Today we’d like to introduce you to Paragraph Taylor.
Hi Paragraph, we’re thrilled to have a chance to learn your story today. So, before we get into specifics, maybe you can briefly walk us through how you got to where you are today.
“Briefly” would be my “piano” to adverse the “forte” musical parlance of our times, indeed! My name “Paragraph” tacked on years ago due to my tendency to say in a paragraph what most folks would say in a sentence.
Talk about a case of the username checking out, right?
So, here we go: age 5, MoM gave a piano lesson of a C scale, went to check on tea, then my father took me into a side room w/a 48-channel mixer, sequencing keyboard workstations, and Macintosh computers amok. Making music with electronics (and graphics, since toying with Photoshop’s literal first version as grade schooler thru its community college courses a score later) has always fascinated & been a pleasure of mine ever since.
Fast forward a decade to when I finally gave playing a guitar a shot. I word it like that to emphasize I’d avoided learning it, as I thought the stereotype of cocky guitarist thwarted way more of an ego than my far more frail Skinny Puppy & Nine Inch Nails demeanor & music tastes, learning to make music just at the tail end of the 20th century’s dusk. However, once I picked it up & plugged it into my various Nirvana, Korn, Nails, Manson & Tool covers as an awkward, socially misanthropic lad? All bets were off.
This is how I learned to write my own songs stacked a la Trent Reznor, Danny Elfman, Martin L. Gore from Depeche Mode, all heavy influences early on. Running away from a conservative Irving, TX household to stay with my father in Long Beach CA, I spent summers between school learning entire grunge, industrial, prog, electronic or metal records: every instrument. This enriched such a palette for me; I’d written my first record demo’d by 17 & spent specks of time senior year thereafter back in TX (after father’s didn’t work out, I graduated in Irving) and recorded the record with a dear friend & collaborator Lcn1 & the guy that convinced me guitar was cool for introverts too: Kevin.
Hopefully, long-origin 00’s story short, after graduating & learning the material live to play shows, we disbanded & I joined a friend named Cameron in a band called LaME. that (in essence) made fancy metal. All 6 of us wore tailored all-black suits, playing with the heaviness of Korn, Slipknot & Pantera mixed with the keys of Nails, Rammstein, and most goth music from the ’80s, with Cameron’s soaring vocals pulling from both, all over my heavy industrial grunge metal songwriting & performing with him.
Snap to the turn of the twenty-teens, when LaME. got a cease & desist (according to then-management from Universal in Canada?) to change our name. Secret Of Boris was born as most original LaME. members had scattered to the wind by that one in the tens place year of 2010. Just having formed, we released a record called “Your Ghost” that garnered one midsummer west coast tour of support, before in October a terribly accidental tragedy took a pivotal member of management away from us. Jeremy King pushed the record to huge Hollywood labels for licensing & tour support for us, right up until his untimely death. Devastated, we recorded our grief as “J” & tried to move on, but after member changes & domestic conflicts, many members individually yet simultaneously experienced in 2012, just as the Mayans were believed to have said the world would end, ours in SOB somewhat did. In 2013’s dawn, I left the band in a fairly unfair fashion amidst a mental breakdown surrounded by suicide attempts, having felt stuck in a seemingly inescapable toxic relationship situation. After escaping & repairing esteem & all friendships, I joined a rad metal outfit called Adakain while writing what I thought would be a solo record between earning my TX Embalmer’s License. I didn’t want to do a solo record though; I spent years in bands & wanted to make more than just what I individually could.
Lillith, a dear friend I met in that mortuary college in Dallas while in SOB, moved back out to northern California after we graduated & dated after assuring diplomas were in hand! (We kept from doing the latter beforehand to remain distraction-free but knew we were linked from the moment we met, just having BOTH gotten through awful domestic situations & swearing off romance. Funny how things arrive right when you’re over wanting them sometimes.) After those couple tumultuous years for us both in separate states, I joined her in Vallejo CA late 2013. Asking if she knew anyone who’d like to collaborate, she said she played vibes in high school marching band. (Full-size aluminum bar vibraphone, not the fiberglass xylophone or the huge rosewood marimba.) I thought that was the coolest thing ever, thinking of how both Elfman and Reznor used mallet instruments in their similar styles. Lillith didn’t have one, so using her engineering skills accrued serving half a decade in the US Navy, she designed Silba, our electronic hybrid vibraphone that works through guitar pedals & amps using K&K Sound pick-up systems. Twas so rad, we had to build it.
ManifestiV formed at the dawn of 2014, and on our first tour – an unbooked trek to & from our SXSW debut that year – Lillith & my dad (not the father aforementioned) completed Silba the vibraphone from draft to density. Our first show, you could smell the vibraphone’s red & black spray paint drying from the stage. That same “impromptour” as it was called, I proposed to Lillith & we got married Friday the 13th, midsummer that year in a Chinese Cemetery south of SF. The marriage strengthened the band (& vice versa) tenfold, as one’s propensity for compromise, sacrifice, the greater good, willingness to learn & deflation of egos really solidifies harder when you’re married to your bandmate, especially if they’re the best counterpart to you. We spent the remainder of the year back in the San Francisco Bay Area regionally testing material we wrote & recorded in our Vallejo home. We managed to release our debut LP 12/13/14 at Slim’s in San Francisco just before heading to Thailand January 2015.
Returning from Thailand, where we remotely pre-booked our first “actual” tour, to SXSW, all over TX & back to CA, our house had gotten short sold back to the bank after FEMA condemned it because of damage resulting from a Napa earthquake’s aftershock accelerating urgent structural repairs on our shared over-a-century-year-old Edwardian/Victorian-era Vallejo home. (They lived on a separate bottom floor, leading Lillith & I to believe we again serendipitously happened to have moved into a former funeral home. While touring the damage, we learned our landlord’s layout heavily reflected that of an embalming prep room at funeral home.) Perfectly timed with an LP under our belt, ManifestiV made lemonade and moved our tiny (our duo’s total biomass barely eclipsed 250 pounds) band into Lillith’s Burning Man goto, the trustily huge yet cutely resourceful & perpetually repaired Bummobile, and hit the road. (Bummobile, or Batmobile for bums, has anything you’d need: silverware, CDs, instruments, clothes, duct tape, coffee mugs, any type of cable, a fridge, a bed: you name it.) That “GlacieR” tour, where I panically booked a few dates ahead along the way to stay on tour for as long as we needed, stretched 13 dates over 5 months, staggered of course, by visits of friends, family & national parks literally coast to coast. After finding an art spot in Vallejo to work on other Burning Man vehicles out of our own (the FEMA boot put us out during the Bay Area’s brogrammer-induced artist exodus via real estate explosion) fall 2015. Then, Lillith went to the Academy of Art in San Francisco to learn Fine Art, while I interned at Prairie Sun in Cotati. That’s the studio where Tom Waits, Primus, Faith No More, Green Day, Nails, Bieber, and so many others had cut records in the past. The most former won a couple Grammy®s there too!
2016 began w/o a steady place, so we hit Thailand again, and them bam – Bowie dies. We were basically the only people there we know who knew who Bowie was then in Thailand, so the incredibly isolated grief inspired us to write while out there. Coming back stateside, Vallejo’s crime & gentrification mix got so potent (bullets whirring overhead where six grand might get us half the space monthly) we deuced to head for Dallas, where we based out of Bummobile at a rad studio near downtown. We kept momentum by not only booking another tour that summer (punctuated w/a break to fly to Chicago Open Air’s inaugural festival to take Lillith to see Rammstein, a mutual favorite & tattoo on her left shoulder, plus so many others who’ve grown to influence us like Gojira & Meshuggah) but also by visiting Thailand again after their King Rama IX, Bhumibol Adulyadej, passed away & tickets plummeted, as all festivals in high festival season canceled for national mourning. We knew Thai folks who were heartbroken we wanted to visit and also knew how cool his Majesty was to the people (he pioneered geoengineering to water droughted farms back to jungle status, artificially through just dumping tons from planes) so we jumped on the opportunity to visit one last time before cutting our next record… which we began at Prairie Sun of all places in 2017.
2018 when we wrapped our last Cotati recording session, we launched a 40-some-odd date 8-month OctouR between the west coast & Texas, with a huge summer chunk in Europe doing impromptu acoustic gigs. That year’s end saw the release of the CD recorded in Cotati called “God Is a Martian” but released in Dallas early December. Between tours, we based there to hone Lillith’s pet portrait business while I embalmed willed body donors for the state of Texas. Amidst those 2019 sidequests, Lillith & myself brought on Ryan A & Kevin (yes, the guitar inspirer from a score previously) as live ManifestiV drums & bass, respectively, debuting at a Trees show opening for My Life with the Thrill Kill Kult.
Exponentially more frequent quad shows came to an early 2020 halt. Resorting back to duo mode, Lillith & I worked ManifestiV remotely with Ryan & Kevin to write “Horsemen,” a 4 song instrumentally speechless and heavy reaction to the state of Earth as it was recorded & released winter 2020/21 at our ManifarM in east Texas. Its release attracted the attention of old friends on a great label GIVE/TAKE that believes & pushes us to be our most creative, and – also, big yes – Lcn1 who Kevin had kept in good touch with over the years. 2021, he joined the ManifestiV writing team & started both writing AND remixing songs together with us.
GIVE/TAKE released remixes earlier this year as “The Bitter Truth” while its original album counterpart comes this fall of 2022. It will be named after the oncoming age of humanity after our currently ongoing Anthropocene after Earth erases humanity for its negligence and we’re left in the Age of Loneliness: “eremocene.” (The ManifestiV GIVE/TAKE LP is slated for an 11/11/22 release as of press time.)
I also play guitar in SOB (having rejoined Ryan & bringing Kevin in on bass there too, who we’re also releasing a record this year with as well) and score various movies and themes for shows and games. Briefly under 2,000 words, right?
Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall, and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
No road smooth is worth taking. It generally leads to a crash. You want the debris to dodge & the imperfections to repair to all reveal themselves early on so your problem-solving hat stays atop the head. Smooth roads get you comfortable, leading to the lack of readiness for inevitable need to adapt & overcome struggles that may present themselves. Learning from the struggles makes you stronger & negates any damage; if you walk from it a better person.
Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know about your work?
I play guitar, sing, write, design graphics for web & print, video edit, design sets both theatrical & IT, and generally have my best time with anything music-related. I seem to be known for having an infallible light about me, even & especially surrounded by & making the darkest music possible. At least folks asked that a lot this last “JulinY” tour of California, where I get my light from the answer is how dark the world is and how much darker it’s about to get. There’s a chronic either unawareness or apathy of just how screwed we’ve left any future humans (even children today) as far as having a planet to live on the surface of.
So… genuineness?
We’d love to hear about any fond memories you have from when you were growing up.
My first EVER: being in the back car seat in a drive-in showing of “Back to The Future,” wondering why Marty was yelling at Doc up in the clock tower about “when I go back…” because I didn’t understand how tall the clock tower was yet. Twas only 3, haha.
Contact Info:
- Website: ManifestiV.com
- Instagram: http://instagram.com/paragraphtaylor
- Facebook: http://facebook.com/paragraphtaylor
- Twitter: http://twitter.com/paragraphtaylor
- Youtube: http://youtube.com/manifestiv
- SoundCloud: http://soundcloud.com/manifestiv
- Other: http://linktr.ee/paragraphtaylor
Image Credits
Andrew Sherman
Kaylie Cortez
Thomas E Moore
Metal Dave
Hilary Harrison
Bob White
Emmar Grant
