Artist Interview: The Younger Brothers
The up-and-coming throwback folk-pop duo talks about their origins, their recent debut album and their upcoming EP.
The Younger Brothers. Photo credit: alt milk productions, 2020.
Because we like to feature indie and emerging artists here at Adventures in Americana, it’s not unusual for our background research to turn up very little on an act. Very rarely, I won’t find anything at all, if they’re really new and they haven’t released a single or played any live shows yet.
But when I couldn’t find anything on the Younger Brothers—a Philadelphia-based folk duo with a full-length album, an upcoming EP, and a handful of shows under their belt—I was extra intrigued.
Their first single, “Blue,” materialized on my Instagram feed in October 2020, a dark time in the pandemic and election season. Its soft opening notes, sad but comforting lyrics (“Alone, but I’m part of this / Scared and on my own, but I’m one of you”) and soaring chorus were like a panacea for everything that ailed me back then—I must have listened to it dozens of times a day, for weeks on end.
The song was followed a couple months later by one of the most wildly eclectic albums I’ve ever heard. With a style evoking everything from psychedelic-era Beatles to Jim Croce, the tracks on the self-titled debut are alternately sentimental, humorous and outright weird, but all grounded in the duo’s perfectly matched voices and smart, quirky and ultimately optimistic storytelling.
So I was really excited to interview them and learn their story. A band like this, I thought, doesn’t just spring up out of nowhere that fully formed. I was missing something—maybe they had a different name at first, or their story was buried on Google because “the younger brothers” refers to several other things (including a now-defunct 1970s band and the outlaw siblings by the name of Younger who joined up with Frank and Jesse James).
The thing is, I discovered during the interview, well…they kind of did come out of nowhere. And despite their already-impressive catalog of recorded music, they’ve been in existence for less than two years.
As they look back, they can identify early signs, little moments in their lives and lifelong friendship that you could point to as indicators of where they’d go if you really squinted. But there were no strong indications that Cary Snider and Aengus Culhane would end up where they are now.
The Younger Brothers. Photo credit: Jacob Snider, 2021.
Accidental Friendship
Before they were The Younger Brothers, Snider and Culhane were just the younger brothers. Their older siblings became friends when the two were in elementary school and they got more or less thrown together out of convenience. “We were the kind of piecemeal friendship that develops there where it's like ‘Oh well, the older kids are hanging out—might as well stick the younger brothers together,’” Culhane says. But their own friendship solidified and endured.
Musically, Snider and his older brother Jacob learned to harmonize early in life. “When I was 5 or 6, my mom wanted us to sing ‘Amazing Grace’ for my great-grandmother's 90th birthday party, and our longtime piano teacher taught us how to do it in harmony. She recorded both lines for us; I remember playing it back over and over on the tape player and learning my part.”
Culhane recalls the first time he encountered Snider’s ability to harmonize: “We were on a sleepover in middle school, with my brother and Cary’s brother—the older brothers. All four of us were in the basement in sleeping bags and they were singing ‘Find the Cost of Freedom,’ which is a Crosby Stills and Nash song, with a three-part harmony. I remember one of them sort of arranging it and telling people what to sing and then the three voices just sounding so cool. I wasn't really contributing at that point; it was before I started playing, but I remember hearing that and being like, ‘Wow, harmony sounds so cool—I want to be able to do that.’”
The two friends did end up collaborating on music in high school, Culhane recalls. “I was really into playing folk music, and Cary would join me at some school assemblies and talent shows. It was really fun playing together. I also remember we wrote a couple funny, really weird tunes over at Cary's house one time, and it was just exhilarating to have created something that we made up.”
But one of the signature aspects of The Younger Brothers hadn’t surfaced yet: “For those songs, we sang in unison—I don’t think we actually did harmony then,” Snider says.
The Younger Brothers. Photo credit: Demi Ratchford.
Harmonious Beginnings
They didn’t see much of one another during college, attending different schools, but both moved back to Philadelphia after graduation and picked up their friendship where it had left off—but with an unexpected new aspect. “We were at a friend's bachelor party in fall of 2019 when we sat down and we played ‘Don't Let Me Down,’ the Beatles song,” Culhane says. “I couldn’t believe Cary's ability to harmonize immediately—like all of a sudden you're singing and then somebody else is singing and there's this harmony coming out—it was amazing to me. I thought, ‘We have to keep playing.’”
“That moment of harmony was a big moment for us. The people we were with too were like ‘Whoa, that was really good,’ and I think that kind of kept us interested in trying more stuff,” Snider says. He recalls another portentous moment that fall: “Aengus and I were outside a bar one night waiting to get in, and it was terrible out—cold and raining—so we decided to start singing ‘Cecilia’ by Simon and Garfunkel. And it just made everyone's night who was out there waiting in the rain.”
Encouraged, they continued developing their harmony skills, practicing on covers like “Judy Blue Eyes” by Crosby Stills and Nash. “We kept trying songs that are super rich in harmony,” Culhane remembers, “then afterwards I’d sing without Cary being there, and I’d be like ‘Where’s that second voice; where's that harmony—why don’t I sound as good by myself?’ We fell in love with harmonizing as much as possible.”
Quarantine Art
Then the pandemic hit and everything shut down. Both forced out of work temporarily by lockdown, Snider and Culhane started getting together more often. “It was just this open, free time where you had to stay isolated,” Culhane says. “And Cary and I were like ‘Okay, you’re my pandemic buddy.’ We’d basically only see each other. I’d bike over virtually every day, and we’d just sit there and play songs.” Snider honed his guitar chops with Culhane’s guidance, and Culhane started learning to harmonize from Snider: “I'm still learning—it's hard to teach. You can’t force it; you just sort of have to relax and let your intuition take over. Cary’s the best harmonizer of anyone I’ve ever seen—it's pretty impressive.”
Eventually, practicing covers led to writing their own songs, and they struck gold almost immediately. “‘Blue’ was maybe the second or third song we wrote,” Snider recalls. “It was just the perfect kind of co-write where it felt like we both contributed. It happened pretty quickly, I remember, and it felt so great. I remember being shocked. Just the fact that we could write a song was amazing, but then, when we wrote ‘Blue’ I was like, ‘This is a good song; I think my grandma would like this!’”
Within months, they had 20 songs under their belts. After the first few were written, they started posting snippets of them on Instagram. “We realized, we have these songs, we should spread them, see if people will listen and like them,” Snider says. “At a certain point, after like 10 songs, I thought maybe I could convince my brother, who has very high standards, to help us record this stuff.” The older Snider was on board, and that summer they began recording their first album.
They describe those early days as seeming like “a pipe dream,” but Culhane remembers Jacob Snider suggesting they call themselves The Younger Brothers. “Once we had a band name in play, that’s when it solidified for me.”
The Younger Brothers. Photo credit: alt milk productions, 2020.
Intentionally Eclectic
They freely admit their sound is eclectic; in fact it’s an intentional decision. “Our philosophy is you never shoot down an idea from the other person. If you have a weird wacky idea, instead of saying, ‘Dude, that doesn't sound anything like our last couple songs,’ let's play with that idea, see where it goes before we dismiss anything,” Culhane says. “That gives rise to some unique, weird, unprecedented types of songs that don't necessarily follow a linear progression.”
That’s not to say they don’t have a band identity in mind when they write. “It’s one thing to write a song for yourself, but it's another thing writing a song for The Younger Brothers,” Snider says. “Once Aengus and I found our sound, I found myself thinking ‘what would Aengus probably suggest here? How do I make this a Younger Brothers song?’ I think it needs to have a kind of quintessential happiness and hopefulness. Aengus always helps me sweeten up anything that gets too dreary or moody.”
They take huge inspiration from the Beatles. In fact, Culhane did a deep-dive rediscovery of their music during lockdown—Spotify let him know he was in the top 1 percent of Beatles listeners in 2020. “There’s a sweetness to their songs,” Snider says. “They can have a depth and darkness to them, but they round things out in this really calming and beautiful way.”
A vast number of other influences inform their music as well: Dr. Dog, David Bowie, Elvis, Roy Orbison, Sam Cooke, Crosby Stills and Nash, Jim Croce, the Beach Boys, Fleetwood Mac … “I could definitely go on,” Snider says. Culhane agrees: “We have a lot of weird diffuse influences, but I think it sort of makes sense when you listen to us. Put it all together, and you get this very strange sound that sounds like it's from the past sometimes.”
Despite its throwback sound, the first album sometimes explores very topical themes. Two songs in particular are firmly rooted in the events of 2020. “‘Quarantine Love’ was one of the first ones we wrote,” Culhane remembers. “It came to us late at night, and we thought it was so goofy, we were just like ‘We have to write this whole song tonight.’ We were in this weird mood, having been quarantined for days and days and feeling a little bit stir crazy. We drew from real life; Cary sort of experienced a little bit of a quarantine love.”
Snider explains: “At the very beginning of the pandemic, I had a little something going and it was a nice thing, but we ended up going our separate ways pretty quickly after the pandemic started. But it inspired this funny absurdist song: The world is ending; am I going to fall harder for you because you're the last person I might ever see?”
“The pandemic has had a really interesting effect on people's relationships,” Culhane adds. “In some ways it forced you to make that decision, like ‘Is this someone I’m going to spend time with?’ You only get so many before your circle starts expanding too far. But it also brought this sort of end-of-the-world vibe to relationships. We wanted to explore the complications with quarantine-born relationships in our song, but also it’s goofy and funny and it sort of makes light of that situation, even though it was obviously a very difficult, sad, heartbreaking time. But the way that romantic relationships got so messy was just such an odd externality of the quarantine that we wanted to comment on it.”
Then, of course, 2020 took an even more dramatic turn with the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. “After the initial shock of the pandemic—with not working, and wondering what we were going to do with ourselves, and starting to play music—the next part got even darker and more serious,” Culhane recalls. “It was nuts; in the middle of the night a shock wave comes through my apartment, because someone blew up an ATM and the gas station across the street from me exploded.
“The Black Lives Matter movement became a very big part of our lives. For weeks we were out protesting every day, and meanwhile you're in the middle of a pandemic so everyone's out here with a face covering; the visuals were apocalyptic. It was a very crazy, scary time.”
Out of that time came “No Justice, No Peace,” a pure and earnest social justice anthem. “We wrote that together after a day of protesting,” Snider says. “We’d gotten teargassed and everything, and we came back home so full of emotion, and we’d been doing so much songwriting, it was just the natural thing to do with that. So after yelling all day, our voices really hoarse, and being sweaty and covered with grime and feeling the aftershock of it all, we sat together and wrote it. There's a lot of emotion in that song. We put ‘Quarantine Love’ and ‘No Justice, No Peace’ together on the album back to back because they’re both pandemic songs. They obviously have wildly different vibes, but they’re really stamped with the time we were in.”
Looking Ahead
For the upcoming EP, they culled five more of their songs and promise that it’s another varied and surprising collection of sounds, though related to their first album. The first single, “Sweet Thing,” recalls the bright and cheery 1960s and 70s folk-pop aesthetic of their earlier song “Caroline,” though this one is possibly even more throwback-sounding. Others will be what Culhane calls “crooners” reminiscent of “Blue” and “Light at the End of the Tunnel,” adding, “Then there's this sort of middle sound that's developing which is more like folk mixed with an older thing. It fits well with our others, but I think it's a pretty diverse EP.”
As rewarding as it’s been to write, practice and record songs together, they’ve always had their hearts set on performing live, and that’s finally been happening in 2021. Along with a bassist, keyboardist and drummer, they’ve played several shows around Philadelphia, including opening for California-based band The Dales at MilkBoy. “Aengus and I have been talking about how if this is as far as we come, we've achieved one of our biggest goals, which is just to be able to play music in front of people and have that kind of experience,” Snider says.
“Playing live is just a roller coaster of emotion, and I’ve built my life around high highs and low lows in a lot of ways,” Culhane agrees. “I would say the driving force behind wanting to do music is the performance element of it. We've been Philly natives for a long time, so we have a good group of people we love, and the music scene here is really good. Once more people get more comfortable coming back to the live music, I think there's going to be shows every Friday and Saturday night, and I would just love to be a part of that, because playing in Philly is really, really fun for us.” He adds: “Of course, we’d love to go play elsewhere, but we’d definitely need to be linked to someone else at this point, because our biggest following is right here at home.”
“One of our goals is to do a tour, maybe by jumping on someone else’s tour,” says Snider. “Spread the word—we’re absolutely looking to try that! Playing shows in Philly is so thrilling for us—I can't imagine what going on a tour with someone else would be like, but I would love to find out.”
For the time being, they continue to build their following organically, both in their home town and on social media. “We're not the best at social media and stuff,” says Culhane; “we're both sort of old school—Cary I think still has like an iPhone 3 or something.” (“It’s a 6!” Snider protests.) “I mean, we're not generally social media people who are good with that, and networking is not necessarily our strong suit. It’s something we definitely want to improve at, but for now I think we're more grassroots; kind of getting people who happen to hear us. Our ultimate goal is just having people come to shows and have a good time.”
Even if they’re not confident of their promotional skills, they both believe in their music. “My big sense about our music is that it's just a matter of time before people hear it, and like it,” Snider says. “It's just getting it out there and getting exposure. We think the music speaks for itself, and we think there's an audience for us. It's just they have to find us and we have to find them.”
Follow The Younger Brothers on Instagram: @theyoungerbrothersband
Find them on Spotify & buy their album The Younger Brothers and new single “Sweet Thing” via Apple Music:
Carol Roth. Photo credit: Dan Lee.
Carol Roth is a full-time marketing copywriter and the main music journalist and social media publicist for Adventures in Americana. In addition to studying the guitar and songwriting, Carol’s additional creative side hustle is writing self-proclaimed “trashy” novels under the pseudonym @taberkeley!
