Ty Bohrnstedt on What's Next for semiwestern
- Daria Slikker
- 2 minutes ago
- 8 min read
For a band that began with two childhood tennis rivals crossing paths on the junior tournament circuit, semiwestern have always existed somewhere between worlds.
Led by Texas-based songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Ty Bohrnstedt, the indie-rock project has spent more than a decade evolving from its early days as The Vliets. Alongside co-founder Daniel Gonzalez, longtime collaborator Jeff Morisano and a rotating cast of close friends, semiwestern crafts music that feels both intimate and expansive – it's a sound that once prompted Stereogum to describe the band as ‘Elliott Smith if he made shoegaze.’
The road to the band's 2023 self-titled debut album wasn't straightforward. After releasing a string of early EPs, Bohrnstedt stepped away from music entirely in the mid-2010s, returning to school and leaving songwriting behind for several years. It wasn't until a chance conversation with longtime friends Sam and Carisa Krause in 2021 that semiwestern was reignited, leading to the release of singles such as ‘velvet sea’, ‘pose’ and ‘condo’, as well as a growing international audience stretching from Los Angeles and Chicago to London, Melbourne and Sydney.
With a new album quietly taking shape, we caught up with Bohrnstedt to discuss the tennis origins of semiwestern, the emotional weight behind ‘zero for conduct’, and what listeners can expect from the band's next chapter.
The name semiwestern comes from a tennis grip that’s about finding a balance between extremes. Do you feel that idea of ‘in-between’ has accidentally become the philosophy of the band – balancing polished vs unpolished, distance vs connection, nostalgia vs moving forward?
It kind of has. The reason I chose the name was because I was a tennis player and I knew what the semiwestern grip was. At the same time, we're from Texas, so most people assume it's a cowboy reference, which is exactly what I wanted. It works both ways. People hear it one way and then I get to tell them it's actually a tennis term.
I think that dual meaning carries over into the music too. A lot of what I do lives somewhere in-between. Even with songwriting, I used to be really self-conscious about sounding too much like other artists. Now I've embraced it. Every artist borrows from other people in some way. At this point I'm pretty shameless about it. I'll throw little references or ‘rip-offs’ into songs, and if somebody notices them, I'm usually just like, ‘Yeah, that's exactly what I was doing.’
Can you think of a song where listeners have guessed the wrong influence entirely?
There's a song called ‘Velvet Sea’ and people constantly tell me it sounds like ‘Fearless’ by Pink Floyd. I love that song, but that's not what I was ‘ripping off’ at all. I was actually ripping off ‘Pepper’ by Butthole Surfers.
They were a huge Texas band in the '90s and that was their biggest hit. I grew up hearing it all the time. It's funny because to me it's a really obvious influence, but hardly anyone ever mentions it. Not an intentional rip on that one, but I noticed it after it was done.
A lot of zero for conduct circles around your relationship with tennis, ambition, and the fear of failure. Do you think songwriting became a way to revisit those younger versions of yourself?
Definitely. As a writer I’m sure you’ll agree that you're always pulling from the biggest emotions and experiences you've had. For me, it's rarely about sitting down and trying to describe something directly. Usually I'll find a word or phrase that connects to a feeling or memory and then build outward from there.
That's when I feel like I'm doing my best writing. I'm not trying to explain an event as accurately as possible. I'm trying to find language that captures the feeling of it.
It sounds like you're not trying to document an experience literally. How do those fragments eventually become a finished lyric?
I don't really write lyrics until the very end. Most of the time I'm just mumbling nonsense over a guitar part.
I don't show many people demos because if they heard them, they'd probably think I was repeating the same few words over and over again. I don't know if it's a good process, but I usually focus on the rhythm and melody first. Then I start filling in words that fit the cadence.
Sometimes I'll hear an interesting phrase in a film or read a word somewhere and it sticks with me. If I can connect it to something personal, I'll expand on it. The lyrics are usually the last piece of the puzzle. Once the music is recorded, that's when I sit down and figure out what the song is actually trying to say.
You stepped away from music in the mid-2010s before eventually returning. Looking back, what did that time away give you?
I think the break was probably good for me. I'd been releasing EPs and trying to make something happen for a few years. There was a label that wanted to put out an album around 2014, and I'd written a bunch of songs for it. I sent them over and their response was basically, ‘This isn't really what we were expecting.’
So I scrapped everything and kind of lost the desire to keep going. I went back to school and started working in sound design. I was still around audio, but for three or four years I barely made any music at all. Looking back now, the label probably wasn't wrong. They weren't trying to be harsh – it just wasn't for them.
In 2021, your friends Sam and Carisa played a big role in bringing you back to music after hearing the demo for Pose. How important were they in getting semiwestern moving again?
Huge. I'm incredibly grateful to them because I genuinely wasn't planning on releasing music again.
I was still recording things here and there for fun, but that was about it. Sam has been one of my best friends since high school and he runs a company called Kowboy that does stage production work for bands like Geese, and julie. They're always out with great bands and really immersed in that world.
When he asked if I had any new music, I sent him some demos, including ‘pose.’ He and Carisa both really liked it. Sam started playing it for people and getting positive feedback. That was the first time I'd thought, ‘Maybe people actually do want to hear this.’
Without them, I honestly don't know if semiwestern would have come back.
Semiwestern is spread across Texas, Arkansas and Connecticut. Has working remotely changed the way the band operates creatively?
Daniel is more of a producer these days. We started the band together, but he's a doctor now, has a family and lives a normal life. I'll send him songs and he'll tell me what he likes and what isn't working.
The person I collaborate with most closely is Jeff Morisano in Connecticut. He's in a great band called Kissed Her Little Sister. We'll constantly send ideas back and forth. I might send him a chord progression and he'll come back with a vocal melody. We have a Dropbox with what feels like a thousand unfinished songs in it. We're always contributing to each other's projects.
Then for the live band there's Chris, Tom and Preston. I've known Tom and Preston since high school, and I met Chris in college. Chris also helps out with recording drums from time to time, hopefully all the time on the new record.
You've opened for artists like Alex G, DIIV and Madi Diaz. Have there been any shows where the audience reaction completely surprised you?
There was a sculpture garden in Dallas that invited us to play a family event. The other artists were mostly pop and country acts, and the whole thing was set up around picnics and families hanging out on the grass. I remember thinking, ‘This could be a humiliation ritual.’ But we did it. There were a few hundred people there and somehow it went great. That was surprising because on paper it felt like the worst possible fit.
The complete opposite happened at our first show back after five years away. We played in a cafeteria at the University of Texas in Austin while students were eating dinner and studying. We started playing and people were literally running out covering their ears. It was one of the weirdest shows I've ever done. I still don't understand why they booked us for that setting.
Your self-titled album arrived after more than a decade of releases under different versions of the project. Did it feel like a culmination or a fresh start?
More like a fresh start. There was such a huge gap between releases that it honestly felt like we were beginning again. The ‘sw ep’ in 2018 was mostly made up of older songs I'd had sitting around. Before that I hadn't released anything in years.
The old project was called The Vliets, and if I'm being honest, I wanted to move away from that name almost immediately. I'd just picked it randomly when uploading songs to SoundCloud. One song got a little attention and suddenly I felt stuck with it. When I started releasing music again, I finally had the opportunity to make the transition and become semiwestern.
You recently hinted that a new album might be on the way. What can listeners expect from this next chapter?
It's definitely a little different from the last record.There's a lot less synth this time around and a lot more guitar. The songs are generally faster and more energetic. Not all of them, but there's definitely more of a rock element running through it.
I'm actually working on two albums at once right now. I've got around twenty-four songs and it's become a matter of figuring out which songs belong together and which are good enough to make the cut. So there's plenty of material. It's just a question of shaping it into something cohesive.
For a band whose audience seems to be spread across places like Los Angeles, London, Melbourne and Sydney, how do you think about touring these days?
It's something we're always talking about, but it's tough. We had a Europe tour booked about a year ago that ultimately fell apart. We were meant to be out playing last November and we've been trying to revive those plans ever since.
The biggest obstacle is simply the cost. Touring is expensive now, even domestically. We had plans to tour the West Coast with HighSchool and, despite everyone being excited about it, the numbers just didn't make sense. So it's definitely something we want to do, but like a lot of independent bands, we're trying to figure out how to make it sustainable.
Aside from the new music, what else have you been working on recently?
The big thing has actually been a movie. Chris, Preston and I have spent the last couple of years making a low-budget buddy comedy in the small Texas town where I live. That's honestly where a lot of our energy has gone.
People sometimes ask why we haven't released more music over the past few years, and the answer is that we've been making a film instead. Chris left commercial work to focus on it, we've finished shooting everything, and now we're in the editing stage. Hopefully it'll be done by the end of the summer.
A lot of friends have contributed music to the soundtrack too, including Black Market Karma, Twisted Teens and Dazy. It's very much a DIY project, just like the band.
Listen to semiwestern on SoundCloud, Apple Music and Spotify.
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