Community Spotlight: Ethan Shantie of Sunflflo’er
First, can you explain what you do in the North Country, specifically as it relates to art and entertainment?
I was born and raised in the North Country and I’ve been involved in the DIY music scene since I was 14. I’ve been in about a dozen short-lived bands in that time and playing with mostly the same group of guys since I was 22. I play drums in a punk band called Sunflo’er. It’s easier to say punk than anything else because punk is this kind of umbrella term that encapsulates everything that we do, but the labels “metal,” “metalcore” and “mathcore,” have been used to describe us, too. We’ve been playing together for 12 years and have released three full-length records, our most recent on Dark Trail Records based in San Francisco, Calif. It’s called “All These Darlings and Now Me,” a line we lifted from Anne Carson’s “Autobiography of Red.”
I also attended SUNY Potsdam and graduated with a degree in creative writing. For the most part, I studied poetry under the late Dr. Maurice Kenny, who was my mentor and friend until he passed a few years ago. Since graduating in 2010, I’ve released a chapbook of poetry, “Poems for Danielle Steele’s Purple Prose,” and a full-length book of poetry, “We Meet by Accident,” both through small New York presses. I think they’re both out of print now!
In the last few years, I’ve gotten into collage, and have made album covers, shirt designs and fliers for a few New York punk bands.
What inspired you to get started with all these art endeavors?
As a whole, I’m not sure that there was one principal inspiration – making art is just always something I’ve done and it’s kind of difficult to picture a world where it’s not the driving force of my life. I started playing saxophone in grade school, and from there I knew I wanted to get more involved in music. As a teenager, I picked up the guitar, and later drums, and have always played in one band or another with very few breaks. I started writing short stories from a young age, too, and knew I wanted to attend college to improve my writing ability. I never operated under any sort of assumption that I would achieve gainful employment through writing, but just wanted to get better at something I felt drawn to do. While at SUNY Potsdam, I got involved in the college radio station, WAIH, which surprisingly turned into a career that had a lot of crossover with my studies and personal pursuits. That’s also resulted in some pretty cool freelance editing and writing gigs. SUNY Potsdam is also where I met Carter Jones, who has been my bandmate and musical partner for the life of this band. And truthfully, collage/visual art came about because I was bored and depressed. In 2017, I quit my previous radio gig (hosting a morning country music show), with meager savings and very little prospects for future employment. I had a lot of downtime, and my partner, Erin, encouraged me to try my hand at collage making since I had expressed an interest but had lacked the nerve or motivation prior. I was really only doing it to pass the time, but I found I really enjoyed the process of finding images that seemed to work well together; on top of that, it seemed like a no-brainer to add some of my poetry onto the images. My biggest project was creating a lyric zine for the band’s second album, “NO HELL.” We had run into some disagreements with our record label and so we decided to pursue other options. Having very little money to put into a physical release, we thought it would be cool to do something a little unique and so I spent about a month making collages and putting it together into a booklet. Our guitarist, Carter, worked on the digital layout for it, and we compiled some work from other DIY stalwarts like Dr. Derek Maus (SUNY Potsdam) and our friend Kyle Warner (of the band Like Lions). I guess that’s a long-winded answer, but I don’t know. I just like to do a lot of stuff all the time, often to my mental detriment.
The music industry is an extremely difficult field to enter. Have you ever had any struggles as a band? If so, how did you overcome them and stick with it? Or was it just instant success?
Success is only what you make of it. It is not at all unrealistic or foolhardy to want to pursue a career in music as a working, gigging musician. There are lots of ways to create a career out of playing an instrument, but for me, and for us, it’s not really something we want. I can confidently speak for the band when I say that success is just writing music that we like and putting it out into the world for our friends to enjoy. That it resonates with anyone at all is a bonus, but it is truly an honor. That something you’ve made out of thin air can have an emotional impact is incredibly rewarding and, frankly, longer lasting than getting $20 from somebody who wants to buy a shirt.
So no, it was not an instant success because it takes time to kill a little bit of your ego. When we first started, we absolutely felt like we were doing something wrong because we either weren’t getting good opportunities or we weren’t getting bigger shows or whatever. And once we just decided to say screw it and only worried about making music we liked, we started having a lot more fun, and as a result, a lot more people seemed to be having fun with us. The music that we’ve just released is, in my opinion, our best ever because the sole purpose was to write music that we wanted to play and that we wanted to listen to. That’s success for me.
As a writer myself, I struggle sometimes with ideas and coming up with new stories. Who is the writer/lyricist of your group and is creating the next song or lyric ever a challenge? Is it a collaborative effort?
Every aspect of our band is collaborative. We all take part in writing guitar, drums, bass, vocals, and lyrics. We each have a say in how our band is visually and sonically represented, including our music videos, social media, and artwork. There are moments when one or the other person is at a loss and says “I don’t know what to do with/about this,” and hands the reins over. But every moment and note is scrutinized heavily and exhaustively. Our records aren’t that long – they’re all about half an hour or less. And sometimes when all is said and done and we look at the run time, we can think – “really, that’s it?” Because we’ve spent so much energy on all of it. But there is very little on our records that aren’t workshopped about 100 times before it gets cemented.
The lyrics for this record did take a slightly different approach. Before the writing process really began in full force, we added a dedicated vocalist/frontperson to the band, when previously we had all handled vocal duties while playing our respective instruments, chief among us, Carter. All four of us contributed lyrics to a shared google doc, which our vocalist, Jeff, then compiled into a cohesive set for each song.
We had been putting words, phrases, and stanzas into this shared doc without necessarily intending for any one thing to match a song. Not without rhyme or reason, but kind of throwing it all at the wall. And as we wrote more individually, I think we realized we were all kind of interested in the same kind of subjects, particularly loss and navigating a world changed by the pandemic.
A lot of the music industry stresses having the ‘next big hit.’ Has that ever been something on your mind/minds or is it all for the love of the music?
Nah, we’ve never expected to have a hit or anything like that. It’s awesome that people are digging our latest record, and it’s surreal to have seen a couple of people singing along at shows, but anything resembling a hit is just so far outside our wheelhouse that it’s never really been a consideration. When people reach out and tell us that they’ve been listening on repeat, or that a lyric really spoke to them, that feels like a hit. I had never seriously considered that what we did would speak to anyone outside a very narrow subsection of musical interest, so the fact that what we’re doing now seems to have slightly broader appeal is vindicating in a way. But ultimately, I’m just proud of what we’ve made and think it kicks ass.
How is life touring and traveling? Is it all sunflowers (pun intended) and daisies filled with fun, or is it challenging?
We’ve traditionally not been a touring band for one reason or another. Some of it has been financial, and much of it has been scheduling or life conflicts. We just wrapped a weeklong run of the North East with our friends from Rhode Island, Dreamwell, and that was fantastic. Most of our experiences playing shows have been really fruitful and resulted in what I believe are lifelong friendships. But the longest we’ve ever been on the road at a stretch was 10 days. That’s a luxury that we have as musicians who are not pursuing the craft for the sake of a livelihood. I honestly cannot imagine what it’s like to be on the road for 3 or 4 months at a time, and I don’t think I really want that. When I was younger I thought it would be cool for music to be my job, but I don’t want financial pressure to have any impact whatsoever on the compositional process, for it to take away from how fun it is to just make stuff. We have nothing but respect for those musicians and bands who go out and do it for long stretches at a time but if I’m being real, we like our own beds, we miss our girlfriends, we miss our pets. So, for us, because it’s not a career, it’s fun as hell. We get to visit new places, eat at new restaurants, and make new friends. There’s so much downtime that the risk of boredom is high, but it forces you to make your own fun with the people that you’re with while away from your normal creature comforts. Doing new things makes time go by more slowly because your brain isn’t just wrapped up in the same routines, so although this last tour was only a week, it really felt like we were away from home for a long damn time. That being said, I do think that more shows away from the North East are in the near future, and I’m excited to bring our music to new places… just hopefully not for a month at a time.
Finally, what’s the best part of being a musician? What about being a musician specifically in the North Country?
For a really, really, really long time, it didn’t seem like there was much of anything happening as far as weird music goes in the North Country. I guess that’s just life, things come in waves. Before COVID, we could rely on the occasional show at SUNY Potsdam, and some pretty fun house shows in the surrounding community, but otherwise, not a whole lot in the area just by the nature of the kind of music we make. For all the ills of COVID, I think that it allowed everyone a new perspective and a chance to reflect on the temporary nature of what artists do. I certainly took for granted that we would always be able to play live music, and then one day we just couldn’t. So I think that people are hungry for things outside of their own homes, outside of their routines, outside of their small circle of friends and influences. It feels like something very cool is happening in the North Country, and I’m just glad me and my friends get to be a small part of it.
Making music is fun and challenging and it’s a chance to create together. For the majority of my life, I’ve been making music collaboratively and it’s not something I’m willing to give up. As anyone who has ever been in a workshop session can attest, having accountability to others is indispensable and irreplaceable. I owe it to the guys in my band to be equal creative partners in our musical relationship, which is an incredibly motivating force. And writing a song is satisfying in a way that nothing else is. It’s like solving a problem. You have one piece, but then struggle to find what the next one is and how it fits into the equation. And when it feels right, you just know. There are no rules in creating music. It’s either bad or it’s good by your own estimation, and while it’s crucial that you take and absorb feedback, at the end of the day, it’s only worthwhile if it’s wholly satisfying to you and your musical partners. It’s always a struggle to be satiated in a creative endeavor, and I believe that complacency is the end of your creative freedom. If I’m totally and 100 percent content and there’s nothing left to strive for, then why am I making art?
If you’re interested in seeing what this music is like in person, there’s a show coming up on Oct. 25 at the SLC Arts Council Creative Spirit Gallery in Potsdam!