Q&A: Vacation Manor Returns with EP ‘Back To Town’
INTERVIEW
INTERVIEW
☆ BY RACHEL LANE ☆
Photo by Nathan Grimes
VACATION MANOR, THE INDIE DUO — consisting of Nathan Towles and Cole Young, have returned with Back To Town, a heartfelt new EP shaped by three years of life changes and creative searching. Between marriage, fatherhood, and bouts of writer’s block, the band rekindled their spark and crafted a body of work that feels intimate and true to them.
The six songs on the EP each capture a vivid emotional moment. “January Over and Over” tackles imposter syndrome and creative burnout, while “Damage is Done” offers quiet comfort during a partner’s battle with anxiety. Tracks like “You in the Afternoon” and “When It’s All Over” reflect on being present in love and parenthood, tying the EP together with themes of inner growth and reflection.
Leading up to the release, Vacation Manor hit the road for a short East Coast run of shows. They were met by fans already singing along to the new tracks. With more tour dates on the way, Vacation Manor is leaning into this new chapter with momentum and gratitude.
Photo by Nathan Grimes
LUNA: You guys just released a new EP called Back To Town. First, it’s beautiful, congrats! Second, I read that it took you guys about three years to write. What did life look like during those years?
TOWLES: In the past three years, Cole has gotten married, my wife and I had our first child. Right around that time, we were in a creative halt. Which I think happens every couple of years for most bands. I didn’t even know what I liked anymore, it's almost like when you say a word too many times, it loses its meaning. I think that's how we were feeling with our own music. It took some perseverance to try to get that spark back, which is never a fun process. Once we had the songs, we had to figure out how we were going to make this record, what producer we were going to use, etc. We tried a couple different “producer dates,” and nothing was clicking. We felt like the people were great, but they didn’t have the sound we were hearing in our heads. Over the past five years, Cole had gotten really good at engineering, so we decided to tackle it on our own. We knew it might be a terrible idea, but in the end we were really happy with it and ended up self-producing the entire thing. That's pretty much what life looked like. Other than that, we’re a smaller indie band, so oftentimes we pick up jobs in between shows and writing and recording.
LUNA: What other jobs are you picking up? Are you staying in music, or doing something completely unrelated?
TOWLES: When I'm not doing music, I'm a home painter. It is a very funny contrast going from one day playing a show where everyone is singing your songs, and then we'll be back home the next day, and you're just going to paint a house.
LUNA: What ties the six tracks on the EP together?
TOWLES: I'm not a concept writer so I don’t normally go in with a theme in mind. With this EP, I think the thing that ties all of the songs together for me was having some perspective on the season of life I was in, and the way we experience time. As with most of our music, a lot of it is pretty personal and autobiographical. So much of it does deal with even the process of writing the EP. “January Over and Over,” for example, was the first song written for the EP, and before I wrote it, I had no idea what to write about. I felt bogged down in imposter syndrome, which is ultimately what I ended up writing that song about. I think that is kind of the uniting theme on the record, it deals much more with inner life rather than what’s happening on the outside.
LUNA: Let’s talk about “January Over and Over.” You mentioned struggling with creative blocks, which is such a relatable struggle with all creative people. When that happens, it can feel like a death sentence in some way. Tell me a little bit more about your experience with that and what you learned through it or how you combatted it.
TOWLES: It comes back to that idea of getting the ball rolling again after making a couple records, like starting over again. As an artist, I'm at the place now that so many of my favorite indie bands were at when I was in high school thinking “these guys have made it.” That is an ever-moving point on the map. You start asking, what is “making it?” When are you successful? I was at a place where I was feeling that more than usual. I kept thinking, “This is weird. Some people know who we are. People know our songs” and yet I was still thinking, “... one day when we’ve made it.” Learning to lean into the fact that that point is probably not going to happen, where you feel like, without any doubt, I've made it. Some of getting through it is acceptance of regardless of what happens with this, we're just going to enjoy the things that we have. That feels pretty great once you get over the hump of having to prove something to yourself. That even comes back to the conversation of having to do side hustles to make things work. I could feel kind of embittered that I don't get to do music all the time, and have to go paint a house or something. But on the other hand, I don't know any other House Painters around here who get to go play shows or go on tour and that's pretty great.
LUNA: “Damage is Done” is a song you wrote for your wife while she was battling anxiety, which is a very beautiful and intimate testament to your relationship. How do you see your songwriting change as your romantic relationships grow and mature from dating, to marriage, to then having kids?
TOWLES: When you're dating somebody, when you're a young band, or when so much of the future is unknown, there's so much thought around the potential of things. Then you get to the point where you slightly know what shape life is taking. And things begin to change less, and less is left up to your imagination. I guess you start to lean into more of the right now rather than what is to come. I think that is hard for a lot of people too, because thinking about what could be and what your life might look like is so expansive. There's so much to be imagined there and there's so much angst you get to deal with. However, when life starts getting a little bit more cemented, you have to find the muse in it. I think that's a really great place to be creatively, if you can find it.
LUNA: With all of the tracks on this EP I feel like you’ve captured really specific emotions or timestamps within each of them. Let's go down the list of all of them and I would love it if you could pair one word or emotion with each!
TOWLES: Sweet. With “January Over and Over,” I would say ‘90’s. That really has nothing to do with the song, it just makes me think of my favorite ‘90’s bands like Oasis and The Sundays.
“You in The Afternoon” would be springtime. I feel like on the surface, when I wrote the lyrics to it, I was thinking that it was too simple. Then when I stepped back from it, I saw a lot of deeper themes in it. That song keeps surprising me. It feels like springtime on the surface level, which I love, but beneath that, it’s about finally being happy in the moment, and looking at the future with hope, rather than with cynicism or dread or waiting for the other shoe to drop.
“Back to Town,” I’m stumped over one word for it. It's not nostalgia and it's not regret. It’s like that feeling when you run into somebody in a grocery store who you haven't seen in a while. You have nothing against this person, but they remind you of forever ago, and you don't want to go back there, so you just go over to the next aisle without making eye contact. Yeah, that's that song.
“Damage is Done,” the first thing that comes to mind is calm. I wrote that one with a guy named Trent Dabbs in Nashville, and he was a dream songwriter to get to work with. We wrote “Back to Town” together the first day, and “Damage is Done” the day after. We had never met before and you have to be vulnerable when you're writing with someone; you're spilling whatever is on your mind. I felt comfortable with him pretty quickly and it just clicked. I just talked to him about what my wife and I were going through. Now that I think about it, this song might be my favorite. I love that instinctually, if somebody is worried, you want to somehow promise them everything will be fine, even though you both don't know if it actually will be. We wanted to find a better way to say “I’m going to be here” and the lyric “I’ll be here until the damage is done,” just came out. I’m really proud of that line.
“Casio Cure” makes me feel like I’m 19. We came up with the music for this first and some mumble lyrics. I think it sat around for a year or two, and I think we might have written two or three rounds of lyrics before landing on the final song. “Casio Cure” was just the demo title, because some of the lines reminded us of The Cure, and the synth pad on it is a Casio keyboard. We had sat with that as the demo title for so long that it just felt like the song, so we stuck with it.
“When It’s All Over,” I would say my son's name, Van. I hope when people hear that, they don't think that I just hate being a parent. It deals with the first couple months of having your first child, and how earth shattering it is. It changes every rhythm in your life, especially those first couple months. even things as basic as sleep. I wrote it to myself, as a reminder to stay present and not forget that I’m going to want this time back. He's almost two, and even looking back now, I can't believe he’s gotten so big. I almost don't remember him being a newborn. I think I just wanted to be honest about that feeling.
LUNA: Earlier this spring, you went on a six show tour around the East Coast. How was that run and playing some of your new songs live?
TOWLES: It was so fun to play live. Some of the songs had only been out for a couple weeks and it was refreshing to see that people knew the words to the music. It had also been a little while since we'd been out on the road. Some of the cities we played in, we were nervous that people thought we were washed up or had lost interest, but every city we played in was a bigger crowd than it had been before. That left us wanting to step on the gas a little more. It was really fun, rewarding and encouraging to see. There are lots more tour dates to soon be announced!
LUNA: Do you have any crazy tour stories?
TOWLES: Yes, several. There was a day we were traveling from Raleigh to Atlanta, which is like a six hour drive. Within that time, we had locked our keys in the van at a gas station, and a couple bystanders had to come help us get in our van. Then shortly after, a tractor trailer cut us off on the road, and we ran over three of those massive cones on the side of the road. Then two hours later, we got cut off again and ran over a mailbox. I’m really sorry to whoever's mailbox that was, but it saved our lives. We made it to the venue that night 30 minutes before the doors opened and somehow managed to make it happen. That was a stressful day. There was one person traveling with us who was in tears at that point.
