When I was first introduced to the music of Tyler Anthony’s Cereus Bright project courtesy of his 2021 album Give Me Time, he was just a normal dude living in Knoxville, Tennessee, working a full-time job and recording music whenever he had a spare moment. The spare moments tantalized, because the music was quite wonderful. I’m not sure if his new album, Anything, is better because he quit that job and moved to Mexico to open a recording studio, but it doesn’t really matter what you chalk it up to. Anthony risked a helluva lot, and it paid off with this folk-rock opus that exists within a lineage, but constantly wriggles outside of it.
Anthony is a devoted lyricist, but never willing to sacrifice the thoughtful textures of his songs to highlight a particularly clever turn of phrase. This is an album in which details lead to a sum bigger than the parts, but it’s also extremely clear how much these details matter—a tightrope walk few can manage. Even when Anthony gets nerdy (opener “Seven Wonders” is in dialogue with the work of Polish philosopher Zygmunt Bauman) it’s synthesized into something that hits with effortless power. These are songs of family heartbreak, being stuck in seemingly endless cycles, and other subjects I have no problem calling depressing, but the album hits like a dip in a cold spring on a hot summer day. It’s endlessly refreshing, familiar but proudly left of center.
To help explain the origins of Anything, we had Anthony break down each song on the album. Check that out below.
1. “Seven Wonders”
This is the oldest song on the record, and the one that set the direction for the whole album. I started it sometime in 2016, but it didn’t feel like a Cereus Bright song at the time. Since then, the band and the music have evolved, and this song is a perfect avatar for those changes. It investigates time, belief, structures, certainty, memory—all the things that glue our conceptions of ourselves and the world together.
Like a lot of this record, this song is rooted in philosophical musings—particularly the ideas of Polish philosopher Zygmunt Bauman. He described the modern landscape as “liquid modernity,” the massive dissolution of long-held institutions and ideas, and the subsequent uncertainty that follows. It felt important to mirror these ideas with a maximalist approach to the production—a sort of overture for the sounds and themes of the album.
2. “Boys”
With “Boys,” we jump from the cosmic to the personal, examining the people who shape us and the stories we tell about them. A few years ago, I heard two stories about my father-in-law and my grandfather, both being sent off to boarding schools at young ages. My grandfather was particularly young when he went—only three years old—and troubled as an adult, damaging a lot of people along the way. When we encounter people in our lives who hurt us, we want to put them in a category as “bad.” But it’s always more complicated than that. In this song, I wanted to explore the good intentions, the bad outcomes, and the gray in-between.
Almost all of these tracks were shaped in real time. I came into the studio with a list of voice memos that the band had never heard, and we trusted our first instincts. I especially love Ross McReynolds’ work on the drums and triangle in this one. It’s a song I could’ve easily seen being more stripped down, but I love how he pushes the song into new territory.
3. “Chasing the Feelings”
We tracked the core skeleton of nine different songs in only three days. It was a breakneck speed, but really helped us not overthink and respond intuitively to what we were all feeling. Each song took on a different personality depending on the order in which we tracked it, or even the time of day. After the dust settled, this song was the only one I wanted to revisit. While we were plowing ahead, this song seemed to want to sit back—so we paired it back down.
It’s a good song to shout out Thad Kopec, the lead producer on this project. This song is sad and nostalgic, a longing for something that has passed, and Thad did an incredible job building a sound bed to match. This record wouldn’t have been possible without him!
4. “Car Alarm”
It’s rare for me to enter the studio with an unfinished song. I love obsessing over lyrics, and I usually observe an unnecessarily purist attitude of, “I need to be able to play it on a guitar and it [needs to] work.” Also, it’s probably about maximizing control and minimizing fear. Recording can be intimidating. But as the end of this record took shape, I knew I needed a few more songs to contribute, and this one had been sitting on the shelf half-done for too long. I brought what I had, and I’m glad I did. Not having everything accounted for gave us space to explore and, mostly, gave the sounds and production of the amazing musicians more room to shine.
One other hero of this record is its mixer, Micah Tawlks. His fingerprints are all over the record, but especially this track—taking the sea of sounds and textures we gave him and shaping it into something even more compelling.
5. “Only You”
This one is different—right out of the gate! In the process of recording these songs, I knew I wanted to explore new sounds, but I didn’t want to aim too specifically. My dream was to have amazing musicians in the room and, as best as we could, to let their sensibilities and instincts merge. This was a song that had gotten many different treatments over the years, but none of them ever felt quite right. To be honest, even this version took me a bit to get behind—which is why it’s no surprise that it’s one of my favorites. It’s funny the boxes we build for ourselves, but I’m glad for the guys helping me get out of mine.
He deserves credit on every song, but [Matthew] Chancey shines on this one. Though he played bass and added all sorts of piano, keys, and guitar throughout the album, he played most of what you’re hearing on this one!
6. “Drifting”
Can you sense a common theme yet? “Drifting” is another song about the malaise of being stuck—in a job, city, mode, you name it. But, there were plenty of other places on the record to stew in the dark side of those feelings. Instead, we opted for a swoonier feel—almost like being tipsy, the sort of unaffectedness that comes when you don’t feel things as sharply, for better or for worse.
7. “Pink Sky”
This song is an homage to the way I feel when I listen to Harvest Moon or Pink Moon (Pink Sky is also the name of the studio where we tracked most of these songs). There’s a longing and a melancholy, but there’s also a peace. It’s a song about time passing, but not letting that fill you with dread—instead of hurtling toward the end, what if you’re flowing towards some kind of peace? The song particularly shows off the gorgeous string composition and performance of Shaan Ramaprasad, who lent his talents across the whole record.
8. “City in the Sky”
We’ve arrived at the quietest song on the record. Making a full album provides opportunities for one song to respond to another. This was one of the final songs we tracked for the album, and I felt like we needed a breath—a moment to pull back from the expansive production we’d been building. Whereas my last record had been packed with personal “storytelling” songs, I knew for this album I wanted to challenge myself to write songs that were more abstract, more symbolic, and even more mythological. One of my most influential records is Midlake’s The Trials of Van Occupanther and the way it builds a world. This song attempts something like that—to take the longing for meaning and arrival that we all feel and embed it in the fantastical.
9. “Unfaithful”
This song had been on the shelf for a long time. It started as a reflection on commitment—how we long for love and connection, but how that very closeness can also become suffocating. But as I continued to write it, it morphed into questions about desire. In the modern moment, desire is being celebrated more and more. A sweeping you-do-you culture. I love the reclamation of parts of us that we struggle to accept, but the story isn’t always that simple. Sometimes we don’t get what we want—and maybe we shouldn’t. This song could’ve been really intimate and pared down, but I love how we complicated it. The drums and bass especially anchor it in a lo-fi, melancholic groove that I never would’ve imagined.
Our engineer for most of these tracks, Garrett Sale (of William Wild) did a phenomenal job of catching the tone and dynamics of each song, adding just as much color and nuance as any of the players.
10. “Ride”
If “City in the Sky” is one edge of the album, “Ride” is the other. Raucous and rowdy, it rips right into electric guitars and driving drums—as it should. “Ride” examines the inflection point that has to happen to make a change. The leap of faith. The upended life. The leaving of the known. As much as the world has evolved in the last decades, we’re still surrounded by structures or gimmicks offering a path, an answer, or a way of being. These aren’t bad, but they aren’t necessarily good. What does it take to let go of something providing you stability in search of something that challenges you?
This song showcases the unending talent of Juan Solorzano—guitar, synth, keys, bass, sound production extraordinaire across the whole album (and the last album). Juan is truly one of the most talented musicians out there and levels up every song he touches.
11. “Horizons”
As the album winds down, we drift back off into space—into the unknown and the unresolved. To steal another metaphor from Bauman, he describes modernity as being on a plane and learning that no one is flying it. Not only that, but there’s not even an airport where we’re headed. No one’s in control. Landing isn’t guaranteed. The dread of the unknown isn’t new, but it’s ever-present. And it’s the burden of existentialism. I generally try and avoid fatalism, but it also feels important to underscore the fear and uncertainty that so many experience about the future.
12. “Don’t You Fake It Too?”
Almost all my songs start on the acoustic guitar. For this record, I wanted to push into lush production and explode these songs out into their own universes. But it felt only appropriate to return “home” sonically and thematically at the end of the record—personal, folky, and intimate. Under all the philosophical musings and (exhaustingly) existential dread, there are people—you, me—having to make our way in the finite and the day-to-day. The easy response to an unknown or bleak-feeling future is to be nihilistic or cynical. I’ve lived in those places. But for me, it’s not enough. Maybe it’s my Protestant upbringing, but I long for hope of some kind. Even if it’s just performed.
This song is something of a humanist prayer—a call for myself and for others to be participants, to build something ourselves. To use our hands, in whatever way we can, to contribute to something good. Something better. The song’s outro opens up, introducing back in all the sounds and instruments of the album. Guitars, strings, fuzz, synths, the soaring horns and woodwinds of Corin Dubie and David Williford that have been weaving throughout the whole record. If you’ll allow me one more moment of self-indulgence, I love it. It’s something I listen to when I feel adrift. A beautiful, sometimes dissonant symphony of sound—of musicians, friends—morphing together. A small metaphor for what it means to move forward, to create, to hope.
