In a world that is getting more and more uncertain every day, it feels like it’s also getting harder to follow your dreams. Whether you feel like you missed the right timing, or like there’s no place for you to even begin, the bravery it takes to go after what you want is getting rarer by the minute. Old Neon, out of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, sat down to talk to us about making things work, no matter how tough it is to keep going.

Jordan: Thank you guys again for taking the time to sit down and chat with me about your projects, your new release, everything Old Neon. For the readers who may not be acquainted with you guys, can I get a little introduction from each of you?

Sean: Yeah, my name is Sean Michael. I play the bass. I write some songs. I do a little singing. 

Mike: My name’s Mike. I play the guitar and make a fool out of myself on stage more often than not. 

S: And we’ve been a band for about three, four years now, and we’ve just been kind of languishing in self-production hell, I guess, even though it doesn’t really feel like hell when you’re doing it. This is the first time we tried to make something that was above that as far as a standard. And so here we are, we’ve just spilled out into the world suddenly.

J: Mike was mentioning before that this was the first time that you guys ever really did anything that came together super intentionally, which you can absolutely tell when listening to the new EP, Resolution, which came out just about a week ago. You described this process of recording as “soul searching,” which is something that I always find challenging myself when I start a new project. There’s that kind of inherent fear of, like, “am I going to be okay with what I find when I search myself that way?” How do you push through that feeling to get such incredible results like you’ve gotten this time? 

S: I think a lot of it is being able to get to a place where you can trust yourself and your friends inherently and intimately. I do think there was a pushing forward that happened where we weren’t sure that it was necessary or possible. I think once we got beyond that sort of blockade of like, one thing you have to ask yourself before each time is “Is this worth it? And is this something that we’re making that is necessary for us to even see the light of day?” You’re always sort of in a world where everything is auditioning for your time, anyway, and so to put the amount of time and pressure on ourselves that we put with this project takes a sort of willingness to put blinders on and run the race. After looking at some of the demos we had, we all kind of felt like there’s still some more to do here and wanted to try to level up both songwriting wise and engineer wise, so we set forth in that process. 

J: I think that it is an incredible body of work. I was telling Mike that I put some of the singles on for my coworker. She doesn’t usually listen to this style of music, she’s very into whatever’s on the radio, but she really enjoyed it, which I think is really a testament to what you guys are doing, that you can capture audiences that are not normally in this sphere and still have it resonate with them. 

S: That’s wonderfully high praise. I hope that we’ve earned it in some way. I just hope people enjoy it. I think there is a pop quality to it, which transcends genres in some ways. So many people have shared this music. We’ve gotten DMs from people this week that you would think, “Well, there’s no way this person could possibly know who we are.” Those have just been so uplifting and encouraging and a real reminder of why you do it and why you make that choice to lock yourself in a room for 10 days and be literally at each other’s throats, sometimes, with creative choices. Thankfully, this time we had a mediator. I think that was a big difference maker for us.

M: For a while, we were just so excited to work on songs and finish. We were asked to be playing, at first, maybe 20 minute sets and then 30 minutes, and then suddenly someone wanted to give us a bag full of money to play for two hours. And it’s like, well, okay, that’s not really what bands in our realm do, and we don’t have two hours worth of songs to play, so we would work on anything we could and shine it up and get it out. That was really helpful for us, to keep putting out music and beginning to understand what kind of music we wanted to make and how we would make it. We were able to constantly have things to talk about. That was really cool through 2022 and 2023. We still, again, self-produced our last work that we put out in 2024. I think we were really not on board with the kind of sound we wanted. We needed a referee, somebody that we all could trust that their opinion was going to be well intentioned. Certainly, they don’t have the baggage of the relationships that we’ve been growing for several years with one another. We put a couple of names out there last summer, and Bea, our guitarist, suggested we try Matt Brasch from The Wonder Years. We had no idea at the time how good of a choice that could have been. 

J: It’s really incredible that you were able to put aside some of your hangups and feelings and come to a mutual understanding. As somebody who’s part of a creative team, I know it is very, very difficult.

M: I think we were bowing to each other and giving into things each other wanted, but none of us ended up being happy with it. It was like, “Oh, okay, well, you know, I got to make the song sound the way I wanted.” There were just different things that we weren’t happy with, like the sonic identity, because there really wasn’t one. It was just several people piecing things together and each trying to win an argument, and there wasn’t a real cohesive vision. Part of that was based on the way we were trying to record. What’s the saying? You can have things cheap, fast, or quality, but you can only have two of the three. I think we maximized quality as well as we could, but we were trying to do things within the budget of what we were bringing in, which, we’re a DIY band. It’s not a whole lot. 

J: Yeah, it’s not a ton.

S: We are five very creative minds who all have a different idea of what we want this band to sound like. I think a lot of times what was happening was, especially in the beginning, Drew, our singer, and I were writing all of the songs. Half the songs were very much in line with what Drew wanted to sound like, and then the other half of the songs were in line with what I wanted to sound like. I think that because we used the same producer for that first album, all the guitar tones sound the same, and all the bass and drum tones sound the same, so it kind of sounds cohesive, but you can definitely hear that they’re very different songs. One of the things that Matt really helped us with was refueling and refining and refurbishing what we expected out of ourselves. A big moment for us on this recording was when Mike brought into the studio a Helix, which has, you know, a million different tones on it, and he was going through them and Matt was like, “Oh no, let’s just use this old amp over here in the corner.” That began to create an outline of what the tone of the record was gonna be, whereas in the past, we had all been using our best guesses on what sound for a pop punk band would be on a record. None of us actually knew anything about that. It was just a shot in the dark, more or less. You could kind of approximate, you know, because other people had ideas on forums and on Reddit. I think we did okay for the time that we were doing it, but there was definitely a huge ramp up in our guitar tones dealing with a professional guitarist who works with professional producers and who had the benefit of all of that knowledge that they had been building since that band started. Our tone immediately took a quantum leap forward. I often tell people that when we went to Matt, I expected it to kind of be like fantasy camp where he would tell us cool stories about the road and cool shit he’s done, but when it came to like recording, he would hit record and be there just to kind of babysit us, but not really care one way or the other. It would still be cool to hang out with Matt Brasch for a week! It was the polar opposite of that. This guy works from like 10:00 AM to 3:00 AM every single day. He was sending us mixes, he was so involved. Every time we had an idea, he would be like, “This is great. Try this, this, and this. This would sound good too.” He could not have given more of himself into this EP if it was his own record. He really took ownership of how it would be perceived down the line, and I think we’re all better for it. Not to mention, he still did tell us cool stories and let us pick his brain, so it was kind of a win-win.

M: Yeah, coming in after where we were at the end of last summer where we really weren’t sure if we wanted to keep doing this together, and then going into that environment and having somebody that’s had as much success in this industry as Matt has, has given us another degree of confidence that, at least personally, was extremely motivating. That somebody that is really good at this is finding something about what we’re doing that’s worth their time. 

S: The first email he sent us back was like, “Well, I don’t think you guys need my help. The songs are great.” And I was like, “Okay, well, that’s high praise. But also I would still like your help, if you don’t mind.” That was really reassuring too. ‘Cause sometimes, you don’t always know.

J: The best and worst part of DIY is that you really are doing it all yourself.

S: Very much so. You’re flying blind. It wasn’t until the end of last year when Matt started to kind of take us under his wing, and obviously Nick (Steinborn of The Wonder Years) and Will (Yip, producer/engineer) did their parts. Then when we started dealing with Becky (Kovach, publicist), that was also another leap forward where that was another person to say “Okay, well here’s a roadmap to different forms of success you could hope to attain, and I’m gonna help with this, this, and this.” It’s been a learning experience to see the underbelly of what it takes to get a record off the ground. It’s much more involved than just making a record.

J: Getting into and out of the studio is the easy part. It’s the rest of it that comes after that kind of sucks sometimes.

S: That’s when the work begins. I don’t think we even knew that it would be this hard to push a record. To have dates blocked off in your calendar where, essentially, your job that day is to sit down and have a conversation. Don’t get me wrong, that’s a wonderful job and it feels good and it’s nice to talk about a thing that you’re proud of, but it’s–

J: It’s still work.

S: Yeah. It’s the time of it all. Absolutely.

Jordan: That’s something that I don’t think a lot of people realize about any creative endeavor that you’re actually pursuing seriously. There’s the cool, fun part of making the thing, but then you have to be able to facilitate the thing and get all of the other pieces around it in place for it to actually exist outside of your little circle.

S: We have friends here who just started their own zine. It’s called Edgewood and it’s a platform for queer art and drag queens. Zelda Kollins, who’s from the famous Haus of Kollins, was putting together a magazine in, like, a couple weeks and they’ve just hit a wall now on edition four of the magazine where they actually had to say like, “Hey, we need more time. The demand has been too great and we need to like, you know, get our ducks in a row,” which is wonderful because they’re having success, but at the same time, I don’t think anyone who starts this realizes how intense it’s going to be. 

J: Oh my God, not at all. The first time I had to push an article, I think I actually cried about it. 

S: It’s just such a huge undertaking. I don’t know that anything ever truly gets done on time. You know, it’s this weird juggling mentally where you get it to a place where you can accept it, you know? Then you’re just like, “Okay, well this is what we’re putting out.”

J: Yeah. It’s not everything that I want it to be, but it is good enough to show it to other people. 

S: Songwriting is like that, too. You’re constantly picking up and abandoning songs over and over, and writing a bit here, a bit there. In some cases, in our case, I mean, we’ve just completely let songs go because we just couldn’t finish them. That’s why it’s good to have a referee like Matt who could say, “Well, this one has something, and so don’t give up on that just yet.”

J: How do you find that within yourself? I know we talked a little bit about how as a band you’ve kind of been able to find more middle ground, but what have you learned about yourselves since starting this project?

M: I’m a more stressed out person than I realized. That’s probably the first thing I learned. One thing that underscored for me is that the music scene was something I was involved in a ton as a teenager, right out of high school and into college and everything. It’s something I’ve gotten away from for a while, but I’ve just made so many friends in the last few years of doing this. It has been like the most awesome thing it’s given me. I don’t know that I’ve learned anything from that, but I’ve learned that there’s an incredible number of awesome people doing creative things around town and supporting other creative people.

S: See, I’m the opposite. I’ve learned a ton, but I’ve made no friends. I think that I have learned to trust myself a little more. I used to write songs and kind of be like, “Is it, isn’t it?” Now, I feel like I have a good handle on when it’s going somewhere, and if it’s of value. Even though we’re all always growing as writers and songwriters, I think that I’ve really kind of honed in on what works for me anyway, I think it’s different for everyone. That encouragement from a songwriter that I respected who also took the time to say, “Hey, you’ve got an ability here,” is definitely something that still resonates in my mind. No friends, though, sadly. 

J: Well, you’ve made friends within your band. I know that you guys were not close when you started this. A lot of the public perception of bands, especially in this scene, is that you start them with the people that you know, and then you go from there because you already have a little group together. What are the pros and cons of getting involved in something that you’re pursuing seriously with people that you are not already really good friends with? There’s gotta be a little bit less butting heads initially on a personal level. Maybe not on a professional level, but what’s the vibe like getting into this with somebody that isn’t your best friend from childhood?

M: I don’t know how we all ended up with the same sort of mindset about how we wanted to approach this. I mean, it is something we’ve talked about, but not super overtly. It’s finding people that are all on the same wavelength. We practice every Tuesday. We might skip three practices a year for whatever reasons, but it’s very regimented. Nobody has to be here, we’re not getting paid to be here or anything, but that’s just what we all wanted to do. So I think that’s like a pro and a con. It’s hard to find that, and it’s probably really hard to find that among a friend group, right? 

S: Yeah, I’ve had a couple bands that we know locally that have come to me privately and said, “I don’t know how you guys do it, because I couldn’t be in a band with people I wasn’t friends with.” And I always try to say, well, first off, we are friends. We just weren’t necessarily friends when we met. I mean, we’ve known each other for four years now, so everyone’s got a pretty good idea of what everyone else is like. At the end of the day, as the person that started the band, it was very easy for me at first. We only played my songs, and it was kind of like what I say goes. Everyone was willing to go along with that for a while, but I think that people have earned enough trust to go out on their own limbs. Drew started writing, and Mike has brought songs, and Bea really has been kind of like the torpedo through the band as far as what we sound like now. I think a lot of our new EP has been sonically defined by Bea, who is the newest member. They’ve kind of taken the reins. They wrote “Baby Blue” and “Nobody’s Burden” for this, musically. And, of course, Drew added the lyrics and melody vocally. I think that everyone has learned to grow and trust each other as songwriters. I think myself, Drew, and Bea for sure have a very specific vision of writing. Mike and Zach have a vision, of course, but they definitely are more happy to put a guitar line over top of anything.

M: I think of myself as more of an arranger. That’s what I have fun doing: arranging things and filling in the blanks. Zach, I think especially this time, has been very… Even if he wasn’t writing the lyrics, he was very instrumental in punching them up and making them be as resonant or as good as we could think to make them. 

S: It’s like any relationship, it’s always evolving, it’s always growing. We just didn’t necessarily have the foundation of having known each other for 10 years like some bands. For me, it works because I don’t think I could be in a band with my best friends. The first time I had to tell them no, it would be sort of like walking on eggshells, whereas with these four, I feel more or less free to say no. We generally back each other up in those things, ’cause I think the things that make me say no oftentimes are the same things that make somebody else say no. There are bands in this town that have been friends for 10 years and they’re broken up. They didn’t make it and we did.

J: It’s like moving in with your best friend for college. 

S: Exactly. It’s a nightmare. You think it’s gonna be the best thing that ever happens to you, and then within three months, you’re at each other’s throat and nobody likes each other anymore. At least when we’re at odds in that way, we’re pretty upfront about it because we don’t have that feeling of, “Oh no, what will so and so think?”

J: It’s built on the foundation of being able to express feelings about this without it being an issue of, “Oh my God, are they still gonna like me? Are they still gonna respect me because I have to say no to something?”

S: I don’t mean to be callous, but part of it, I think, is the fact that we came together to work, not to be best friends. It’s nice that we became best friends, but at the end of the day, the reason we started this band was to do work together. The personal relationships have been, you know, just a sort of bonus. We’re so involved in each other’s lives, we do so many things. We hit the road together, we’re together so much that it would be impossible to avoid each other’s personal lives. I think the bedrock of our relationship has been honesty and trust.

J: Totally. You guys have mentioned the other bands in your scene a couple times. As someone from Jersey, there is a really strong Jersey identity when it comes to pop punk. What is the scene like in Pittsburgh? All that I know of Pittsburgh is entirely based on Dance Moms, which is not the best foundation for any kind of musical point of reference. 

M: I don’t think we have a sound. You think about various towns at different times; that was Chicago in the late nineties, or Chicago in the early two thousands or whatever. I don’t think there’s a specific sound that defines it. In a lot of ways, it’s just an attitude amongst each other that kind of defines it. A lot of us really are friends and we’ve become friends through playing. We played here in Pittsburgh recently, and it’s so cool that so many other musicians come out to the shows. They’re all in the back horsing around and having a good time together and it’s so cool that we’re part of facilitating that.

S: There’s a ton of bands from the scene that there’s not really one sound. Pittsburgh is kind of a confluence of different areas. You’ll find like there’s some Midwest emo bands here, even though it’s Pittsburgh. We have a huge punk and metal scene here. There’s a lot of emo here. It’s all our friends, we all have a group chat together and almost every band is in it. Even newer ones. It varies in age from people that are just starting their first college band to bands that have been around forever. It’s pretty interesting, and it’s a special scene right now. There are some bands in this town that are really special. We’re going to a show of a band called Go For the Gold, and they’re just out of this world great.

M: They’re probably the most talented band, remotely adjacent to what we do.

S: They’re a little more punk than we are, but they’re just so goddamn good. I can’t wait to see ’em. I’m wearing a Crash Nebula hat right now. They’re a local emo band . I could name drop a hundred bands right now. There’s so many great bands, it’s shocking, honestly.  Pittsburgh really isn’t associated with having a bigger music scene. Feeble Little Horse came out of here. There’s a band called Gaadge that was recently written about in, I believe, Pitchfork. There’s a scene here that is bubbling that like the rest of the US probably doesn’t even know about, but it’s one of the best music scenes in the country. I’m sure people would hear that and think about how brazen it is for somebody to say that, but if you were here, you would be shocked. This is the most band centric town that I could even think of. It just seems like there’s something happening here right now, so it’s cool to be a part of that.

J: It seems like you guys have built a great community between you and the other bands that you know and love that are coming up in this Pittsburgh scene right now. How would you say that that community has supported you as you’ve really pushed the throttle?

M: We’ve all grown together too, which is cool. We were getting started coming out of the pandemic. A number of the venues in town closed during that time or really reorganized the way they did business. I’ve always enjoyed going to shows. It wasn’t intentionally working together, but we all realized that we all want an audience to play for. If you see a couple of extra people at a show, it just starts to make it that community that we were talking about. We’ve done some really cool things. There’s a kid that comes to a lot of local shows and his birthday was in February, and the whole scene threw him a birthday party. He comes out to see all of us, so we all went and met at a bowling place and had some beers one night. That’s the kind of thing that’s been the most rewarding about all of this. 

S: Last December, we had a local pop punk/emo fest, and we tried to put on the bands that we felt needed extra eyes on them in a room with nine other bands, ten including us. We just had a day-long celebration of what we’re doing. If you go to a lot of local shows, you’ll see the same handful of people. They end up being a part of the scene, too, even though they’re not in a band. Like in Brian’s case, which is who Mike was talking about, he’s just around and we’re always together. He’s just one of those guys who loves shows. We got plenty of those in the scene. There really is no separator between someone like that and someone in a band. We’re all just in it together. I can’t stress this enough — It’s a special time to be a band in this area, because everyone seems to be drawing for once.

J: I feel like it had shifted for a while, that it was not about being a good live band, doing your thing on stage. It was about, what are you putting out on streaming? What are your numbers like? It wasn’t about being able to fill a room based on your live shows.

M: You think back over the last year or so, and a number of bands from town have headlined shows with over a hundred people in the crowd. It’s just so cool to see it.  

S: We’ve talked all so much today about being a band, but really, the number one thing I do in this scene is just go to shows. I’m at so many more shows than we even play, and that’s what I like, you know? I’m just happy to be a part of it. I’m happy to see so many people doing good work and writing songs that are urgent and viable. To see them succeed is special for me, even as a total outsider. It’s just a wonderful experience to be here in a town where there is comradery and there is an initiative like, hey, we’re gonna be here for each other. If you draw 50 and my band draws 200, now guess what? Your band draws 250. That’s really the mentality, I hope, of everyone, but certainly of us.

J: I feel like some people forget the community aspect of it when they start a creative project, which is really such a shame because that’s what makes all of this so special to be a part of.

M: Yeah. At the end of the day, we’re not all getting signed and going on Warped Tour. We have mortgages and children and things like that. That doesn’t mean that we don’t wanna take what we’re doing seriously and try to make the best music that we can. We wanna create good recordings, but we wanna create a cool live experience that gets our music across. That’s different from somebody that wants a bunch of numbers on a Spotify account. You do different things to try to make one or the other happen, and we certainly wouldn’t mind people listening to us on platforms, but the immediate thing that we’re typically doing is promoting a show that we’re playing.

S: There are, of course, those people that are out for themselves, but Pittsburgh’s pretty good about ostracizing those people quickly. So you either learn that you’re gonna be part of it or you’re not. Pittsburgh is very self-regulating in that way. One of my edicts, of which there are many, is that every show we play, we’re gonna put a new band on from Pittsburgh that has no draw, that cannot help us in any way. But they’re fucking great and they deserve to be heard. Last time we played in Pittsburgh, we put on this band called Eastern Pine. Kind of an emo-y, yell-y sound, but god damn. They were so good.

M: Very good.

S: It was one of their first big platforms to play for everyone. My hope now is that the 200 people that got to see them that had never seen them before will be with that band for the rest of their working life as they grow. I think that the most important thing you can do as a human being, but also as an artist, is just bring other people in. I always say, you know, what if Eastern Pine becomes the biggest band in the universe? Well, guess what? They’re gonna want to help us or help one of the other two bands that played that night because we helped them when they were coming up. This is all community based. These are all very simple shared ideas that we all mutually have. You don’t have to worry about the competition of it all because if any band in this town gets big, well, that’s great news for me because I’ve helped god damn near every one of ’em. That’s good news for all of us, because we’ve all been on the same shows and helped each other.

J: It’s what I tell my friends all the time, like, “I’m getting better and I’m taking you with me. You don’t have a choice.”

S: Exactly. That’s our mentality here for sure. 

J: And personally, I think it’s the right one to have. 

S: I agree. 

J: I always tell people that I got to where I am because people have helped me so much and given me advice and guidance in ways that have been so invaluable. And also because I made a dream board. That’s why I’ve gotten to where I am. If you had to make a dream board, what would be on it?

M: It’s funny because by the summer of 2023, I assumed that we did everything we could potentially, theoretically do as a new band. I literally did have to rethink that. My vision board is always just to keep doing what we’re doing and better. There’s a lot of room to improve and the more we keep improving, the more I keep improving, whether it’s my playing or the behind the scenes stuff that I do to help the band that’ll allow us to do more.

S: I think for me, my dream board is pretty full already. I have a wonderful partner. I have a wonderful home. I have a great cat. I’m really feeling pretty sturdy at this point in my life. I think for us, my dream would be if we could just take the next step, whatever that is. Get to the next echelon. Maybe we have 10,000 listeners. I don’t even know how many listeners we have. Maybe next year we have 20,000, and that’ll feel good. Maybe, you know, we keep on hitting the road, keep on touring, keep on trading shows. Maybe we get on like a small run with someone if money and time allow. We’ll just keep plugging away. I feel like I’m too used to how everything works to expect some sort of giant windfall overnight, but you know, we’ve been progressing this whole time little by little. So if we could just keep doing that, that’d be wonderful. 

J: Yeah. One step at a time. What is next for you guys? Beside Resolution that just came out, you’ve got a couple tour dates this summer with Afloat. What else can we expect from Old Neon? 

M: We have to write more music, I guess. 

S: Yeah. We’ll see if the next batch of songs is any good, and we’ll decide if that’s something we want to keep pursuing or if we wanna just all become lumberjacks or something and head out into the deep woods and never to be heard from again. I think for right now, the hope is that we make another album that has some sort of meaning to us and hopefully if Matt’s available, we’ll be able to record it with him. We’ll just keep plugging away. If we get offered an extended road trip, that would be cool. Otherwise, we’re just gonna keep writing and keep performing and keep trying to be the best members of this community and the best kind of citizens of Pittsburgh pop punk and northeast pop punk as we can possibly be. And I guess we’ll go from there. 

J: Sometimes that’s all you can do.

S: Exactly.

Wherever the next steps take Old Neon — whether it’s another hometown show or back out on the road, or back into the studio — we’ll be tuning in to see where they end up next. 

Follow along yourselves! Find Old Neon on Instagram and TikTok, as well as their website. Resolution is out now on your preferred streaming platform.