Why #MusicWorship Is The Lifeblood Of Everything

Soft-spoken and endlessly polite, Anthony Green is seated in bed at home in Doylestown, Pennsylvania with his two dogs, having just put his three sons to bed after a tiring day at the zoo. Regularly sharing personal titbits of his family life on Instagram, it’s evident Green is an immensely doting father and husband, and as one would expect, it pours out into the music he writes.

“I tend to write about relationships and those are the greatest relationships that I have,” he admits, pausing. “I would say that they influence me in a way that they remind me of the urgency of a feeling. Little kids are very spontaneous and sporadic, and you never know what’s going to come out of their mouths or what they’re going to do. 

"I have to record it. I have to somehow put it down so that I can remember it or else it flutters back into the ocean of melodies"

“Music is beautiful in that way and creating music is beautiful in that way, and for somebody like me who is also very much like a child with ADD, when I get a melody in my head that I really love, I have to record it. I have to somehow put it down so that I can remember it or else it flutters back into the ocean of melodies.”

To the community of 138,000-strong Instagram followers who are welcomed into Green’s world with his #littlegods, Will, Luke and James, and his wife, his #pixiequeen, Green unashamedly also hashtags many of his photos with #reallove, #realmagic and #musicworship. 

“For me, #musicworship is just being surrounded by music. There’s a rhythm to everything, you know? There’s a rhythm to the way our blood flows in our body, there’s a rhythm to the way our earth moves. There’s an underlying music that’s kind of encompassing every little thing. When we go out and we listen to music or we put on something that we love to hear and we’re driving around or we create music, we’re sort of saying a prayer to that entity that encompasses all living things. That’s kind of what I mean by that.”

As he speaks, his fervent passion for what Circa Survive does is unmistakable, and he seems to get lost in his thoughts. 

“I love making music, I love celebrating music. I think it’s the lifeblood of everything. The vibration of sound and the vibration of all living things are very connected and there’s a sacred melody that runs through life, and when you listen to music and when you play music, when you dance to music or when you just give into it, you’re sort of becoming part of it. It’s my god, and I worship that.” 

Green’s ocean of melodies once again led the band’s newest album, Descensus. With the only goal to get together and jam but no real studio recording time booked, the five-piece (born out of members from Saosin, Green’s previous band, This Day Forward and Taken) simply wanted “to see if we could write some songs”. 

“A year before that, we were trying to write music remotely from each other’s laptops, by sending parts back and forth. It didn’t work. I think the idea was, ‘Let’s all get together, in a room, and we’ll jam, and we’ll take some of these old ideas, and we’ll take some of these instrumentals that everybody has, and we’ll work on them.’”

The “Circa Survive soup”, as Green puts it, created Descensus quite non-traditionally. Green explains that some songs were written in the month prior, or were simply taken into the studio as a few lone guitar parts or ideas, or were written in full in the studio. Listening to the cohesiveness of the ten-track album though, one could never tell, which perhaps is as much a testament to their producer Will Yip (Balance & Composure, Citizen, La Dispute), as it is to the band.

"There’s a rhythm to the way our blood flows in our body, there’s a rhythm to the way our earth moves"

“Will Yip came in and structurally and melodically really understood what the band’s vision was, and helped us put everything together in a way that made everybody happy. He helped not only with song structure and melody, he helped us delegate ideas and mediate ideas with each other. He’s such a great producer for a band like Circa Survive because he’s just truly trying to get the best song and trying to get the best feeling and nothing else.”

Having just played Coachella in Palm Springs and touring South America, Green explains there are no plans to sit down and record with the band again any time soon. One mustn’t forget that the infinitely productive Green is also lead singer of Saosin and works on his own solo music, too.

“I’m always writing – I have been writing from before Descensus, I was writing two days after we left the studio and I’ll always be writing, but the band isn’t currently working on another record. I think we’re just dealing with and seeing out the Descensus wave.”

As for the band’s upcoming Australian tour, Green assures fans he can’t wait and that they’ll play songs from all across their repertoire.

“Everything about Australia is awesome! The people are super friendly. I always come over there and discover some new band that I’ve never heard that’s inspiring. The weather’s beautiful like, 24 hours a day, 12 months a year. The people are just lovely, the food is good – I love Australia!”