Interview: Logan Young of Reflections and I, The Breather

 I’m here with Logan Young, the rising star who not only was brought up with the comeback of Reflections, but is now the guitarist of metalcore legends I, The Breather! Tell me man, how did you manage to get onboard?

Hey man, thanks so much for having me! It’s actually a really short story on how I joined up with ITB. Basically what happened was, Shawn found me on Instagram and saw some of the music I was posting on there and he decided to reach out about potentially working together on new ITB stuff. So I ended up writing a few demos to see if it was going to work out and PREY was one of the songs I sent over to Shawn. He really liked it and I became apart of the ITB family.

What was it like writing I, The Breather’s comeback track “PREY”?

That was a very interesting experience. So this isn’t the first time I’ve joined an already established band. With that being said trying to hop into an established band and write music that sounds like that band (in this case ITB) is a pretty hard thing to do. I really wanted to keep the iconic ITB sound but I wanted to also make it a bit more modern seeing as the previous music is 6+ years old now. I also wanted to add my own style into the song, which I knew was going to be a hard task to get all these elements put together in the correct way. When Shawn talked to me about his vision for the new music he said he wanted it to be like These Are My Sins but heavier, like a lot heavier. So I kinda just took that idea and ran with it. PREY is a song that I felt really captured the elements of classic ITB but also adding in my own style.

Tell us about your favorite guitar and your preferred gear?

My favorite guitar has to be my custom 8 string. It’s a Kiesel Aries model with a buckeye burl top, which is probably my favorite guitar top wood. I recently got a Kiesel 7 string Zeus, and let me tell you that’s a close 2nd favorite, but 8 strings are definitely where I feel “at home”. So for my preferred gear, Kiesel is my go to for guitars. I have 4 of them and I honestly wouldn’t want anything else. They are truly killer guitars. I was lucky enough to get the opportunity to join the Kiesel family and I couldn’t be happier. I’m also endorsed by a company called Neural DSP and if you haven’t heard of them, they are a company that make guitar plugins for recording. All their plugins sound absolutely incredible. ITB and Reflections actually used their plugin called Fortin Nameless for Willow and PREY. I think another must have for writing and recording is definitely Get Good Drums. They are the best sounding and easiest to use drum samples on the market in my opinion. As far as live gear, my setup is actually really simple. I used to use a Kemper live but after joining up with Reflections I switched over to a Line 6 Helix. I run the Helix into a really simple poweramp that feeds into my 4X12 Orange cab. With that being said we might be making a switch to the new Neural DSP Quad Cortex. That thing looks wild.

Anything you can tell us about upcoming I, The Breather? New album in the works maybe?

Honestly I feel like this is going to be very disappointing for people but as of right now the plan for ITB isn’t looking like an album is going to be put together. At this time we feel like releasing singles for a little bit is going to be the best move for us. We’ll be able to get songs out faster and not stress about a full length. At the moment we are doing everything DIY as we are no longer with Sumerian Records, but if we do end up signing with them again or another label we will absolutely have a full length put together.

When did you first pick up guitar?

Sorry in advance that is this a long story lol

So I started playing music when I was in like 4th grade or something like that. I played trumpet in school band and I actually did that all the way through high school. I think it was 7th or 8th grade when a friend of mine asked me to play bass in his band, but at the time I didn’t own or know how to play bass. That was right around Christmas time and I asked my parents for a bass. I got this terrible $100 bass for Christmas that year and started playing in my friend’s band. So that was like my first band ever, we were called Sane Asylum or something terrible like that. After that band broke up I started a new band called Season of Silence (also terrible name) but the vocalist never showed up to practice, so I said “fuck it” and taught myself how to scream/sing. It might be surprising to some but for a really long time I was focused on being a front man/vocalist, not a guitar player. So finally I arrive at the answer to your question. It was during my time in Season of Silence that I decided I was going to pick up the guitar. I was in 8th-9th grade so I was 14 at the time. The thing about it is that I didn’t pick up guitar to be a guitarist, I picked up guitar so I could help write the music in my band. So moving forward in time I left that band because I moved from my hometown in Lansdale PA to Hampstead NH. In NH I continued to be a vocalist but I focused a lot of my time on guitar so I had songs to sing on. I ended up making a new band in 10th grade with some high school friends called Letters From Home (again terrible name), where I wrote all the music but I did the vocals live. During this time we played live a few times but we could never keep a guitarist because they could never play the stuff I wrote. We must have tried out like 40+ people. So the band broke up around the end of high school and I didn’t play in a band for probably another 2 years. Around the time I started college when I was 18 and that’s when I bought my first mac book and started getting into recording. It was during this time when I got pretty okay at guitar because I could write and record whenever I wanted but I was still dead set on being a vocalist. So around the age of 19 I went into a Guitar Center and I saw an 8 string guitar for the very first time. Keep in mind this was like 2014 and although 8 string guitars were a thing back then, they were not at all as popular as they are now. Not a lot of people were really using them back then. To be honest I completely made fun of the idea of an 8 string guitar. I picked it up to play it as a joke and realized that I actually really liked it. I had been playing 6s for years and even 7s for a couple years but nothing felt like this 8 string I had just picked up. I left the store and it’s the only thing I was thinking about on the way home. Keep in mind I was living in the middle of nowhere NH so my drive home was 45 minutes. I literally went back as soon as I got home and put the guitar on layaway. I wanted that thing so damn bad that I went back again only a couple days later to just pay it off and take it home. I remember I was so in love and inspired by that guitar I wrote like 4 songs that day. So basically this whole long story is how I came to from playing trumpet to bass to then wanting to be a vocalist more than anything to then finally loving guitar and completely changing my mindset. It was then that I made my first band that I would actually be the “guitarist” of called Hollow Point.

How did you manage to get in touch with Reflections?

This story is really similar to the ITB story. But to give you a little bit of detail on the backstory, I was living in AZ at the time and I was playing guitar in a band from LA called Mothersound. Mothersound was a melodic sadboi metalcore band that sounded like a mix of Silent Planet and Invent Animate. I love that kind of stuff but I was really feeling a void and missing the heavy low tuned 8 string stuff that got me into playing guitar in the first place. So I made my solo project called Dal Av. At the time I was really getting into THALL music, stuff like Humanity’s Last Breath and Vildhjarta. I wrote an EP and released that back in April 2019. During the summer of 2019 Mothersound pretty much toured the entire summer and by the end we decided to call it quits for a number of reasons. I made the decision I was going to move from AZ to Lafayette Louisiana at the end of that tour. For a lot of reasons that I won’t get into here I was pretty much fed up with my career in music. It didn’t seem like things were ever going to work out for me but I didn’t want to completely give up, so with my main band breaking up and me moving across the country I decided I would spend my time just working on my solo project Dal Av. Not even 2 weeks later Jake reached out to me on Facebook because he had found my solo project and loved the music I was writing. He asked if I wanted to help with the new Reflections album and if things worked out if I’d want to join.

What was your favorite song off of Reflection’s “Willow”?

That’s a tough one. I feel like I really like all the songs a lot and Willow is an album that really means so much to everyone in the band for a lot of different reasons. I’m sure most people would expect me to say From Nothing or Samara but to be honest I feel like my favorite song is probably Psychosis. I absolutely love the intro of that sound and how unforgivably heavy it is.

What was your favorite part about the writing process for Willow?

The thing I really liked about working on Willow was the fact that it was more than just me and my ideas. Previously to working with Reflections, all the bands I was apart of were all my writing and I almost never got any help from anyone else. When I joined Reflections they already had like 8 or so demos that I was able to just work on. That’s something I really enjoy doing. I like when people bring me demos or song ideas and I can help shape them into the final product. 

What are some of your interests outside of music?

Honestly not a lot. I have pretty much sold my soul to music. I do a lot of other things outside of music but music is for sure my passion and I do it as much as I possibly can. Outside of music I obviously work but I’m also in school for my masters in digital marketing. I like marketing a lot and find it really fun, plus is super useful to know how to do when you’re in a band. I’m also really into anime. I have been a huge anime nerd for a real long time now. I used to be a huge gamer but not so much anymore. Lately I just play games that have a great story line. The Last of Us is probably one of my favorites. Also since I brought up The Last of Us, my super unpopular opinion is that I absolutely love the 2nd game. Not a lot of people did but I’m a weirdo and I love stories that are depressing and bleak as hell. But yeah, writing music and promoting music are the things that really make me happy at the end of the day.