughing. But unlike asking those close to you for support, turning to the public for help can be daunting. “To do that, to come out and ask for money, you’re in a vulnerable place,” Logan says. Reaching out to the public meant believing in the band’s talent and hoping that the public would invest in them. “We don’t have the ginormous fan base that a lot of people do, so we didn’t know if it was going to be successful. We didn’t know if there were fans out there that would back us, and that’s scary,” Grayson says. “Like Logan said, you put yourself in a vulnerable place, which is why we were so surprised when it ended up working.” Ultimately, the band found supporters eager to fund their album, but asking for the public’s help also came with pressure to produce a quality record for their donors —
and to do so quickly. “The thing is, we want to make the best product possible, and we’d rather get more time,” Grayson says. But like all bands, Vinyl Thief had a limited amount of time to work on their now completed album. So for their first full-length album, the band recorded new songs and re-recorded old tracks on the production until the very last moment, even after their manager told them the album had to be completed by the next morning. But timing wasn’t really the problem for Vinyl Thief. As with most artists, the band members were their own worst critics. “After two years, you can get inside your head so much,” Grayson says. “One day you can love every song on the record, and then the next day, we’re like ‘these are all shit.’” The band struggled to produce an album they were satisfied with, constantly making more adjustments to recordings, simply because their own idea of perfection kept changing. “There’s a constant struggle because you want to be a perfectionist, but the problem is your perfection is based on you as a person,” Andrew explains. “So you’re constantly changing, and you want that record to change with you. That’s what makes it hard.” As a result, the band added two entirely new songs with just a week before the album was supposed to be completed. “We really thought the record was done, and then we wrote two more songs and threw them on [the album], and they’re some of my favorites,” Grayson says. One thing the band worked hard to accomplish was making Fathom as true to their experiences and as telling as possible. But to write a meaningful album was challenging because it also required the band to reveal their stories and subject themselves to the public eye. “It’s a vulnerable place, but I feel like that’s where you can pull in people. You
have to put yourself out there,” he continues. “And people can’t relate to something that’s not real, you know. You can’t just make up a story, and [expect that] they go along with it. They’re going to catch it, whether subconsciously or consciously.” Perhaps it’s Vinyl Thief ’s honest voice and empathy that has helped them win fan support. “We really tried to work on making all our music sincere,” Logan says. “You can hear a lot of [music], and it doesn’t have that [sincerity]. But if [I] look back in a few years and say ‘Well I was honest about how I felt, then that’s all [we] can really do.” Although their debut album has yet to be released, the band dropped a four-track EP Stop Motion as a teaser of what is to come. While it is a short EP, the songs serve as concise snapshots of what the band has experienced since 2012. “Smooth,” which opens the album, is centered largely on the theme of escape and running away from their troubles. The last song on the teaser, named after the title of the EP, however, is more self-reflective and presents the band’s more hopeful outlook on the future. The last song on the EP also provides a preview of the rest of songs on Fathom, which also concludes with a happier tone. “The record ends on kind of like a realization that things will be okay. You can escape from everything, and then you just, in the end, realize it’s going to be alright,” Grayson says. “It’s a dark record, we went through some things over the past two years, but it ends on a lighter note.” Even the music they’re working on now reveals a more content Vinyl Thief. “We’ve written a few things over the past few months, and they’re kind of taking a more upbeat approach, a happier side to things because that’s where we’re at now,” Grayson says. “We’ve come through some things, and we’re in a happier place.” NKD NKDMAG.COM
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