I recently caught up with Zero 9:36 (aka Matthew Cullen) about how he started making DIY songs as an 11-year-old, his creative process, working with different producers, and his new single, “Chasing Shadows,” from the recently released None of Us Are Getting Out EP (ONErpm). 

Zero 9:36 Photo: Jimmy Fontaine 

RYAN J. DOWNEY: Tell me about the creation of “Chasing Shadows.”

ZERO 9:36: My producer, No Love for the Middle Child, and I start on acoustic whenever we write anything. Then, we’ll tune everything strangely to see if that gives us any different inspiration. He’s like a musical genius so that he can do that naturally, but for me, it’s easier to find an interesting riff when it’s tuned differently. So, he played that one, and immediately I was like, ‘Hey, put that in.’ We were working with producer Erik Ron at his place. Erik said, ‘Yeah, we have to move fast on this one. I love where this is going.’

I had the melody and the idea for the song immediately as soon as the acoustic riff came. Erik wrote the heavy parts. We started putting drums on it. Those vocals are three and a half years old at this point. I was going to recut them, but any time I recut my vocals, I lose the feeling from that [original take].  Even though I feel I’m a better singer now – people actually asked me if these are new vocals, which is nice to hear. But Erik is an incredible vocal producer. We did these in one day.

Nobody at my then-label was excited about the song at the time, but I’ve always been extremely excited about it, and my management was, as well. Now we are working with ONErpm; the song was one of their favorites, too. I just had to hold onto it for three years until some other people believed in it.

Where is the song coming from lyrically? I bet it’s interesting to revisit three years later.

The song is about that definition of insanity: doing the same thing repeatedly but expecting different results.

Much of the conversation about you involves your “post-genre” style eclecticism. It’s demonstrative of where we’ve arrived culturally with music. Many people are less segregated by genre and subgenre. Why do you think it’s become more prevalent to mash it all up now?

I grew up during the big switch from CDs to Limewire and then iTunes. Sometimes you’d try to download a certain song on Limewire and end up with something entirely different.

Some marketing folks started mislabeling files on purpose.

I’d heard that! I heard artists were doing it on purpose, too. Genius marketing. I think being kind of in that shift of my brother giving me CDs, my dad giving me CDs, Limewire, iTunes, and YouTube, I think that’s why genre-mixing is so prevalent now. Linkin Park was the first to do it at a big level in the early 2000s. That’s around the same time I started making music. I was about 11 years old. My parent’s generation was only getting information from however many sources. I grew up during a time with much more access.

I understand that your late father turned you onto rock and metal, but rap was the first stuff you made as a kid. One of the brilliant things about hip-hop is that you can make it by yourself. That wasn’t always true about rock n’ roll, where you needed a handful of people playing different instruments.

We had Xbox headsets and a computer. I watched YouTube tutorials on how to mix a song in Adobe’s Cool Edit Pro. Everything was permanent in Cool Edit Pro. If you clicked the compressor or reverb button, you could not change it after the fact. I made probably 100 songs by the time I was 12.

Doing so much as a young DIY producer must have given you a different perspective by the time you worked with more experienced people like Erik Ron, Drew Fulk, and Travis Barker.

The bigger advantage I’ve had was being comfortable writing songs and knowing what I would sound like because I’ve heard it 100 times. When you go into these studios with these producers and stuff like that, the main thing that I like to do is kind of do whatever they say because otherwise, I can just make music on my own. If I’m not going to take their advice, I may as well stay home. I love collaborating, and everything that has ever been collaborative, for the most part, is a better product in the end, whether that be physical products or clothing or music, so you’re not pigeonholed by your ideas. I loved working with all of the people I’ve worked with, and I’ve worked with them all multiple times. Having my own recording experience, I know what I’m doing well enough to take their advice. Erik, Drew, Mark Jackson, and Ian Scott, who did “Adrenaline,” and my producer, No Love, are my main guys. I keep going back to specific people for a reason.

Tell me about this new EP.

There are seven songs plus an acoustic version of ‘I Felt It All’ I did with Landon [Tewers] from The Plot In You. He produced the first single, and No Love produced the second one. Cody Quistad from Wage War produced the third. No Love and I produced ‘Nine Three Six.’ It sucks not to release more songs at a time.

How do you hope “Chasing Shadows” hits people?

 Anytime I make a song like this, I hope it’s something they can relate to themselves and know that they’re not alone. I get that a lot, especially with ‘Adrenaline’ or other songs where people are like, ‘Oh, this song made me realize that I’m not the only one [going through] this. The world isn’t against me, I have to get out of my own way. That’s the only goal of the song. You know, everything else is great, but if someone legitimately helps themselves through this song, I can’t really ask for anything more than that. #