You know those “big” bands you see these days that have fans saying, “I wish I could have been at those basement shows” or, “Imagine seeing them at a place with 400 max capacity”? It’s this phenomenon I’ve noticed on social media. Pictures of bands and artists in their formative years playing in smaller venues and bars captioned with things like, “I lived in this area at this time! Where was I?!”
There is something very special about following your favorites from “infancy” through to their eventual, inevitable success. Something that most people can’t always say they’ve managed to do.
But today, if, perchance, you’re looking to hop on the bandwagon (pun entirely intended) for a true up-and-comer, I’ve got just the thing for you.
Shifting from a two-piece to a three-piece to a four-piece, Sorry Ghost has been through a transformation of locations, members, and sounds. It’s the growing pains of starting off, but it seems like the band has finally settled into something solid. Something that is ready to move onwards and upwards.
In anticipation of the upcoming “Fools on Parade” tour with Bermuda Search Party, I got the honor to sit on a call with these exceptional humans for a little chat.
Believe it or not, between the giggles and laughter, we actually managed to have an actual conversation to discuss their evolution as a band, their anticipations of the tour, and the appropriate way to properly perform “box breathing.”
“On my call with Sorry Ghost, we counted vertebrae like an abacus.” (I promise this will make sense later.)
So, I wanted to start with the basics: where all of you are from, and I always like to get to the core root of how you all found each other.
Dan Anton (vocals and bass): Nice, nice. I like that. Should I kick us off?
Matthew Polito (guitar): Take the reins!
Dan: So, Matthew and I are from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and we have known each other since high school. We were in bands in high schools across the street. I guess rival high schools?
Matt: We were in rival bands in rival high schools!
Dan: Yeah! I wanted nothing more than to crush his band! No, but we knew each other, and then we sort of reconnected in college in freshman year, and I said, “Hey! My band fell apart,” and he said, “Oh, mine did too!” And then I said, “Do you wanna try to start something?”, and he was reluctant–as he always is, I could see it in his eyes. But, I told him, “You’re gonna wanna do this, Matthew.” And then we kinda played around in college, it wasn’t super serious, but then we moved to LA, and then- Tate, if you would like to now say where you’re from, and how we met you!
Tate Silver (drums): I’m from Oklahoma originally—Tulsa, Oklahoma.
Matt: Is that where you’re from?
Tate: Yeah, I know, crazy! I didn’t wanna tell you guys because I was scared I’d get kicked out of the band. But yeah, I moved out here about seven years ago, and I met Matthew at a restaurant job we both used to work at.
On his first day, I was training him, and as you do when you’re chatting and rolling, [he said,] “Oh, I’m in a band!” And the first thing that goes to your mind in LA when someone tells you they do something artistically is like, “Oh…are you bad? I can’t have a friend who’s bad at something and then I have to go support that,” and it’s a whole ordeal. And he said, “Oh, we have a show! You should come out and see us!” and I was like, “Oh… okaaay.” And I listened to their music and was like, “This is great!” And then I was like, “Are they good live? Like, anyone can sound good on a recording.”
And then I showed up, and I was like, “Wow, they sound like they do on the recording!” And so I just slowly tried to worm my way in there, acting like, “I’ll just learn your guys’ songs, ‘cause I’m a drummer, and if you guys need to practice, let me know!” And then, eventually, they’re like, “Okay, we’re not getting rid of [you]; do you wanna just officially join the band?” And then we moved over to the last member, Sean.
Sean Duong (vocals and guitar): Hi! I was originally born in Boston, Massachusetts, but around six years old, I moved over to Florida with my family. I met the other guys because my old band– that I started back in high school, as well—had done an East Coast tour, and we found a band on our ‘Fans Also Like’ on Spotify—the first band on there, it was a band called Sorry Ghost–a little three-piece! featuring the members called Daniel, Matthew, and Tate.
And then we [previous band] did the whole East Coast tour, and basically throughout that tour we had confided to each other that we had, unfortunately, grown a little bit of dispassion—I don’t know if that’s quite the word. But, basically, we fell more in love with the idea of doing indie rock kinda music and moving a little away [from] what pop punk music was potentially becoming, ‘cause none of us can rap or know how to make trap beats or anything. And yeah, we essentially, after the tour had wrapped up, they [Sorry Ghost] had given me the phone call - the coveted phone call—where they said, “Sean, you’re about to finish college in about six months; you should go ahead and uproot your entire life and join our band on the west coast!”
Like, “You just got a degree, BUT-”
Dan: Yeah, like, “Don’t use that! Don’t use any of that!”
Matt: “Don’t use that degree for the foreseeable future!”
Sean: And I’m still waiting on it to pay off, but we’ll see if that happens. Yeah, so basically six months later—January of 2023—I got in my Nissan Altima, and I made a big ‘ol road trip, and that’s when the four-piece was finally complete; it was like the big Power Ranger mech thing getting together.
Matt: It’s like Voltron coming together.
Sean: That’s exactly right!
Now for my all-time favorite question: I am curious, do you remember what your first instrument was?
Dan: Oh yeah! Big time. So- okay I guess technically my first instrument was my trombone-
Matt: If you don’t say trombone then you’re lying!
Dan: Yeah, I grew up playing trombone like- my whole life and I was in a jazz band in Louisiana. I started that when I was little and I just loved it. I love the whole [trombone noises and pantomiming] It was so much fun! So yeah, that was mine. And now I have a plastic trombone called a pBone which is a great name for a brand. And sometimes I still play it. It’s featured in one of our reels.
Matt: My first instrument was a Pulse brand gold drum set. I found it on Craigslist for $100 and I bought an entire drumset and it’s still at my house somewhere. It was awful, but it got me started and it was good enough to teach me that I was not good enough to play drums so I quit and picked up a guitar.
We all have to live and learn.
Matt: Exactly. Boy did I live and refuse to learn. Tate, what about you? Did you start straight away with drums?
Tate: Well, technically if we’re going like the origin, I started with Rock Band, that was my first instrument, but no I- like anyone else, I fidgeted on the guitar and I was like, “I don’t know how my hands are supposed to make any of these shapes.” My older siblings - who are both far more musically talented than I am - they had a little band in high school and so I would just watch my older brother drum all the time and thought “I feel like I could do that”. So I think his first drum set was just like straight out of the box- like the Pearl plastic uh- it was that shiny maroon color too. Like anytime you think “drumset” it was that one. So I was hittin’ on that for a while and I guess I just never stopped.
Sean: Nice! If we’re not counting the recorder, ‘cause I think everyone starts there- I attempted clarinet in a beginners band, back in 7th grade. It was lame, I felt like Squidward, and I didn't understand what a b flat was. Accidentals were not a concept that I could comprehend in my brain. And then, uh—yeah, so then honestly around the same year I started learning drums as well as my first instrument.
Wow.
Sean: Yeah there’s too many drummer-to-guitarist ratios in this band, it’s funny. Well,l technically I guess then there’s three guitarists and three drummers.
Dan: Yeah, everyone drums. In this band, everyone drums, and I'm the best, too! I’m the best drummer.
Sean: He’s the worst one for sure.
Matt: I'm sure he’s doing us all a favor by allowing himself to restrict himself to playing bass instead of being Neil Peart on the drums.
So you guys release your first full album, right? In 2020, which is quite a time to release an album.
Tate: Was something going on in 2020?
Something, yeah. It was just a little thing, like barely a blip on my radar… But how was the writing situation there? How did it feel to write at that point and how did you manage that?
Matt: We made an excellent decision, which was to release music at a time when it was—to the world, physically impossible to tour on that material, but the silver lining there was that we weren’t really at a size where we could have realistically done a successful tour. So I actually think releasing in that window was of benefit because everyone in the world was in the exact same circumstance and was living their lives through their phones, just through the internet.
We’re like, “Everybody’s gonna be on the internet anyway; let’s give ‘em an album, give ‘em something to do, and then everybody’s gonna be online so we’ll be able to chat with our fans on Twitter [X] and on Instagram and build this fanbase because no one else has anything better to do.” So we sort of tricked people into seeing our band by making them realize like—well, what else are you gonna do right now? You can’t leave your house; you might as well be a fan of ours. And a lot of them stuck around.
Dan: Yeah, that was definitely- it is like Plan Z for them to listen to our album, but like Matthew said, they had nothing else to do and so-
Matt: Plans A through Y? Already done!
Now that you are able to tour, what are you most excited for? Because you guys are coming up on one- which, by the way, you're playing Pappy and Harriet’s in Pioneertown and I wish I could go because that’s one of my favorite venues.
Dan: Yeah! That one is so exciting. These three Philistines in the band had no idea at the time what Pappy and Harriet’s was, right? So I was trying to explain to them!
It’s an experience!
Dan: It’s a total experience! You get to wear your Western wear! Your assless chaps! But okay, so to answer your question, I’m most excited about seeing- I kinda wanna see Boise, Idaho. I’ve always—I just think of Napoleon Dynamite—it was all filmed in Idaho and like—I’m pretty sure this is what Idaho is gonna be! But I don't wanna be an Idaho bigot and assume that, so I'm going to go in and make sure that that is what’s happening there.
Tate: Matt?
Matt: I, on the one hand, am excited to go to Portland because I’ve never been to Portland before. But, similarly, we also have a tour date in Salt Lake City and [like Dan] to Boise, I’m just super curious because Salt Lake City is like an enclave. It’s its own little thing and I’m so fascinated to see what the culture is like there.
Tate: So no one’s brought this up, but this is actually the first time we’ve all toured together. So like, really looking forward to that.
Personally for me, though, my real answer would be uhm—I love road trips. I would take a road trip every summer with my family to Arizona ‘cause that’s where my parents are from, so I'm really excited to play Phoenix, but I just love road trips. I love the early wake-ups—even though you don’t like them in a hotel. Or like just driving and you see the sunset and you see the sunrise. It’s always a fun time, and you get to pick your perfect little snack combo! I dunno, maybe I’m just over-idealizing road trips. I think they're a great time.
Sean: I, having not been to any of the other states outside of California - or spent any significant time in any of them - ironically, I will still say the Los Angeles date, because we’re playing a venue called Genghis Cohen, and apparently during the day it is a Chinese restaurant- but in the evening it moonlights as a music venue as well. And yeah, I perceive it as being the equivalent awesomeness as playing Denny’s, except it's just a Chinese restaurant, so we’ll say what the heck is up Ghengis Cohen!
Tate: I'm looking forward to the chow mein personally. We tried our best to book all restaurants. A few fell by the wayside but, y’know, we’ll let it slide.
What is your favorite place to eat where you live?
Sean: It’s gotta be the taco place near the rehearsal space.
Tate: See that’s not- this might be blasphemous but that’s not my favorite. I’d say my favorite is a Thai spot called Emporium Thai, it’s also famously Cardi B’s favorite restaurant. They have a wall of celebrities in there that have come in, and she’s on there like six times! She has a dish named after her that’s her favorite dish it’s like the Cardi B something-
Matt: It’s the mango sticky rice, it’s Cardi B branded. I get it every time.
Is that the eventual goal?
Tate: Oh, big time! It’s: have a dish on the celebrity wall, and I want to - I don’t even use a laundromat, but I want my photo over a laundromat that’s like “Tate Silver comes and gets his laundry done here.” That’s the two goals that I have and then once I hit those I'm done, I'm gone.
Yeah, then it’s time to retire.
Tate: Oh yeah! Matt, do you have a favorite?
Matt: So my favorite back home I've gotta shout out is Elsie’s Plate & Pie. It’s a great little pie restaurant in Baton Rouge that’s been going strong- through the pandemic and everything, it’s great. But in LA, the one that I immediately think of is also a Thai place, but it’s a totally different Thai place. There’s this great restaurant called Tuk Tuk Thai and- I love Thai food, but what I love about this place is the things that I always get there are super unique to there. So I don’t know if it’s like a regional Thai food or if it’s foods that are not typically on the menu- ‘cause they have your classic curries but they just have a bunch of different kinds of Thai noodle dishes and soups and things that haven’t ever had before so it’s like I keep going back because I have yet to find anything else like it, so Tuk Tuk Thai is my go to. Dan?
Dan: My favorite thing about LA is—I love salads and the best thing about LA is everywhere you go they’ve got your salad options, you açai bowl options, so I like this place called California Fresh-
Matt: Nice! I knew you were gonna say California Fresh!
Tate: l thought you were gonna say, Sweet Greens, personally.
Dan: If Sweet Greens were local I would say Sweet Greens. I love Sweet Greens. My dream is to make enough money from this band that I can just eat Sweet Greens every day.
Sean: Or get a sponsorship.
Dan: Yeah, we need a sponsorship. Currently, we’re very far off from that goal with their $30 salads, but yes Sweet Greens, that’s mine.
Sean: I would like to change my answer to the crazy Chinese buffet that we had in Orlando, Florida that everyone between my old band and this new, terrible band. Not only do they have all the classic Chinese dishes but they also have a full sushi bar, and they have ice cream-
Dan: I remember watching a small child dip his chicken finger in the ice cream bin. Repeatedly.
Tate: It was awesome.
Dan: Yeah, and it tasted somehow better- I’m like, actually this child understands something about flavor that I don’t.
Sean, you talked about being from Orlando, so you’re all the way over there and then you said something about not having really spent time in California - what’s the furthest that you’ve been from home? Whether it's with the band, family trips, or solo trips?
Sean: Good question, so I guess prior to California, it was the million cruises that my family would go on every year down in-
Matt: Sean, wasn't it Vietnam?
Sean: Oh, true! I did visit Vietnam once when I was six but it was not a spectacular experience for me because 1) I was six and I couldn’t appreciate it and 2) I didn’t speak Vietnamese, so every single time anyone attempted to speak to me it was in Vietnamese, and then they were immediately disappointed by the fact that I could not communicate with them. So then I was like this little black sheep who, ironically, I look- [gesturing to himself] y’know, you wouldn’t bat an eye. Like if you see a white guy in America and he starts suddenly speaking Chinese, you’re like, “What the Hell?” This doesn’t make sense, logically.
But yeah, I guess now, essentially it is California…I haven't left the US besides that, and I guess in terms of miles it still is technically San Francisco. I would love to go to visit, like, Seattle and all that. Yeah- I mean, I would love—I have a secret fantasy of being a sailor, I’m very into the nautical-
Matt: I just want to put it on record that it is not a secret.
Tate: Yeah, at least like once or twice a month Sean is like, “I found this mariner ship, right? And I think I could go do it.” So, that's the only possible option that we see the four-piece leaving is that if Sean gets called to the sea one day and then he’s like, gone.
As if he’s called by the song of the siren. Where’s the furthest the rest of you have been?
Matt: Dan this is a good one for you, Mr. World Traveler!
Dan: I’ve been to Uganda, I’ve been to Myanmar, so that’s over by India- yeah, I guess geographically India would be the farthest, like, I think on a map.
Matt: And I just got back from Australia. Australia and Japan are probably the farthest–I'm guessing Australia is still further if I was on the Eastern coast. But yeah- Japan and Australia both had similar 15-hour flight times. It was brutal. Tate?
Tate: I’m the lamest I think, um, 'cause it’s either L.A. or like Boston/New York. ‘Cause I’m from Oklahoma, smack dab in the middle. I guess Sayulita—I mean Oaxaca [de Juárez] is pretty south too, and I’ve been there once. I’ll say Oaxaca so I can appease the ancestors.
So, I have a question about your favorite - no two of your favorites. One is what is your favorite part or lyric of any song, and the other is what’s your favorite song that you have put out?
Dan: My favorite song that we’ve put out is “robin,” that one’s my favorite. My favorite–I wanna do favorite lyric ‘cause Sean and I write the lyrics so… Come back to me, please.
Matt: My favorite lyric probably is in “robin”, actually, it’s a line that appears in the second chorus. It’s a line- it’s a combination of the line itself and just how it's delivered but, there's a line where he says, “All I have is a paring knife, a box of clothes, and these tired eyes” and the way it's delivered is great. The way the vocals crescendo there. And I just thought that that was an interesting list of items. I think it's great to mention a paring knife in a song. It's just specific enough to get people Googling like ‘what is a paring knife’ and then I like the box of clothes and the tired eyes, so that’s my lyric.
Dan: That’s a good one, thank you, Matthew. You're getting a raise. Mine- okay I thought of my lyric. In “box breathing,” at the end, I like the line “The box still on the stage, not sawn, and hardly seen” so like, not sawn in half and then not seen.
Sean: Good one. I was originally gonna say the, uh, the rap bridge that we cut out of “box breathing.”
Dan: We should’ve kept it.
Sean: “There was a hollow man who had a plan, and a dream and a band,” [...] it was gonna be awesome. Um–I like when I use the word ‘nonpareil’ in “lollapalooza,” cause I didn’t know what that word meant until I used it.
Tate: I don’t know our lyrics!
Sean: He just makes up the lyrics.
Matt: Right, he’ll just make ‘em up.
Tate: Like, famously, I'll be singing it either in the car or just to myself, and Daniel's like “What?”
“Those are not the words”
Tate: Yeah, no, uh, it happened one time I was singing an old song, and Daniel was like, “Oh you're singing that? I kinda like that a little more,” and I was like, “Nice!” But it's still not the lyrics. Um, the only lyric I know off the top of my head that’s none of the ones you guys said was from the EP “I DID/DID I?” from the song “BACK OF MY KNEES,” I believe, ‘cause it really confused me: “Hold a glass with your hand held open,” and I was confused as if he meant he was holding a glass like this [flat-palmed facing up] or like…
Very careful balancing act
Tate: Yeah! I was like, are you holding a glass with your hand [flat palmed again], like–what? And I think you said it was like a pane of glass,
Sean: That's what I was told, I was told it was like [palms facing forward as if against a window]
Tate: You’re lying! I think you don’t know for sure!
Dan: Right, well that’s- it’s such a deep cut, like–oh God I don’t even remember.
Matt: It's such a deep and great lyric that I know it can have a million meanings
Tate: And, um, favorite song I’d say—it's an unpopular one but I’d say “to the creatures”. I like that song a lot.
How do you guys feel about the evolution of your sound over time? Is that something that happened naturally or something that was consciously like, “We should do something different”?
Dan: It was…to be honest, maybe a little bit of both. I think that it definitely was sort of happening naturally just as, honestly, just as we were kind of getting a little bit older. I felt like the angst was starting to leave my blood-
Matt: That was exactly the line I was thinking of, the angst had begun to leave my body.
Dan: Yeah! It just became a little bit harder and harder to inhabit that space - to write those lines - in a way that it didn’t when I was 18 or 19, and so, I didn't like the feeling of kind of forcing it. I think the second part of that is that we—Matthew and I–had been doing it for a couple years before we met Tate and then met Sean and the band had just felt like something wasn’t quite lining up. It was kind of incongruous from who we were. It was like we were in this pop punk band and we just were so soft, where just like- it just didn’t feel like the brand was clicking with us and I really firmly believe that the audience can always tell if something is a little bit out of step. That’s kind of my theory for why we said, “Maybe let's just try to be a little bit more true to ourselves. As authentic as we can be, and let’s see if that resonates with people,” and I think that we saw that it did.
Tate: And, kinda to Dan’s point when you said kind of like organically or do we kind of like force it at times—the sound change–I feel like a lot of times when we’re writing there’s a moment where like we’ll all do something and we’re like, “Oh that was cool!” but then we’re like, “We do that a lot,” or, “That’s kind of our go-to. Is that what the song is calling for? Or is that just what we always instinctually do?” So there’s a lot of times where we will kind of force ourselves out of our routine or out of the classic like, “Okay we go here and then we go here.” We’ll build and just to see where the song truly is lying and then it's like, okay, no, we instinctively went there cause that’s what the song needs, and that’s just what we have to do, but then sometimes when we’re trying to get out of our own box is when we really find what the song is supposed to go to, and it’s really cool that way.
I love letting whatever piece of art that you’re doing- letting it be what it is and then following what it is. I think the last question that I have - to go with the most recent single - is: have you ever done box breathing? Or do you know what box breathing technically is?
Matt: Big time! I have vivid memories of when I was in middle and elementary school we had—it wasn’t a class we had every day, but I didn’t think this was weird at the time, but about once a week we had ‘guidance class’ where our guidance counselors would come in and they would basically, kind of check on everyone’s well-being. I guess that, y'know, comes with the territory when you go to Catholic school, and one of the things they would do–they would call it square breathing, but it's the same thing as box breathing and I remember that really stuck in me as like this sort of grounding and centering technique at a young age so yes I have done square breathing which, now [I know is] box breathing.
Dan: Yeah, I’ve had anxiety my whole life, and when I started with therapy in high school, I very quickly—I like used to have trouble functioning. I was just so anxious, and so I started going to a therapist, and one of the first things that he showed me was box breathing as a technique, and I use it at least probably three times a week still. Even if it’s just like 20 seconds, 30 seconds, where I just kind of step aside and work through four or through six or through eight kind of thing, y’know in for 8, hold for 8.
Oh! I haven’t heard of it that way, I’ve heard of the through four. I didn’t realize until literally today- you’re supposed to hold again after the breath out. That’s what makes the box.
Matt: Yeah ‘cause otherwise, it's triangle breathing, if it’s like: in, hold, out, then you have to go straight back to in.
Yeah, and then it makes you feel like you’re gonna pass out!
Matt: Exactly!
Tate: I’m pretty sure that's called circular breathing, I think. I’ve never done it to, like, calm myself from a panic attack or an anxiety attack, but I’ve used it when my coaches growing up–if it was after like, a hard workout or something like that, they would have us go through it to get our heart rate down before we started stretches. That was the only time I’ve really done box breathing. Sean?
Sean: And that leaves me. I think I’ve probably been practicing this technique since like high school as well, same as Daniel, for even the same reasons.
Dan: There’s a 100% chance that Matthew and Tate are gonna be like, “Uh, I mean we were either forced to do it institutionally or have never done it,” and then I knew Sean and I would be like, “Yeah, we’ve been doing that since we were 7.”
Matt: 3x a day for the last 18 years.
Sean: But, because I’ve been going to vocal lessons my box breathing now includes my diaphragm in the technique, and I’ve been learning harmonica so that helps too.
I think that’s all I have for you guys other than… Do we get to look forward to an album or more singles anytime soon?
All: Yes!
Matt: Single on the way.
Dan: Yes, We have a single on the way that we believe…next 8 weeks.
Awesome. Tour? Will that come out while you’re on tour? Right?
Dan: I think after.
Do I know how to do math? The answer is no.
Tate: It should at least be announced while we’re on tour, I think.
There you go! The only thing I got from my dad was a connective tissue disorder. I did not get the ability to do math inside the brain.
Matt: You gotta really put the scoliosis into solving that math problem!
Tate: Yeah.
You gotta count the vertebrae like it's an abacus.
Dan: That’s great! Can you open with that line? “On my call with Sorry Ghost, we counted vertebrae like an abacus.”
Matt: That's great, I’m stealing that for a lyric.
Tate: And honestly? That's how you wanna end the interview too! You start it and end it right then and there I’m good with that as well.
Well, who am I to say no to a request like that?
The promise of a new single hitting the airwaves is just what we need for this spring, and who better to give it to us than these self-proclaimed softies? 2025 is as good a year as any to let yourself fall in love with bands who are taking their first steps into the limelight.
Sorry Ghost is set to sail (much to Sean’s delight) on April 15th at the Black Buzzard in Denver, Colorado, and will go on to play 9 shows throughout the Midwest and West Coast.
If you’re in the market for their brand of sketch comedy and want to keep your finger on the pulse of new music, you can find the band all over the good ol’ World Wide Web.
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