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Do you ever feel, in the best way possible, that when you meet a pair of wondrous people, you’ve interrupted their sitcom or talkshow to the point you look around for a script? Witty exchanges, humorous quips pass so fast and effortlessly you need to be extra focused to catch them all? Well, then you’ve likely sat down with the amazing duo of Tyler & Harlow, know as hey, nothing to the musically inclined, hailing from the legendary musical haven of Athens, GA. Wanting and willing as always to be a great guest, we reached out to this famed pickle ball doubles team, to learn more about their latest EP, great hangs in Athens, and basically getting out of the way of their amazing banter: 

OnesToWatch: I always ask this is my first question: why are you guys artists? 

Harlow: Oh, that is a good question. 

Tyler: Why? Why are we artists? 

Harlow: Can't stop us. Everyone told everyone was like, please stop. 

Tyler: But, I think if we're being very serious about it, we both kind of grew up in in like a conservative part of Georgia, where they want to crush your feelings and and bottle them up and make you a feel like it's not possible to be an artist or to have emotional experiences and be able to share them. We are the exact opposite of that and really wanted to rebel against that. I think that's where it started. 

Harlow: That's a great answer. 

So, this is despite everyone, basically. 


Harlow: That's what I'm saying. 

Tyler: I think we feel a lot all the time. and the only way to make us feel good is to create.

Harlow: Also like, what else will we do? It's kind of what feels right, too.
I have no real skills. 

Tyler: Other than pickleball. 

Harlow: Oh, yeah, we've got mad pickleball skills. If this goes down the drain, we're doing competitive pickleball. 

Tyler: Harlow is like the Serena Williams of pickle ball. 

Harlow: And he is Roger Fedor. 


Wow. I almost want a pivot immediately. Your music is interesting, but we have generational pickleball talent right here. 

Harlow: That's what they're saying. 

Okay, so I'm a tennis player, which I know is just we should be mortal enemies just because of that, but I'm curious why pickleball over tennis? 

Tyler: Well, we’re not at all athletic. 

Harlow: And if we were to face real pickleball players or anyone with athletic ability, we do lose. 

Tyler: We're real bad at it and we have fun playing with each other, but the second we bring in one of our friends who has actually played and practiced before, it's over. It's no longer fun. 

Is there any equivalent to what you do with music and pickleball? Do you guys have a similar approach? I think irreverence probably carries over a little bit, and humbleness. 

Harlow: Well, we try to rbing humility to the forefront of everything that we do. 

Tyler: Yeah, but once we get on the court. No, but I do think it is important for the music, not only to just like get exercise and and get those chemicals really in your brain, but any belligerence we have towards each other – we kind of get it out on the court instead of it being bottled up while we're writing.

Harlow: We're together all the time and sometimes it can get tense… things come up. It's kind of nice to not fight over the dishes because you can just yell out an “F– you” after you score a point in pickleball. 

That's fair. Is there a cat somewhere I’m not seeing? 


Harlow: Oh yes, our cat is yelling for us to let him in. His name is Tequila Michael Cigarette Daynothing. 

Tequila Michael Cigarette what? 


Tyler: Day nothing, it’s french. 

Uh, I love that. You do bring up something tangentially here: there are not a lot of groups anymore. I would guess at like 90% of the artists I interview are solo acts. You guys very much have a group dynamic, clearly. I can just sort of visibly and audibly hear it right now. What gave you guys that sort of chemistry? Like how did you guys know we need to create music together? 

Tyler: We both have been writing songs since we were pretty young, and through doing it on our own and then experiencing doing it together, I think we realized how much better it is to do it together and how much better of a time we have. I feel like it's so much healthier. And we were talking to Andy last night about this, you know if you go on a tour in your car alone, and just play an acoustic opening for somebody every night for 20 days straight, it's pretty depressing. But if me and Harlow go on the road for four months and it's just us, we don't get lonely at all, it's just great. 

I love that. Okay, so you guys are like each other's comfort blankets that you travel with. That sort of collides with another question I always love asking, especially with a group dynamic, what's your process? Is one of you the Serena Williams of melodies, the other the Roger Federer of top lining? How do you guys write together? 

Harlow: Tyler can rip crazy guitar parts and I think we're both such big fans of each other’s music and what we create that it's so fun when we get to create together, but in terms of process…

Tyler: It's hard to say, we just write together and I think black out for six or seven hours and then we have something in the end that we can't really explain, but it's cool. Looking back at every lyric and every guitar part or every melody, we don’t even want to think about who did it. We’re just proud that it got made and that we did it together. 

When you guys are writing together, is it sort of a jam, you just let everything happen and expunge the feelings and the music? Or do you have more deliberate processes as well? 

Tyler: We definitely are trying to get better at letting every idea out, but that's hard sometimes, to be that comfortable. 
And it is always changing, but I think for the most part, one of us will come in with a riff, the other one will be like, that's fucking sick. Boom. Let's spend the entire day figuring out what that should turn into. Here’s a lyric, a melody, really anything. Tthat's usually how it starts. There's just tiny roots. 

Love it. Dialing more towards your latest EP, 33º, are you guys prodigious? 
Do you have dozens of songs that become five or six on an EP or is it just like, this is what we got? 

Tyler: When we write, we kind of write in project form. Very intentionally and every word matters. And also, I feel like we don't write as often as other writers write. 

Harlow: That's also because we write together and so you have to deal with things like, if you're in the mood to write. 

Tyler: And that lines up less frequently than it would if we were just writing on their own. If that make sense?

It sounds like you guys know how to synchronize well when writing. 

Tyler: I don't think it's intentional, but it just happens. 

Harlow: It's our periods. Once a month we write a banger together. 

So basically it's lunar, you guys have sort of like larger gravitational pull.

Tyler: It's a moon cycle. 

Let's talk about your latest EP, and just to break everyone's heart, you had to release it on Valentine's Day, which I love. First of all, why did you guys settle on 33º as the title of the EP? 

Harlow: It's punchy, isn't it? 

Tyler: It's easy to Google, good for search engine optimization… 

Harlow: Good symbol to tattoo (as they both hold up a 33º tattoo)

How old is that tattoo? 

Tyler: We got it in the studio.
I think the day we finished recording the EP, we went and got it. 

And how long ago was that? How old are these songs? 


Tyler: I think we did that in September. So they're pretty fresh. I think “sick dogs” was the first track we wrote. We wrote that in February of last year so that song is almost a year old.

Happy anniversary! 

Tyler: Yeah! That's crazy. But the rest of them we kind of wrote throughout the year. We had the opportunity to write a song with lighthearted, that was really awesome. And then we were in Nashville at this little acoustic session thing with the band. And I remember [Harlow] started playing the “Barn Nursery” riff just messing around. And that original voice memo that we took in Nashville was called “barn nursery,” t's like based on location, then that just became the title. 

Harlow: Ultimately though, 33º was the most aesthetically pleasing.

Tyler: Yeah, and it also represented the main story, the main theme of the whole EP. Which honestly, I’ll let you decide because we just write the songs, we don’t choose themes. 

You buried us observers into believing there's like this mathematical science to everything and you don't really know either. So that's perfect. Let the Internet do its work. Do you guys look at forums and Reddit and all that stuff and see people talking about the EP? 

Harlow: Unfortunately. The first time that I really dove deep was yesterday because of the AMA. I like seeing all the nice comments. 

Tyler: Yeah, but then you come across one that you don't wanna see, but the ratio of nice comments to bad comments is awesome, there are so many more good comments. 

Harlow: That's what we should comment back on Reddit, about ratios.

Tyler: Right. But when I do see a comment, that's actually constructive, I can then think about the music in that kind of way too, and be like, “okay, well, how do we make it better next time we go into the studio?” 
If somebody says it's like, cookie cutter or generic indie tones, I can think, “you're actually right about that, and I see that now.” Maybe next time we go to record something with that in mind, we can just try to be more intentional about sounds and stuff.. 

I have to imagine that's so tough as a musician because in a weird way, music is formulas, right? And then when people are like, “hey, it's formulaic and you're like, yeah, but if I did it without that formula, chances are you probably wouldn't like it, so…” 

Tyler: There's a constant battle between that point of view and also, “but I could be better.” 
It's a weird internal thing that we're trying to figure out.. 

Harlow: Technique versus vibes guy. 

I’m a vibes guy, but god bless technique. I’m curious, when making this EP, did you already have a next chapter in mind, or were you already thinking of the next project?
Is this sort of setting up something for the future? Or is it literally just a moment in time? Like this is a bit of a time capsule and then you'll just start fresh with the next project. 


Tyler: I do think it is a time capsule and we'll probably move past it. 

Harlow: I think that about all of our projects, like each one has its own little world. Or maybe they're all different houses existing in the same neighborhoods. 

Tyler: In the subdivision. 

Around some pickleball courts, I hope.

Harlow: With an infinity pool!

Tyler: A plunge pool in our house. But, I do think we're always inspired by artists who interweave every project in some kind of way, or are able to reference their previous works and expand on perspectives they have. It shows how you've grown through lyrics and stuff like that. I think that's sick. So I think it would be cool to do that. But I don't think we're setting anything up really. 

Does that mean the next project is still to be determined?
Or the next build, the next family home, the foundation for the next thing?

Tyler: There's concrete down, and now it's time to put up some walls, you know what I'm saying? We need to go to Home Depot.

Harlow: Gotta get some lumber. 

Lovely, now getting some more personal questions. How's this? 
An alien comes down to earth – again, because it's obviously happened many times before – and they ask you to take them somewhere that represents you guys. Is there a real place that you would take them to best understand who you guys are as a group, a band? 


Tyler: Toppers, it’s a strip club in Athens. 

Harlow: Probably, Toppers makes sense, for sure. No, the real answer is the cabin in the woods. There's a cabin in Maine where we wrote the song “Maine,” and also the song 33º, too.

Oh, so do you guys continue to visit this cabin? 

Harlow: It's owned by my family. 


Oh, perfect. What part of Maine is it exactly? Is it like deep into the Canada side? 

Harlow: Yeah, it's pretty much the middle.

So it's remote. 

Harlow: It's very remote… 

How did your family come across that or what's the sort of story behind it? 

Harlow: My great-grandpa built it in the 60s. They live 30 minutes from where the camp is, and in the 60s, he built his house and then decided to build a cabin by the nearby lake he’d go to all the time. 

All right, and now it's a beacon for alien understanding of your project. That's amazing. 

Tyler: I would take them also to Big City Bread. A little brunch spot in Athens. 

That sounds delicious. Mentioning Athens, which has such a pop-specific historical importance: do you guys feel like you're part of that lineage now?

Tyler: I think we absolutely appreciate history. We love that we are a part of the Athens scene. I don't know if we're part of history here, but we are here and we're making music, but it's the best scene in the world.
I love it. 

Harlow: I think we're just happy to even be a part of the community. To be friends with the people here and play with the bands that live here.

Tyler: Just to go out on a Saturday night and see them play is incredible. 

I feel like that's probably a throughline in any great music scene, is your peers also supporting and going to see each other's shows and maybe offering healthy criticisms or not. I'm suspecting that seems to be true still with Athens, and that's sort of what makes it special and unique. 

Tyler: Everyone’s just so nice. 

It's like “we could all be better” competitive as opposed to like, “I don't want you to succeed, tear you down” competitive. Which is really awesome. 

Tyler: Yes, we’ve definitely experienced a couple times, not in Athens, but where we’ve met people that don't like watching anybody succeed and it’s just so wild. It’s so much cooler to have a community that is the opposite of that. 

That’s great. You may have answered with pickleball, but if you guys were to do something to cut loose, relax, take your mind off what you're working on, what would it be? 

Tyler: Pickleball is the answer. 

Harlow: Every morning, weather permitting, we go and play pickle ball and it's been a beautiful edition to our routine. And also Thousand Faces is a little coffee shop here that a bunch of our friends work at. We go there and it feels like the Central Perk of Athens. 

Oh, wow. 
Does it have iconic baristas that know you by name?

Harlow: Oh yeah, they don’t let us pay.

Tyler: But thankfully they charge us so we can tip them. 

Love that. Well obviously, OnesToWatch is all about uplifting rising artists, so we’d love to know who you’re excited about that we should be hip on, too. 

Harlow: Ray Bull. They're awesome. 


Tyler: lighthearted, who we just put out a song with. They’re the most talented and beautiful people I've ever met and they're gonna be so famous like all of our homies down here in Athens. 


Harlow: Sean Solomon, Hotel Fiction, Well Kept, Heffner. 

That’s amazing. Well, thank you so much for the recs, and for your time. Keep it up. 

Catch the band on tour:

03/26 - Bronze Peacock

03/28 - 3Ten ACL Live

03/29 - Cambridge Room

04/01 - The Rebel Lounge

04/02 - The Roxy

04/03 - The Independent

04/05 - Holocene

04/06 - Biltmore Cabaret

04/09 - Bluebird Theater

04/11 - Amsterdam Bar And Hall

04/13 - The Shelter

04/14 - Velvet Underground

04/16 - Le Ministère

04/18 - Brighton Music Hall

04/19 - Music Hall of Williamsburg

04/20 - The Foundry

04/22 - The Atlantis

04/23 - Amos' Southend

04/24 - Georgia Theatre