It's About Being Strong For Everyone Around You: Kyle Fasel Talks Real Friends' 'Composure'

Kyle Fasel chooses his words carefully. As well he might, because that’s how he makes a living. He plays bass and writes lyrics for Real Friends, the Illinois pop-punk-emo band who are helping close out Warped Tour for the final time.

On the band’s first release, ‘Maybe This Place Is the Same and We're Just Changing’, in 2014, Fasel was their sole lyricst. By the time ‘The Home Inside My Head' landed two years later, frontman Dan Lambton was pitching in with words to several tracks. On their new album, ‘Composure’, they share duties.

On a cursory listen you might not be able to tell the pair apart, but on closer inspection the two songwriters are quite different. During the recording of the album in Los Angeles Lambton was going through a hard time - having broken up with his long-term partner, he also stopped taking medication to treat his bipolar disorder and started partying too much.

“It was a seriously over-stimulating environment,” he recently told Alternative Press. “I was going out all the time and taking advantage of the situation. I stressed out everyone around me by being super-energetic and really highly strung. I was all over the place. I was really unsure of what was going on with me.”

Fasel and the rest of the band had to pull together to get the album made and keep their friend on the right track. As such, Lambton’s lyrics sometime reflect a man falling apart, while Fasel’s paint a picture of trying to keep things afloat.

“It’s about being strong for everyone around you,” Fasel says, discussing one of his songs from the LP, Smiling On The Surface. “But in the process you’re feeling weak on the inside. You’re kind of just like smiling, like ‘Oh yeah, everything is great, I’m here for you.’” He describes another of his songs, Me First, as being about “being there for people and then when you need them maybe you’re not being put first.”

Fasel is polite, while his sentences often stop and start as he’s thinking about what he wants to say. Rock star egos are out of fashion these days and he is both gracious and humble when discussing the band's position. “If we can keep doing what we’re doing then we’re happy,” he says. “If something more happens and we gain new fans or bring back old fans that maybe haven't listened for a while then that’s just extra points. We’re very happy to be where we’re at. We’re not settling for where we are at, but we’re definitely very grateful currently.”

When asked about the band’s renewed focus on pop melodies with ‘Composure’ Fasel is careful to correct, though, explaining that the aim was to be more memorable. That might sound like the same thing to many people, but then bands are often accused of ‘selling out’ when they start to focus too heavily on hooks.

That wouldn’t be a fair assumption in this instance, though. Real Friends manage to achieve catchy melodies without sacrificing interesting instrumentation or making the production too slick. Like the best of the classic emo bands they are able to maintain a balance.

“We did focus a lot more on the vocals,” Fasel says. “[And] we did focus a lot more on making the song be musically a nice ground for the vocals to go over. There are times when we said 'this guitar part might be a little too intricate to have a vocal melody over it, so let’s make it sound a little smoother'. Just things like that. The vocals were always in the front of our minds while writing any part of the record.”

Some of the credit in this instance also belongs to returning producer Mike Green, who co-helmed ‘The Home Inside My Head’ and has also worked with pop-punk luminaries like All Time Low and State Champs. “We co-wrote and recorded three songs with him on the last album and we were pretty happy with the way they turned out,” Fasel explains. “It wasn’t even a conversation. We all agreed right off the bat: let’s go with Mike for the whole album. And it turned out great.

“He’s just able to get something out of us that we’re not able to. He really opened our eyes to a lot of things. Sometimes we were working too hard, like, it’s OK if this guitar part only has two chords because the vocals are what everyone's hearing. Keeping the melodies and lyrics the number one concern is key and he was always reminding us of that. It’s not like the songs are simple, it’s just here and there you simplify.”

If you want to go deeper with Fasel his lyrics remain the closest you can get to understanding how he feels. Smiling On The Surface features the line “Am I telling myself the truth about my self-esteem and how others place their worth in me?”, while on Me First he says “Are my emotions hard to read? Seems I'm good at hiding” before adding “You burn the bridge and then I build it.”

You get the impression that he spends a lot of time being supportive of other people but struggles expressing his own emotions, unless it’s in the lyrics of a song. “I’m going to write what I feel because it truly is an outlet,” he says. “There’s times that I’ve written songs with a lyric and I’ve been like ‘Wow I feel like [there’s] a weight off my shoulders, I needed to get that out.’ I definitely try to put it all on the table.”

Fasel also uses poetry as a way of communicating, having performed spoken word for many years. He recently released his first collection of poems, Nothing Memorable Stays The Same, and finds that the medium presents new opportunities.

“It was just something that I wanted to do for the past couple of years,” he says. “And after recording we had some time off and I was really able to put it all together finally. It’s really refreshing to be able to write poetry. I could write a poem about something that I couldn’t write a song about. I could cover a lot more ground with poetry. It kind of opened up a whole new world for me.”

Talking about his poetry is the most animated Fasel gets. “If you were to read through my book you could see some poems that have certain lines from songs because they were originally poems,” he says. “I used to keep them separate but when we were writing I was like, ‘I’m going to put everything into this. If a poem works for a song let’s do it.’ Over the past year I have entwined them a lot more. Now it’s one big thing.”

Fasel seems to be a rock for Real Friends. He comes across as the reliable, smart, level-headed person you need when you’re going through a hard time; someone that might be able to keep a recording session going when everything else is falling apart. A real friend.

'Composure' is out now through Fearless.

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