Posted: by The Alt Editing Staff
Dylan Balliett cuts a bold figure in the contemporary indie music scene. A visual artist and the musician behind the project Spirit Night, he is also a former member of the iconic emo band The World Is A Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid To Die. Spirit Night’s last album, Bury The Dead, was released in 2023 after an eight-year gap between albums; Stereogum quipped that the wait for the next album has been an eighth as long. Spirit Night’s most recent record Time Won’t Tell, which dances between power pop and dreamy ambient, was released on October 4.
As a project, Spirit Night has a strange emotional resonance that is nonetheless earnest; Balliett remarks that he likes “coming up with kind of weird concepts and then saying them as sincerely as possible.” The record has bright and jangly guitar hooks; the riff from the record’s lead single “Darker Now” sounds like it could have been written by The Smiths’ Johnny Marr.
Balliett recorded the entirety of Time Won’t Tell in a home studio, with help from collaborators Miguel Gallego and Jordan Hudkins, the lead singer of Rozwell Kid. The album’s creation was a whirlwind of trading songs back and forth between Balliett and his collaborators, who experimented with mixing the album until the last minute. Hudkins, who plays drums on the record, has been collaborating with Balliett for years. “He and I have been friends forever,” Balliett said. “We did a split Blink 182 cover single a long time ago.”
Balliett painted the cover himself, which features his sister and her chronically sick cat in their apartment. “I guess I walked into her room one day to ask her something, and that scene was before me, and I just took out my phone and snapped a picture,” Balliett recalled. “I’ve always really liked that picture with the way the mirrors work and stuff, and I decided at the last minute to try and paint it for the album cover.”
The album is embedded with nuggets of melancholy. The upbeat-sounding “Darker Now” features gloomy lyrics about storm clouds and encroaching oblivion. Wistful angst suffuses “26,” which is about, among other things, losing healthcare insurance. “I thought it was an interesting idea to romanticize an age that a lot of people might think is kind of old. Taylor Swift has 22, there’s so many songs about being young,” he said. “I just thought it would be funny to do one that’s about a fully grown adult.”
The genre of Time Won’t Tell can be hard to pin down; the sad, intricate guitar of “Wendy” feels very much in line with indie folk, but the songs vary widely. The album can feel gothy at times; “Out of Hand” features buzzy atmospheric sounds reminiscent of Cocteau Twins, the drums of “26” feel like they were taken out of an industrial show.
With transcendent instrumentals on “Bertie” and “Memory Park,” Balliett emulated the Brian Eno album “Green World” with the infusion of ambient music. “Ultimately it was just inspirational to me to see that he made this album with little pop songs interspersed with very mysterious instrumentals, and then going right back to pop,” he said.
The album concludes with “Somebody’s Going To Love You For Who You Already Are,” a sweet song in the tradition of Daniel Johnston’s “True Love Will Find You In The End,” while also being a tremendous stand-alone. Balliett found the melody in an old voice memo of him singing, and felt inspired to write the song for a friend.
“I was pretty much inspired by the third Velvet Underground album where they have ‘After Hours,’ it’s kind of like a cute, sweet song right after the really experimental one,” said Balliett.
“I really like when an album goes all these places and at the end there’s a little bell on it, a palate cleanser.”
Balliett was born and raised in West Virginia, where his childhood was divided between his parents’ CD store and an organic farm on a hippie commune. He formed his first band at age 12, a pop-punk band called Pogo. “Someone recently unearthed a copy of the Pogo CD,” he told me, “which is really horrifying to me.” In high school, he played bass in a screamo band called A Letter Home, playing VFW Halls across West Virginia. After telling stories about teenage shenanigans, he would conclude by gravely saying “That is the kind of stuff we were doing that could have resulted in many deaths.”
He attended West Virginia University in Morgantown, where he took a degree in English literature, and frequented (and lived above) the venue 123 Pleasant Street. “When I was a senior in high school I kept looking at their schedule, this was in 2004, and Xiu Xiu and TV On The Radio played, and I was just like oh my god, I can’t wait to go to college! Because [previously] I was in a place where I couldn’t see the bands that I learned about on the internet.”
The Morgantown music scene was a small but lively creative community. “Sometimes now I still think back to those bands,” said Balliett. “They were really good, but just isolated to that one specific time and place.”
Balliett was college roommates with David Bello, now the frontman of The World Is A Beautiful Place, and the two frequently played shows at 123 Pleasant Street, playing in an outfit simply called The David Bello Band. Balliett was a staple of the Morgantown music scene and opened for now-legendary indie bands. “Our second show was opening for the Walkmen. And that was when they had just put out their second album with ‘The Rat’ on it, they were really popular at that time,” Balliett said. “My band, a pre-Spirit Night band, got to open for Deerhunter once.”
Having been friends with Nicole Shanholtzer through her work in the West Virginia DIY scene, Balliett heard about The World Is A Beautiful Place almost as soon as it was created.
“Someone was like ‘did you hear the name of Nicole’s new band? It’s The World Is A Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid To Die, and I was like, that’s extremely funny that Nicole did that!” Balliett said. “And a couple more years pass and they’re famous, which was really weird because growing up in West Virginia… I never thought anyone would ever care about any of us, and weirdly all it took was someone to escape to Connecticut.”
There was extensive cross-pollination between TWIAB and the early Spirit Night, with Balliett often sending demos to band members, and the record Shame released on cassette via Shanholtzer’s label Broken World. “At some point, someone in TWIAB told me that the reason they asked me to join was because they listened to that album so much in the van on tour,” Balliett said.
“I started working on the Spirit Night album Shame, and I was sending them, David [Bello] and Nicole, early mixes, just because they were my old buddies,” said Balliett. “And a little while later David messaged me and was like… ‘Do you want to join the band?’”
Balliett was reluctant to join, disliking their most recent release. “This was right when they had put out their second big release which had a poet guy doing spoken word over pseudo-post-rock-emo,” he said. Despite reservations, he became a driving member of the band, singing on their third album Always Foreign and touring internationally.
Balliett stayed in the band for two and a half years, departing in late 2017. “I ultimately didn’t like being on tour, and having eyes on me,” he said. “I think it made me a little more mentally ill than whatever my status quo mental illness was.”
Balliett now lives in Long Island with his girlfriend. He is relentlessly creative, painting and illustrating colorful images of everything from Budweiser trucks to animals in gardens. Once during a Zoom, he noticed the photograph of a Mail Pouch barn in the corner of my frame and sent me a picture of a beautiful and surreal painting he made, featuring drones in the night sky spelling out Chew Mail Pouch Tobacco.
Spirit Night is Balliett’s central musical project, and while he doesn’t perform, it maintains a cult following and a vivid life of its own.
“I’m going to keep making records,” Balliett said, “and that’s because I’m doing it for me.”
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Elizabeth Piasecki Phelan | @onefellswoop.bsky.social
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