The Ghost Inside's Jonathan Vigil and Andrew Tkaczyk take us through the making of their sixth studio album ‘Searching For Solace’. Featuring the singles ‘Earn It’ and ‘Death Grip’, it is available digitally now via Epitaph Records with a physical release set for June 07.
Catch the band back in the UK when they appear at Slam Dunk Festival in Hatfield and Leeds on May 25 and 26.
Read The Ghost Inside, ‘Searching For Solace’ | The Album Story below:
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Many years ago, Jonathan Vigil’s father imparted upon his son a pearl of parental wisdom that has stuck ever since with the Ghost Inside frontman. “He told me that life is never just one constant thing,” the vocalist recalls from a suitably purple-hued dressing room in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where TGI find themselves kicking rocks ahead of their evening’s soundcheck and live performance. “He said, ‘There will always be ups and downs along the road; life will always set you back in one moment, and push you forward in the next. But the thing that makes the ups so good are that you have to survive the downs. You have to get through the shitty parts in life to appreciate the bigger picture.”
Jonathan Vigil has lived by those words ever since, drawing strength from them in moments darker than few could ever truly comprehend, the shadow cast by the tour bus crash that cost the driver of both vehicles involved their lives and nearly robbed The Ghost Inside of theirs lingering long through its life-changing damage, both physical and mental.
Yet emerging out of the Covid-19 pandemic, Vigil and his bandmates would need those words more than ever, and ‘Searching For Solace’, the band’s sixth full-length album and follow-up to their self-titled ‘comeback’ record of 2020, finds them exploring that thematic quest for peace of mind in typically soul-bearing honesty.
Joined by drummer Andrew Tkaczyk, the pair take Rock Sound on a journey peeling back the layers of their triumphant, forward-thinking new album.
THE SOUND
If you’ve spent the past weeks since its release filling your ears with ‘Searching For Solace’, or even if you’ve taken so much as a passing interest in the commentary surrounding it, you’ll know that this is no ordinary Ghost Inside record. The band’s long-established DNA is present, of course – the riffs, the breakdowns and Vigil’s inimitable roar all explode from the likes of ‘Split’, ‘Going Under’ and ‘Reckoning’ – but ‘Searching For Solace’ is coloured with a refreshed and reinvigorated palette, too, piling on lashes of melody, synths, clean vocals, and influences and inspirations never before explored by the band.
“Recording our self-titled record, our first after the bus accident, was our first foray back into playing music again,” Vigil says. “It was about us making a statement that we were back, and this is who we are. I don’t want to say that we were timid on that record, but it was about existing in a bubble where we felt comfortable, so we could navigate getting back into that headspace again. We approached ‘Searching For Solace’, however, from the mindset that we knew how close we had come to losing the band entirely and never having the chance to make music together again, so why would we limit the scope of our ambitions, and not throw everything we’d ever wanted to try at it? There’s tonnes of new sounds, new vibes and new feelings on the record, and we wanted to explore all of that to the fullest.”
“There is a push and a pull that mirrors the theme of the album” – more on that later – “with peaks and valleys, left turns and right turns and dead ends,” Vigil adds. “The structure to the way the record sounds is about creating a journey that the album takes you on.”
The pair point to the seemingly innocuous presence of an acoustic guitar on album closer ‘Breathless’ as indicative of their all-bets-are-off approach.
“If that idea had come up during the sessions for ‘Dear Youth’ (2014) or (2008 debut album) ‘Fury And The Fallen Ones’, we would shut it down instantly – ‘We’re not going to put an acoustic guitar on a TGI record, that’s stupid!’” Vigil laughs.
“Instead, we approached it with the mindset of nothing being off the table,” Andrew picks up. “It was scary at times, sure, but we simply didn’t see another path forward. Whenever we tried to approach a song with the specific mindset of, ‘Let’s write a song like something from [2010’s] ‘Returners’, it felt too forced. Instead, we let the songs dictate what they needed, and saw every idea through to its fullest – whether we ended up keeping it or not.”
“I think above all, the record works so well because its core values remain the same as ever,” Vigil says. “It has the same ethos as every other Ghost Inside record. It might have a little bit more musical exploration, but the meaning and the spirit behind the songs has never changed.”
THE COLLABORATORS
Key to The Ghost Inside’s dynamic shifts on ‘Searching For Solace’ were the production skills of Dan Braunstein (Spiritbox, Silent Planet, Dayseeker), who helmed the sessions for the majority of the album (with contributions coming elsewhere from the likes of Carson Slovak, Grant McFarland and Wage War’s Cody Quinstad). Turning to Braunstein marked the first time The Ghost Inside hadn’t looked to A Day To Remember frontman Jeremy McKinnon for studio duties – a move born out of both scheduling necessity given McKinnon’s unavailability, as well as that desire to mix things up.
“We knew we needed help to find these different sounds within ourselves,” Andrew says. “Working with a number of different people really helped pull different things out of us and find this new era of the band. We spent well over a year and a half across multiple writing and studio sessions working on the songs for this album; we ended up with a pile of potential tracks to work through. Originally we were only working with Dan on a writing session, to test the water. But I think we all knew immediately that it felt like the right fit for the album.”
For Vigil especially, the move was transformative. “A lot of the melody in the Ghost Inside in the past has come from working with Jeremy. He’s such a tremendously talented guy and a super close friend. Often he would track a rough cut of a vocal melody and then I would find myself recording over the top, so that what we ended up with was me doing my very best ‘Jeremy McKinnon’ impression. I had to approach this album in a completely different way, and one that was probably more naturally ‘me’. Honestly, it felt like unlocking talents that I never knew I had. And that all came from Dan empowering us to be as creatively free as we wanted to be in the studio, and really let ourselves go. We were so open to hearing every suggestion and idea he had, and vice versa. He has such a knowledge of our band, but approaches everything in a very fresh way.”
“I think it’s the most fun I’ve ever had making a record,” Andrew adds.
THE LYRICS
So, about that ‘theme’ that was touched upon… “The album as a whole explores how people get so focused on an end destination that they lose themselves on the journey,” Vigil says. Andrew adds: “I think the concept ended up writing itself, because when we took a step back and looked at the songs we had and asked ourselves what they were about, we all started noticing this sense of a push and a pull, a yin and a yang. The album talks about how we’re all on this constant search for happiness, focused on the end game, but when you get there you’re still not satisfied, and there’s always more to be desired.”
For Vigil, whose lyrics have historically always been representative of his engrained PMA, ‘Searching For Solace’ marked an about turn that found him reflecting more negative thoughts and feelings. “I was deeply affected by the pandemic, as so many people were,” he says. “We had spent so many years and put in so much hard work and pain to get back onstage, and to give the band a future, and then it felt like it had been stripped away from us all over again [just like in the aftermath of the bus crash]. The pandemic made me feel like this was forever going to be out of reach – something dangled on the end of a stick that we could never truly reach, that was forever being pushed further and further away. Mentally, it affected me greatly.”
The song ‘Light Years’ most starkly explores those emotions. “It’s traditional Ghost Inside in that it has a degree of positivity in there, but there’s also a lot of frustration and despair – ‘Feels like I’m light years away but it’s just beyond my reach’.”
The track ‘Cityscapes’, meanwhile, which sits at the heart of the record both literally and figuratively, found Vigil revisiting the loss of his father while TGI were on tour in Australia in 2012. Having previously written about the loss of his brother on ‘Get What You Give’ (2012) track ‘White Light’, it’s impossible not to hear ‘Cityscapes’ as some degree of emotional companion to that track. “Andrew originally wrote the melody to that song, and one day he was humming it, and saying random words just to fill it with syllables, and one of the words he used was ‘Cityscapes’. It wouldn’t leave my mind until one day it hit me like a tonne of bricks, that this song was conjuring up memories I had of standing in my hotel room in Brisbane after my father had died, looking out at the cityscape in front of me. I know what writing ‘White Light’ meant to a lot of people all those years ago, and that I was capable of writing a song with such resonance because of it, and I know that ‘Cityscapes’ will mean the same to people today. The line ‘Every time I feel the nights grow cold / Your memory reminds me to stay gold’ is me talking directly to him.”
“It’s funny,” he adds. “Because ‘White Light’ and ‘Cityscapes’ are probably the only two Ghost Inside songs ever where the lyrics didn’t change from the initial draft. What I first wrote is what you hear on the record.”
THE TITLE AND THE ARTWORK
‘Searching For Solace’ as a title came following the recording sessions, as the band sat around at Vigil’s house discussing how the theme of the record made them all feel – the quintet quickly identifying the phrase as the perfect encapsulation of the record’s perpetual journey. “I think it’s important as well that it just <sounds> like a Ghost Inside album, doesn’t it?” Vigil says. “I think we as a band have a very distinct language, and this just sounds like us.”
To bring the theme to life visually, however, the band looked externally to Jim Hughes of Northary Studios (Miss May I, Caskets, Wage War). “We’re such huge fans of Jim’s style, and I couldn’t think of a better artwork to encapsulate the album,” Andrew says. “The idea actually came from our bassist, Jim (Riley). To us, that maze inside the figure’s head is about depicting how inside everyone’s mind, you get these roadblocks, and you’re trying to find comfort, answers, and happiness, but you encounter all of these different roadblocks along the way.”
THE FUTURE
“The exciting thing about this record is it opens up a lot of avenues to let us explore more,” Vigil says, tantalisingly. Whether that takes the form of the release of material that didn’t make ‘Searching For Solace’’s initial cut, the band are noncommittal on – “I think those songs would require a bit of work before they saw the light of day, though it’s something I could maybe see happening,” the frontman says – but Andrew cuts directly to the point when he says: “We’re going to keep writing whenever we can. It feels like we’re on fire at the moment.”
Rather, the immediate future is focused on the stage, and bringing ‘Searching For Solace’ to life across the US, before the band heads to Europe and to the UK for Slam Dunk. One look at TGI’s touring schedule underlines the remarkable resolve it’s taken to once again join the globetrotting ranks of their peers, when it’s only been a matter of five years (including a near two-year pandemic lockdown of touring) since the band stepped foot onstage for the first time post-crash at LA’s The Shrine for what at the time seemed like a one-off.
“Honestly, it’s taken an incredible amount of work, physically, mentally and emotionally, to get to this point,” Vigil says. “We have a lot to thank A Day To Remember for, actually, for pushing us and giving us the opportunity to get back into touring (in direct support to them, in 2022) at our own pace. I don’t mind saying that at that time, I simply couldn’t face getting back on a tour bus. So I was flying from show to show. Being able to get past that was a huge moment for me, and for us. My fear was around falling asleep on the bus, as our accident happened when we were sleeping. One day, I decided to ease myself in while we were doing a day drive. I got into my bunk, just to see how I felt, and I found myself falling asleep for about two hours.”
“It was like a movie moment,” Andrew smiles. “Vigil comes into the back lounge and is like, ‘Dude, I think I just fell asleep.’ We looked at each other and said, ‘Let’s go on tour!’
“And boom!” he laughs. “Roll the movie montage!”
