Cover of TS Foss album "Everything Finished" features art of trees and a winding river.
Madison’s Tyler Fassnacht has been involved in the Madison music scene for more than a decade, in such bands as Proud Parents and Fire Heads. His solo project TS Foss is set to release a twangy and reflective folk album, Everything Finished, on May 12. Fassnacht hopes the album will be a step toward establishing his new NightBell Records as a label that helps younger artists gain experience and footing.
As a teenager in Madison, Fassnacht says he was inspired to become an artist by his love of grunge music. “Seeing people who weren’t aficionados being able to [make great music] was inspiring at a young age,” he says. The thinking was that he could “work hard and write good songs” but wouldn’t have to be good at his instrument.
Fassnacht was in and around Madison punk bands while working on an English degree at UW-Madison. (He’s not related to Robert Fassnacht, the physicist who was killed in the bombing of Sterling Hall in 1970, though he says he “does get asked that from time to time.”) He mentions Tenement, a hardcore punk band from Appleton, and Poney, a sludge/stoner/hardcore punk band from Madison, teaching him “how to book shows and go on tour and kind of DIY it,” he says.
Writing for a folk project like TS Foss means Fassnacht works to create “honest and earnest” music: “My punk brain is constantly telling me, ‘oh that’s cringe-y,’” he says. “It took me a long time to work through that.”
He calls Everything Finished, which he began during the COVID-19 lockdown of 2020, “somewhat of a concept album about how I was gonna quit making music,” he says.
With live music on pause, artists were “forced to reckon with the fact that there’s no stability [in a music career],” Fassnacht says, citing the realities of the business from lack of insurance to no paid time off. He began by thinking of the work as his “last hurrah,” but ultimately came to terms with how the pandemic was hard for everyone. He kept working on the album.
He calls TS Foss “a very lo-fi bedroom acoustic thing” that he “didn’t take super seriously” at first. But once he started expanding on it in a studio he wanted it to be “big and emotional and cinematic.” The result, however, is “much more loose, bare bones. I just think it’s a beautiful record,” he says.
Everything Finished is eight tracks of lyric-focused folk. Front and center is Fassnacht’s distinct voice, nasal and grumbly. Drums from Madison musician Heather Sawyer add punch to the melancholy of the lead single “Grown Used to It.” Madison pianist Emili Earhart plays backing chords on most tracks, enhancing the melody and the mood. Occasionally Fassnacht lets loose with emotional vocals like the frustrated yelling at the conclusion of “Married to a Feeling.”
Around the time he began writing the songs for Everything Finished, Fassnacht started to reconsider how his expectations for himself weren’t good on a “mental, emotional or physical level.” He was in several different bands, another solo project (Baby Tyler) and constantly on the road, working weird hours and burning out. “It took stopping to realize that I wasn’t actually happy,” he says.
When he “reframed” his expectations he looked to the model of “smaller DIY artists doing amazing things,” he says, citing Simon Joyner and Bill Callahan as artists who’ve formed healthy relationships with their craft that allowed them to release music for decades and occasionally go on tour.
“Bob Dylan’s amazing but what am I gonna take from him that I could realistically use in my life?” Fassnacht asks.
“I’m a local artist. I’ve come to accept that’s my place,” Fassnacht says. “That doesn’t mean I can’t reach out or play other places, but it’s important to have local artists.”
Everything Finished will be the first record by the new Madison label NightBell Records. Fassnacht created NightBell with Milwaukee artist Cody Kimbell as a way to put out their own music but also “build up the resources to help younger artists get to levels we either had to work really hard for or that we never quite achieved. I would love to be able to provide that for someone who’s really excited about their sound and dedicated to working on it.
“We’re seeing how this first release goes,” Fassnacht adds. “If it does decently well and we make a little bit of money to put back into the label, we’re hoping to expand and release other local and regional artists. But if it crashes and burns, at least it’s only our stuff.”
