Posted: by The Alt Editing Staff
The most undeniable thing I learned after my first year of teaching high school is that the best teachers have a highly creative mind. This is entirely evident when I look at my hallway-neighbour and 23-24 Best New Teacher recipient–an award specific to our school, and quite true, all the same–Anthony Piraino. Piraino is both a math teacher and the guitarist/vocalist of Boston screamo band oak, fallen.
oak, fallen released their sophomore EP, cyclic, on July 26th, around the same time I got the chance to talk with Anthony about music instead of lesson plans. I sat down with Piraino and fellow guitarist/ vocalist Mike Lipari. We started by discussing how the group was formed. Piraino said he and Limpari had met in college about 10 years prior, but things got more serious “around 2020 when we played in a band called Sandwich Time. I had always wanted to do heavier screamo stuff like Rites of Spring and Moss Icon. When the drummer of Sandwich Time left, it was kind of like a fresh start for Mike and I, genre and style wise.” Lipari added, “The end of that band shifted us to a new, different lane, and Tony and I just shared great chemistry to begin with so it made sense to try it out together.”
cyclic is not the band’s first release, as October 2023 saw the band debut with a self-titled, self-produced EP. We talked about the recording process behind the first release, and Piraino shared that, “The first record was recorded at The Record Co in Boston and was self-mixed. The whole thing was a learning process, and we’re happy with the results for what it’s worth–but we wanted to work with pros. We worked with Steve Roche [from NYC-based screamo band Saetia] at Permanent Hearing Damage. Steve is very driven and experienced, and really helped us with things we struggled with, like getting the drums to really push through in the mix.”
Lipari mentioned of the entire experience that “It was a major level up all around; the equipment and production were better quality, the engineer was experienced, and I think that Tony really developed a lot with his vocals this past year. He seems more comfortable, purposeful and professional.”
My experience with Anthony is that he is extremely organized, and likes to take his time to reflect. I wondered how my professional perception of him translated to the more commonly chaotic expression through heavy metal music. I asked him about the change in sound and narrative between the first and second EP. He explained, “In terms of where and when they were conceived, the old and new songs are like a Venn diagram of the same thoughts and ideas. Some of the inspirations and styles and moods are the same, and some are unique to each EP. The new stuff has almost no melodic singing; it’s all screams, where the first EP had a little lighter vocals. The instrumentation on cyclic is definitely heavier and more riff-oriented, but it shares a lot with the self-titled release both lyrically and thematically.”
It was no surprise to find that he was just as reflective in his personal articulation as he was in a meeting. I then asked what kinds of themes he noticed were appearing in his writing, where he said that “a few of the songs are about my experience during my first (and honestly second) year teaching. It comes with a lot of stress and it can be very unforgiving–like you have to suffer and struggle to prove you can do it, and long-time teachers will just tell you, ‘this is the way it is and always has been.’ It’s hard enough to maintain a space for young people who are practically on their own, and that’s without this feeling of inevitable uphill battles. For me, being a leader is a mirror; you see all of those things that you maybe do or maybe don’t understand about yourself reflected back at you–so you have to learn to reflect yourself. And I did a lot of that kind of reflection and processing last fall.”
The burnout of being a DIY musician is something that faces every single artist and band in the industry. Success in music is like a constant uphill battle, where your first few years are spent suffering on purpose to prove you earned your place at the Lower Middle Tier of the structure instead of just the Lower Tiers–and that’s if you’re lucky. Teaching can be the same way, which Piraino gets to the heart of when explaining the song, “i am the birdfeeder.” He says “The new EP is very themed around bird feeders and caregivers. The album art is a bird feeder, and the song ‘i am the birdfeeder’ is really about expending your energy and thinking critically about what/who you’re expending it on, and why. It’s like, I used to stare at the birdfeeder outside of my apartment. Whenever I noticed it was empty, I would feel guilty, like I was starving the birds, until I realized the birds didn’t actually need me to feed them. It was just nice that I did.”
If you’re in the Brooklyn area on 8/23, go see the band open up for So Hideous at Gold Sounds!
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Luciano Ferrara | @lucianorferrara
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