In celebration of a decade of their breakthrough LP, Harmlessness, Connecticut-based emo post-rock band The World Is a Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid to Die have just finished a mini tour, where they played the entire album in its entirety for the first time ever. 

A few weeks prior to their scheduled show in Brooklyn, NY, at The Brooklyn Monarch on March 20, I had the opportunity to speak with Chris Teti, one of the band’s guitarists and the primary producer for the majority of TWIABP’s work to date – including Harmlessness. Here, we spoke in depth about the production process of Harmlessess, and how this record helped to shape the band into who they are today. We also spoke about future plans for the band, including their long-waited fifth LP, set to be released later this year.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Hannah Fitzpatrick: For those who may not be familiar with TWIABP, could you talk a little bit about who you are and your role in the band?

Chris Teti: Yeah! So, my name’s Chris. I play guitar in The World Is A Beautiul Place & I Am No Longer Afraid to Die. I used to also play some trumpet for us, but we’ve kind of switched things around over the years like sonically. The band started around 2009, 2010, but then I joined in 2011 and I’ve been in it ever since, which is kind of crazy to think about. I also produce our material, and I’ve produced a majority of it by this point. The first thing I produced for us was in 2013; I did a single that was on a four way split with Tiger’s Jaw, Self Defense, Family and Code Orange Kids. Basically, after that, I’ve done everything since. I’ve had various roles over the years, but that kind of comes with where we’ve come from, which is kind of having to do some elements on your own to make stuff work. Right now, we’re doing a 10 year tour for our second LP, which was the first full length I produced for the band, so it has a special place for me. We started iff more as a post-rock kind of indie band, but morphed between different genres of the years. There’s always gotta be some sort of progession and learning and change happening. So it’s kind of been an eclectic musical thing, but still hinging in the indie, post-rock, punk-adjacent world overall.

HF: Going off on that, Harmlessness definitely has a lot of sentiment to you. It definitely has a lot of sentiment to me because that was the first album from you guys that actually got really into you. And even though this was your second album, this LP had a lot of firsts for you. It was your first on a major label, and it was the first thing that catapulted you guys into one of the major modern emo bands today. Looking back on when the record first came out until now, how are you feeling about this anniversary and the reception that you’ve been getting because of this milestone?

CT: It’s been fun relearning the songs! I have the Pro Tools recording sessions for it,so it’s been gun soloing out things in the record as I’m learning it, because that’s what I’m using to play along with it. It has a lot of isolated tracks, so there’s a lot of easter eggs into what I was thinking 10 years ago – finding things that I know I spent a lot of time on, or other things that I forgot existed. It’s like looking back through a photo album. It was also an interesting and very formative time for all of us, especially for me. There was such a spotlight in the scene on us and the bands around us, especially because at the time, we had signed with Epitaph when a year or two before then, we were playing in basements. Next thing you know, we release a record with Epitaph and play a bunch of crazy tours all over the U.S. and Europe. Everything was moving so fast that now is the point where I get to sort of look back on it. I try not to dwell too much on things in the past, and I’m always trying to have, like, a forward motion and stuff. That’s why I always want to have some different sounding material as we go through our discography. But this one, I was  especially proud of, because I think it laid out the real template of what the band has become – more so than our first LP. With Harmlessness, it was a very big sonic and songwriting shift that cemented a lot of things for the years to come. It’s also crazy to think that it’s been 10 years already.

HF: Yeah, time definitely does creep on you. One day you’re just going through the motions, and the next day you’re like “Wow, I am a full-fledged adult that did all these things. I’m still winging it, but I did that.”

CT: Exactly! Now I’m like “I’m 35, holy crap.” We have a couple interns at my studio, and they’re like, 21 and 25. When I was that age, I was like, “I got it all figured out.” But now looking back on it, I definitely didn’t. I was definitely winging it. There’s also an element to it that’s interesting, because both of them have some bands that they’re working with on their own, and it got put into perspective pretty hard for me when one of them told me “By the time you were 25 you had already toured Europe. You were about to go to Europe for a second time. You toured the states, like, multiple times. You just signed the epitaph, you’re doing all this stuff.” When I was 25 I thought I was late to that stuff. Now looking back, I’m like, “holy shit, that was a lot for my age.”

HF: I can definitely relate to that, thinking that you have it all figured out at one point in your life, and then the next time you’re like “Well, actually, no I didn’t.’

CT: Yeah! When we did Harmlessness, I was finishing my degree online. I barely slept during that whole recording process, but I remember submitting my final paper for college, like 4 am and then I went to sleep and woke up at like 9am

start tracking for the next day. Like I wasn’t even out of college yet, submitting a paper on some short story or something.

HF: I can relate to online school as well. I also finished my degree online. That was a crazy time, but two different scenarios for sure. Circling back, obviously you did a lot of the production for Harmlessness. I would love to get a more detailed perspective from you about what the production process of this LP was like for you, and some of the inspiration sources and ideas you were fleshing out while you were making it at the time. 

CT: If you were to ask every member of the band what their take was on that, it would all be different answers. Most of the band was in Connecticut at that time, so we were able to rehearse a lot even between tours. It’s different now, but it happens with most bands as you go. We get together every week or two – pretty frequently, and we were writing a lot of the material at that time. I got us set up with a very basic, like recording setup at our practice spot. We’d have like a basic interface with like eight inputs, some sort of free recording program on, like an old iMac, you know, and we put separate mics on, like the guitars and a couple mics on the drums. I would actually have whole practice sessions where I would record it all and then kind of chop them and go back to the group for feedback. That’s kind of how we were forming a lot of ideas. There were some songs that were from iPhone memos and stuff like that that we’d later flesh out, but we had a lot of stuff written going in for the record. And when we did the record, we did 17 songs. We didn’t finish all of them, but I’d say full band stuff about 15 to 16, and then one of them was acoustic with stuff that I added later. They all obviously didn’t end up on the record, but, some of them have come out later on for like, rarities and B sides and stuff. We do change things a lot in the studio, so I think it’s really good to have the openness to do that, to really use the studio as an instrument. During the recording process, it was ridiculously long days because it was a pretty tight schedule from when we started recording it to the turn in date. It was three weeks, obably worked from about 10 or 11am till I would be tracking till about 11 at night, and then I would work on edits that night, unti, like, 3am for the for the following day, or like stuff I had just tracked. So pretty much three weeks of non-stop craziness. After that, there was another four weeks until the record was due. I tracked a lot of my stuff after everyone left because I had so much to fit in from the rest of the band, so I was tracking everything and still trying to get the mix together during those four weeks. I ended up handing it in the day before it was due. As far as my influences go, they were pretty across the board. My main influence was this early metalcore leaning band called Living Sacrifice. They have a record, Hammering Process, that has amazing second drum set work, and I would listen to that at night before I went to sleep. I was trying to pull influence from that percussion-wise, because they did such cool percussion work. Another pretty obvious one for me was mewithoutYou. We toured with them a lot and during the tour cycle for Harmlessness, we toured with them a couple of times, including the US and Europe. Overall, I was influenced by a lot more heavier bands because I wanted our heavier parts to be a little heavier. The whole record was the craziest thing I’ve done up until that point in terms of production. Every day was a learning process. There’s a lot of things from that record I still do today, but that record was like “What could I do? I’m gonna find out.”

HF: Obviously, making Harmless was a huge learning process for you. Reflecting on it now, I’d love to hear about what worked for you, what didn’t work for you, and how whatever you learned from the production of Harmlessness has helped you improve on your work, whether it would be through TWIABP or with other bands you’ve produced for.

CT: Harmlessness definitely made it so a lot of people come to me with very grand record ideas because especially at the time, it was pretty dense. There’s strings, and we had three or four different guitars contribute to it. It was a collaborative process where we had a lot of minds contributing to that record. I work with a lot of bands on a daily basis, and so it helped me, especially with the collaborative part of the process – working with different session musicians to add something to the record and being able to communicate with them on what we would or wouldn’t want. It was such a quest of how far I can go with the songs at that time for what I was able to do, among trying to manage four different guitarists – including myself – that were contributing with the album. It’s kind of like when I was a kid, where I played the trumpet in orchestral bands and I played the guitar in my high school’s jazz band. Those things were helpful because it taught me how to work with an ensemble that was bigger than, like, say, a three or four piece normal rock band. And like, seeing where your instrument fits, not being like, “Oh, I have to play every note all at once, all the time, every second of the song.” I think the problem with a lot of guitarists is that they try to fill a lot of space with their one thing, there’s multiple people in the band that have to fit stuff. On Harmlessness, I had to worry about fitting in synths, multiple vocalists, strings, multiple guitarists, percussion, any other extra elements we were adding. A big focus for me, especially on Harmlessness, was having our synth player and vocalist, Katie, have more vocals. She had been singing more live, and I was like “Oh, she needs to be, like, a thing on this record. We need to feature her more.” She was kind of more shy at the time, and she’d add some stuff here or there. But I remember really, really wanting to push her to add more vocally, even if it’s like harmony or something like that. Starting with that record, I really tried to get her and our main vocalist, Dave, to work together on certain stuff. Like, “hey, your homework for today is like, go through the lyrics of this certain whatever song we have next. I want you both to communicate with each other and plan out who’s going to sing what part.” And that’s the thing that remains in the band as an aesthetic to this day is having Katie and Dave switch off on parts, which helps the dynamic of songs for us, especially. I’ve used that trick for a lot of other bands too. The big thing I took away from it was trying to manage so many people’s ideas and trying to funnel that into something that will work for a song. And that record was big for me on realizing “Hey, everybody doesn’t need to play all at once.” Sometimes, the absence of an instrument or vocal, and when it reappears in the next section or later in the song, makes it more meaningful and have more impact.

HF: Going off on that, prior to our conversation, I did go back and revisit all of Harmlessness and try to pay extra attention to some different details in there. One thing, at least for me, that kind of caught my attention is that not only is the production very dense, but a lot of the songs in there are very lyrically dense as well. Like, “January 10, 2014,” “We Need More Skulls,” “I Can Be Afraid of Anything.” A lot of people resonate with those songs and, and I’d love to get your thoughts on the themes in these songs resonate to you and to other people today.

CT: For sure! Harmelessness our first LP with our lead singer, Dave. He did contribute some stuff on our first record, but this was the first LP where he was on the forefront of the lyrical content. I love that every time he writes a song, there’s, like, a wild story to it. The January 10 song in particular – that’s like, an easy one to start with – , is this whole story of vigilante justice in Mexico, and there’s whole articles about it that he sent me. because at first when I saw the lyrics, I was like, “What Is this about?” When he sent me the article, then it was like, Oh, I see. Okay, okay, this all makes sense”. There’s a deeper meaning. He’s not one to ever be like, writing songs about something cheesy, like “Oh, my girlfriend, oh, I wish you would love me.” There’s not nothing like that. If there’s ever a sentiment like that in a song that Dave writes, there’s a way deeper meaning than that. I was amazed at how he would wind these cool stories within these songs. And because I got to record his vocals for it, I’d be asking him about it. I’d be getting a history lesson from him about certain things or certain stories, and it was always such a treat. I always learn something when Dave is writing vocals for a TWIABP song. Dave has a master’s degree, and it’s like, very apparent in the way he presents ideas to the band, especially for his lyrics and especially on the record we’re working on right now. But this iskind of a similar thing that he’s done through the years. He’ll write his lyrics out in, say, a Google Doc, and he’ll do his research. And literally, after the lyrics, he will have cited sources. He’ll be like “Hey, you know, the theme for this song is based on this.” And he’ll be like, “Here’s an article from BBC or Al Jazeera, or NPR,”  or whatever it might be.

HF: I believe he did that for “Auguries of Guilt,” right?

CT: Oh yeah. Classic Dave kind of stuff, and I love it. You could literally ask him about asong and he’ll be like “This is about x thing.” There’s a song “Wille (For Howard)” that’s about our friend, Howard that Dave grew up with, and Howard’s dog, who was named Willie, passed away. That was a little nod to a friend of ours. There’s other themes throughout the record, but Dave goes in pretty deep on the stuff overall, which I’m always appreciative of and it has carried over through the band.

HF: I’ve also noticed that throughout the band’s career, and that there’s a lot of interconnectedness with within the lyrics, whetherwould be theme wise, or the most obvious reference would be between the end of, “Getting Sodas” and “Fewer Afraid,” – “The world is a beautiful place, but we have to make it that way.” You can definitely tell that there’s a lot of intention lyrically, but sonically as well.

CT: Yeah, and there’s musical passages that were self-referential on Harmlessness as well. And the title Harmlessness is a play on the band’s first EP, which was titled Formlessness. There’s a lot of self-referential themes, which I always kind of refer to as Easter eggs – you might know initially, but it’s all throughout the record. Harmlessness set the template mainly for us to that on records. That’s where we were like “Oh, we could do this. This is a big moment.” We understood that at the time with signing to Epitaph, and it was like, “This is our shot to impress people or just be forgotten,” because there’s a lot of bands that we knew that signed to a bigger label, but their next record flopped, like. For us, I was happy to know that we didn’t have a sophomore slump record. It was like “Oh, that’s the true form of the band coming together.”

HF: Sophomore slump or comeback of the year? Sorry, I had to make that Fall Out Boy reference.

CT: That’s good! Thankfully for us, it felt like comeback of the year.

HF: Reflecting on Harmlessness, obviously, I imagine you have a lot of people asking you, “What was your favorite thing to make on this record? What was your favorite part about this? What about this?” I mean, I would love to hear that, but at the same time, I would love to hear, if you were making Harmlessness now, or go back in time to change anything in any of the songs, what would you do differently?

CT: Oh man … tricky. I’ve thought about this question in the past, and I thought about it when I was going through the album, relearning it and isolating certain tracks. I guss there’s two answers to it. One, I would sort of not change it because there’s a certain rawness to it. I thought I was overproducing it at the time, but realistically, it’s a pretty loose record in a good way. There’s a quirkiness and a spirit to it that’s really cool, and it’s unique to itself that I’m glad that I did what I did production wise, where I intended to or not. But I think if I got that record now to produce, I feel like there’s some guitar parts I would cut, or a couple of random little layers, but it definitely would have taken me longer than three weeks. Since I’ve been producing for, like, ten more years then, there may be some things on the technical side I would change, but I feel like certain things are just better left as they were.

HF: I completely understand. When it comes to things that you spend so much time on, and you put your heart into it, you look at it and you’re and you’re like “Oh, what can I do to make it better?” But what I find sometimes is that just leaving it as it is is what makes it shine the most.

CT: Yeah, it’s like a photograph of that time.

HF: Obviously, you are currently in the process of making LP5. What has the production process been like this time around, and what are the main inspirations you’re drawing from for this record?

CT: This album, writing wise, has been spread out over the course of a few years, and a decent chunk of it has actually been written in the past eight months. But I think for good reason. So, we toured a lot on Illusory Walls. And Illusory Walls is our longest record. A big thing to me is that at the time, as far as guitars, it was almost all me and I tried to make it sound as if there were four guitarists on that record. I went crazy with the layering. I also felt like I had something to prove with it, and it was a big stepping stone for me, even as a musician. A lot of those songs on the record are longer and kind of linear. There’s obviously a 15 and 20 minute songs that are more post rock, atmospheric leaning, and then there’s multiple other songs that are 5,6,7 minutes and don’t necessarily have a pop structure at all. There’s not too much of a verse, chorus, verse, chorus kind of thing. With this record, I was in a space of, like “How do we approach the next record? What do we do?” The??re’s a lot of demos that we scrapped and a lot of things that I wrote that I scrapped, because I was just not happy with them. But I think the material now that we have for the record is awesome. I’m in love with it, and overall the songs are shorter – almost all shorter than stuff on Illusory Walls. “Auguries of Guilt” is kind of the song in between what LP5 is and what Illusory Walls is. With the last record, I was partly trying to focus on certain things I liked with Harmlessness, which was some of the longer linear songs like “I Could Be Afraid of Anything,” “January 10,” “Mount Hum,” some of those that go a lot of different places. Not to say that the songs on LP5 don’t go a lot of different places; they certainly do, but they go there much faster.  There’s a lot more intention and immediacy to the songs.

HF: Would you say it’s more “in your face?”

CT: Absolutely. We just tracked some vocals last night, and Katie is screaming on a song, which she’s never done on a TWIABP song. We also have a song on the record that’s a minute and thirty seconds, and it’s a shorter punk, hardcore song. We all kind of come from that, and I work with a lot of punk hardcore bands production-wise, anyways, so I’m constantly in that world. There’s a lot of cool dissonance on that record, and I really tried to focus on stretching what  musical keys could do for us, and trying to write weirder chord progressions. There’s a little bit of that on Illusory Walls, but once you’re on LP5 you’re like “I need to get a little weirder with it. I like “Auguries of Guilt” a lot. It’s, It’s funny, though, because it’s the second longest song on the record. the longest song is going to be the last one. We had written two songs for a split that were supposed to be with a metal band. That didn’t come together, but on those songs, we went crazy with it. I was like “You know what? This is gonna like, This song’s gonna start with a blast beat.” I just wanted, like a statement piece, something that surprised people, because it’s very weird for us to do a split with a band that heavy. For this record, I was pretty influenced by Gouge Away, Failure and Deftones. But it’s not all metal by any means.  There’s a decent amount of alternative-leaning stuff that feels like The Smashing Pumpkins. Overall, compared to any other TWIABP stuff, it’s definitely the most heavy and maybe the darkest in terms of content.

HF: Personally, I’m not surprised that you’re going down a heavier route, because I did notice a couple of heavier breakdowns on Illusary Walls and those are some of my favorite parts of that record. 

CT: Hell yeah!

HF: Obviously, you guys are still working on LP5. Is there a timeline for when we can expect for newer stuff this year?

CT: I would say by the fall, and ideally releasing some singles before that.

HF: Well, I am very excited for it nonetheless. Going off on that, obviously this year is going to be a bit of a bigger year, celebrating the anniversary of Harmlessness and going on a European tour shortly after. What are you most looking forward to this year for TWIABP?

CT: Honestly, I’m really curious to hear people’s reactions to the new record, because it’s taken up so much of my life lately. it’s been such a big part of it. Normally I don’t care what people think about things, but for this, I’m just curious. There’s a lot of things on the record I feel like, almost like a statement piece, and we’re pushing ourselves, like, further than I thought we could have. And I know a lot of bands say that, but there’s been a very intentional push for that on this record. We originally were going to release this record in May, but we’ve pushed it off slightly, like, because we were like “We need to put some more time into the songs.” I’m also excited to go back to Europe and to play these shows. And I’m sure there’s people that I haven’t seen in years that will probably be at these shows, and of course meeting new friends and stuff like that.

HF: Of course. I’m definitely curious to see what it sounds like, but based on what you’ve been telling me, I’m pumped. Also, I just remembered, since you said you were relearning all the songs on Harmlessness, I was wondering if there is one song on this album you haven’t played before that you’re most excited for people to hear for the tour.

CT: Good question! We’ve never played the first song off the record ever. It’s probably the most streamed song for the band, but we’ve actually never played it – not even on the tour cycle. I’m also curious to see how “Mount Hum,” the last song, is going to be, because we’ve wanted to play that for years. We used to play it live, but it hasn’t made sense for us to play it in recent years, because it’s the last song on the record, and it never can fit into a set unless we play as the last song of the set. But that’ll be fun. And [at the time of this interview] we just locked in a violin player, and ‘s such a big element to the record, that today, like right before this call, we locked in someone who’s, like, a perfect fit that came from a suggestion of of a violin player that we actually had played with live in the past. This person kind of comes from the same world as us nd his playing style fits the record, and he somehow was available this month to do it, and I have a bunch of mutual friends with him. That’s probably the most exciting element of it – to actually have a violin player who can play through guitar pedals and is very good at improvising to add to the record.

HF: Oh my god, that’s awesome. I was definitely not expecting a violinist to come with you on this tour.

CT: Yeah, we’re really trying to make sure it’s presented in the best way possible. It’s so different than any other tour for us. It’s not just like “Oh, I want to play these songs and get paid” or something. It’s like “No, I want to play these and be able to impress people with it.” There’s a goal in mind.

HF: Well, I am super excited for this. I guess my final question for you would be – for someone who may be listening to TWIABP for the first time, or maybe they’re revisiting Harmlessness for the first time in a while, what is one thing that you hope that they’ll take away from Harmlessness, but also from who TWIABP is as a whole?

CT: I’m trying not to sound corny here, but I think tha this record, that record is, for us, is a big step in collaboration being able to move forward in times that might seem really crazy or hard to deal with, and having some sort of a positive outlook on it, and just trying to create a world with people around you and appreciate the other the people around you. Everybody in the band has had so many bonding experiences over the years. We’ve been in each other’s lives for so long, and Harmlessness was the first iteration sonically and a little bit member-wise of how the band works now. There’s this hopefulness to Harmlessness that I love, and it was a lot of us all working together and trying to experiment stuff for the first time, and experiencing that all together. It was a very formative thing. I just hope that this record could be the formative thing for someone, even musically, because it hits a lot of different themes and a lot of different things musically. It was this life achievement for me at the time, to do that album and really strive to excel past what the band had done, or anyone else around us was doing, and just putting your best foot forward.