SNQLX: You spent years as part of bands — Wildermiss and others — before going solo. What was the thing you couldn’t do with a band that you needed to do alone?

SETH: I think the biggest thing was honesty without compromise.

Being in bands taught me so much – collaboration, performance, songwriting, how to build something bigger than yourself — and I’m genuinely grateful for those years. But when you’re in a group, every decision naturally becomes collective. Over time, I started realizing there were things I wanted to say, sounds I wanted to explore, and risks I wanted to take that didn’t always fit inside a shared vision.

Going solo forced me to fully own the creative direction, for better or worse. There’s nobody else to hide behind. The songs became more personal, more direct, and honestly more reflective of who I actually am.

I think I needed that.

SNQLX: Nashville gets talked about in very specific ways — the machine, the formula, the hustle. What does the city actually mean to you as a creative space?

SETH: Honestly, Nashville has been both inspiring and humbling.

There’s definitely hustle here, and there are moments where the industry side of things can feel overwhelming. But underneath all of that, there are also some incredibly talented people who genuinely love songs and love creating.

What I appreciate most is that the city pushes you. You can’t really coast here. Everybody is working on something. Everybody is writing, touring, recording, building. Being around that level of creativity forces you to sharpen your instincts and figure out who you are pretty quickly.

For me, Nashville has been less about “making it” and more about rediscovering why I make music in the first place.

SNQLX: Your sound gets described as anthemic, early-2000s energy — but that framing only goes so far. How do you describe what you make when that shorthand doesn’t cut it?

SETH: I think at its core, I make emotional music that still wants to move.

I grew up loving bands that felt huge and cinematic – stuff that made you want to scream the chorus in your car at night – but I also care a lot about vulnerability and detail. I want songs to feel energetic without losing humanity.

So even when there’s big guitars or loud drums, there’s usually something underneath it that’s conflicted or reflective. A lot of my music lives in that tension between nostalgia and forward motion.

I think that’s probably the most accurate way to describe it.

SNQLX: You can turn a half-heard melody into something completely new — where does that instinct come from? Is it something you trained, or something you’ve always had?

SETH: Probably both.

I think I’ve always naturally heard potential in fragments. Even when I was younger, I’d hear a tiny melodic idea or a weird rhythm and immediately start imagining where it could go.

But over time, songwriting also became a discipline. The more songs you write, the more you learn how to trust those instincts instead of overthinking them.

A lot of times my favorite ideas happen fast. I’ll stumble onto something accidentally and my job becomes protecting the feeling before my brain talks me out of it.

SNQLX: You Can’t Change Me is your debut album. What took longest to figure out — the songs, the sound, or the order they’re in?

SETH: Honestly, probably the sound.

Some of these songs were written years apart, so the challenge wasn’t necessarily writing them – it was figuring out how to make everything feel cohesive. I didn’t want the album to sound like a random collection of singles. I wanted it to feel like one complete body of work.

Working with Chris Beeble and Randall Kent really helped shape that. Both of them brought different instincts to the process, and over time we found this balance between something polished and cinematic, but still raw and human underneath. There were definitely moments where we pushed songs further pop, and other moments where we leaned harder into the alternative/rock side of things.

I think the record really came alive once we stopped trying to force it into one lane and just let it sound like the emotional mix of influences and experiences that created it.

SNQLX: Your music has landed everywhere from the NFL to Sesame Street. Those worlds couldn’t be more different. What does it tell you about a song when it connects in an unexpected context?

SETH: I think it reminds me that emotion translates in ways you can’t always predict.

At the end of the day, people respond to feeling before they respond to genre or branding. A song can work in wildly different environments if there’s something emotionally honest inside it.

It’s honestly still surreal to me sometimes. But I’m grateful for all of it because every placement represents somebody connecting with the music enough to imagine it living somewhere bigger.

SNQLX: You write from highs and lows in equal measure. Which is harder to turn into a song — the good stuff or the hard stuff?

SETH: Usually the good stuff.

Pain tends to announce itself pretty clearly. Happiness can be harder to define without sounding vague or overly polished.

A lot of the songs I connect with most aren’t purely sad or purely hopeful – they exist somewhere in between. That’s what real life feels like to me. Even beautiful moments usually have some awareness that they won’t last forever.

I think that tension shows up in my writing a lot.

SNQLX: What’s something you put into a song that you couldn’t say any other way?

SETH: Probably fear.

Fear of wasting time. Fear of becoming disconnected from yourself. Fear of waking up one day and realizing you built your life around other people’s expectations instead of your own instincts.

I think songs let me be more honest indirectly. Sometimes I can write something in a lyric that I’d never naturally say out loud in a conversation.

SNQLX: There’s a track called The Silence on the new album. What kind of silence were you writing from?

SETH: The silence between people who love each other but don’t really know how to reach each other anymore.

Not explosive conflict – almost the opposite. The absence of communication can become its own kind of weight over time, and I think that song came from sitting with that feeling for a long time.

It’s probably one of the more personal songs on the record.

SNQLX: Colorado’s music scene shaped a big chapter of your career. What did you take from that world when you decided to leave it for Nashville?

SETH: Colorado taught me a lot about who I was creatively, but it also showed me the limits of staying in an environment that no longer feels aligned with where you’re headed.

When I stepped away from bands and started releasing music under my own name, things changed pretty quickly. I realized a lot of the support and identity I’d built was tied to previous projects, not necessarily to me as an individual artist. That was difficult, but honestly really clarifying.

I think leaving for Nashville came from wanting to rebuild something on more honest ground – to challenge myself, start fresh, and see who I was without the history attached to me.

SNQLX: If someone hears You Can’t Change Me for the first time tonight — headphones on, late, alone — what do you want them to feel by the last track?

SETH: Hopefully understood.

I don’t think music has to solve somebody’s problems to matter. Sometimes it just needs to make you feel less alone for a few minutes.

If the album leaves somebody feeling seen – or feeling a little more connected to themselves than they did before they pressed play – then I think it did its job.

The written conversation gave Seth room to think. The video gives him room to talk. We sat down for SONIQLOOX Conversations and got into the stuff that doesn’t fit into a press bio — what Nashville actually feels like day to day, why he calls it music summer camp for adults, the song that started as a quiet diss track and ended up one of the standouts on the record, and a first look at music he’s never talked about publicly before.

SONIQLOOX: Conversations Play Side A

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