Athens-based indie rock outfit Heffner first got onto SCAD Radio’s radar from their explosive set on the El Rocko stage April 17th. Positively bursting with bombast and fervor, the 5-piece act controlled the room with a blistering set of indie bangers twinged with punk soul. Ad-libbing between sets to one another, front man Reagan Byrd and guitarist Taylor Cotton in particular had an infectious camaraderie that imbued the room with a warmth that complimented the fire of their performance style. In this interview, Production Director Megan Atwell sat down with the two to discuss origins, influences, and even diss tracks, getting to the core of what makes up the band’s lively soul.
Listen to the audio and read the transcript below
Megan: Hello, everybody! This is Megan, your Production Director, and today we are interviewing a band from Athens, Heffner! Or at least two of them. How are you guys doing?
Reagan: Great.
Taylor: Yeah, we’re great. How are you?
Megan: I’m doing great, just happy to be here. Stoked to be interviewing. So for the people, who are you guys? Uh, I already said where you’re from, but how did you guys meet?
Taylor: Yeah. I’m Taylor, that’s Reagan and we’re two fifths of the band Heffner. Um, Reagan and I went to high school with each other in Kennesaw, which is north of Atlanta. And the other three in the band are McKendrick Bearden and Lars and Will Hefner, our namesake twins.
Megan: I actually wanted to ask you about that namesake, because if I’m not mistaken, I believe the twins, their names only have one F.
Taylor: Yeah. I mean, yes. So the two F’s in the band Heffner, uh, basically there’s an English band from like the nineties and early aughts called Hefner that we didn’t know about until…
Megan: …Later into the career.
Taylor: So we’re just, you know, it’s mostly like avoiding future lawsuit type thing.
Reagan: I liked it with two F’s as an homage to Foo Fighters.
Taylor: We really want to make a t-shirt with like the Foo Fighters double F and then just like Comic Sans H-E–N-E-R on the either side.
Megan: [laughs] That’s good. I think you guys should definitely do that. That reminds me of Dinosaur Jr. Do you know the story behind why they had to add Jr? There’s a French band called Dinosaur that sued them. Um, and so instead of changing the name, they just added the junior so that they were like, a follow up to the French band.
Taylor: Lame that anybody sues anybody.
Megan: I know, right?
Taylor: Should just be a battle for…
Megan: …whoever comes out on top.
Taylor: Exactly. Dinosaur Jr. is way cooler anyways.
Megan: Well, okay. So with that out of the way, how long have all of you guys been performing together?
Taylor: Almost three years, but there was a big fat, like, 18 months off for COVID. So really like a couple of years.
Megan: Have you found that there’s been a lot of band chemistry that’s kind of developed over the years or has it all been pretty solid from the beginning?
Taylor: I mean, we were all friends. McKendrick worked at the same bar and restaurant that Reagan and I work at, and then Lars and Will moved here from Mississippi in like 2018. So we all like, knew of each other and then knew each other. And then Reagan and I were trying to put a band together and Will and Lars are a package deal and McKendrick is… a bit of a secret weapon.
Megan: There you go. So speaking of that kind of gap for COVID, uh, I was curious, has it been a relief coming back to performing post lockdown or has it been a little bit nerve wracking towards the beginning?
Reagan: I’ve definitely enjoyed it. You know, I think we all kind of do the thing to be out playing for people. So like as fun as being in the studio is, we definitely love being in the studio, we were in there as much as we can, you know, nothing’s as fun as playing a sick show.
Taylor: Yeah. It’s a relief to be back doing it. And it feels really good just to be like seeing friends and hanging out at shows even when we’re not playing.
Megan: Nice. So kind of on the topic of being in the studio, your guys’ debut self-titled album came out in 2021. So that’s kind of a fraught time to be releasing an album. I was curious, how long was it in development before it got dropped? And how many iterations did it go through? Like, were you sitting on it for awhile?
Taylor: It was done for like eight or nine months before. Uh, we put it out and honestly, we just didn’t have a plan. We just wanted to make another one. So it just took us eight or nine months to shoot the album art, basically. I mean, we’re not that we’re not that precious about it. We really want to like, just record as much music and put out as much music as we can, so we’ve picked up the pace for this next one.
Megan: Do you guys have a tentative release kind of window for the next one?
Taylor: Yeah, I think it’ll be out by August. Barring anything…
Reagan: …silly.
Taylor: Silly.
Megan: No silliness. We have had enough silliness in the last few years. So I was curious about who in the band would you say tends to take the lead when making a new song?
Reagan: Kind of comes down to Taylor or I.
Taylor: Yeah, it’s pretty half and half it’s either Reagan’s song or my song. And we usually help each other finish each other’s songs and then we bring them to the band. And then if, uh, how do I say this diplomatically? Reagan and I are the filter, I guess you could say. But yeah, they’re amazing players and musicians, so they always end up on the song in one way or another.
Megan: So when you are developing a song, what do you find comes first in the process? Is it the melody? Is it the rhythm? Is it the lyrics?
Taylor: It’s different for us. Like sometimes it’s an idea or like a phrase that we think is funny or clever and then do it that way. Sort of like country music style. A lot of times it’s just like a nerdy guitar riff type thing.
Reagan: Yeah.
Taylor: And sometimes it’s a little bit of both, but we rarely write a whole song, start to finish, and decide ‘this is how it goes.’ We’re usually putting our heads together to finish them.
Megan: All right. So I noticed that there were some interesting things on Heffner, like the song Golden Hour (An unsavory solicitation). There’s some kind of concept elements there, obviously, and a little bit of, like, sound collage with the idea of making the phone call a different kind of area of the track. So do you think you want to dip in a little bit more to like quirky production stuff like that?
Taylor: Definitely, yeah. It’s not to be taken too seriously. We have lots of really fun ideas for the second [record]. And the third one’s pretty much written as well. We’re both big fans of a little bit of tongue in cheek humor in a song.
Reagan: Yeah. We’re usually trying to chase a production idea. That’s something that we maybe haven’t done before or go further down a rabbit hole that we’ve been down. You know, we’re always trying to kind of test the formula of what a Heffner song is.
Megan: Never trying to box yourselves in.
Taylor: Yeah, we’re just trying to amuse each other really more than anything else.
Megan: Yeah. I think that that definitely imbues itself into the music because there is a very palpable air of fun and entertainment throughout the album, so I had a lot of fun listening.
Both: Thanks!
Megan: And it definitely that weaves itself into your performances a lot too, because you can see when you guys are on stage, like I had the privilege of watching you guys at El Rocko recently, you can really see all the fun and all of the interactions between you guys.Even like, between the songs, the little monologues that you guys have, they’re all very tongue in cheek and they feel, like you were saying, like you’re not precious about your image or making it too buttoned up or anything. That makes it really relatable and fun.
Taylor: For better or worse. [laughs]
Megan: What have your guys’ favorite performances that you’ve done been?
Taylor: That El Rocko show we loved. I love Savannah so much and we always have too much fun there. I mean, we played El Rocko three times now and the first few times we played like absolute trash. So it’s nice to like, sort of get some revenge. Our album release show at the 40 Watt in Athens last fall in 2021…
Reagan: It was a chaotic time.
Taylor: It was really amazing. We were DEVO. We dressed up as DEVO.
Megan: Oh my God.
Taylor: And um, yeah, Lars and his girlfriend, Val, made our DEVO hats. We did a DEVO cover at that one, and like, we had a costume contest and the three finalists came up on stage and smashed a piñata with a guitar.
Megan: Oh my God!
Taylor: It was– there were a lot of shenanigans that night.
Reagan: It was chaos.
Taylor: It felt really good.
Megan: That sounds like a ton of fun. So speaking of DEVO and other bands, your guys’ music, when I was listening to it I got the vibe of alternative, indie and some post-punk kind of sensibilities. Where do you guys find that you have overarching influence from, and to follow up on that, do you find yourselves inspired by bands as a whole, or more like moments in tracks and vibes?
Taylor: I mean, I think that we all listen to…
Reagan: to vastly different things.
Taylor: Yeah. Really different music, which is cool. And it helps us when we are writing. I think Reagan and I have really similar tastes and Lars and Will are twins. So they share some bands in common and McKendrick is totally out there. And he’s also a little bit older than the rest of us. And so he shows us things that we’ve never heard before, but it tends to work out for us. But yeah, Reagan and I will usually get into like a record at a time and sort of wear it out.
Reagan: Almost like taking notes of what we’re going to be stealing from.
Taylor: Yes. Always stealing, always stealing. Always be stealing.
Reagan: Always be stealing.
Megan: Yeah. I mean, even like for visual arts, from my end, you think of yourself kind of as a sponge. You’re always taking in the best parts of what you’re looking at and you try and surround yourself with the best parts of art that you can so that you come out with the best stuff that you can yourself. So I think that there, you can definitely feel the kind of eclectic sensibilities on the album, which once again, kind of imbues itself with that fun aspect that you guys are so good at capturing. So to kind of cap off our interview, I was wondering; you guys are members of that strongly emerging Athens scene that’s happening right now, with your peers like Night Palace, who you played alongside at El Rocko, and bands like Hotel Fiction who recently played at Savannah Stopover. It’s kind of … it lends itself to comparison, I guess. So do you guys find yourselves influenced by your peers on that scene or do you kind of feel that it’s more just separate entities performing alongside each other?
Taylor: I don’t know, the scene is small. Um, but it’s really solid and everybody’s really close. And everybody goes to each other’s shows and I don’t really feel like there’s much… I feel like because the scene is small and everyone is kind of doing their own thing, there’s not really any competition.
Reagan: Pretty collaborative scene. Yeah. Like when you go to the studio, you’ll find the same crew of, you know, 20, 30 musicians. You’ll find some combination of those people in the studio, or you know, our friend, Tommy runs a studio out of his house and he’s, he’s had a Flagpole article written about him recently about how his hands are on like every single thing in Athens.
Taylor: Yeah. I mean, it’s just really collaborative and there’s a bunch of people that played on our first record that aren’t in the band and a bunch of people that we brought in to play on the second one that aren’t in our band. It’s kind of just like a spread the love situation.
Megan: Yeah, very cool. So, I forgot I had one more thing I wanted to ask. So the two of you I see are mostly the writer credits on Apple Music and stuff like that. So I take it both of you are the lyrical kind of minds, right?
Reagan: Yeah, I guess you could say that.
Taylor: We’d like to think so.
Megan: So I noticed that on the album, there are a lot of references to sort of this ambiguous someone, or like you’re speaking directly to a person a lot of the time. So do those songs reflect like real experiences and relationships or do they more kind of come out of just a scenario that you’ve thought of?
Reagan: There’s songs like James Kim, [which] is about my high school best friend, James Kim. So yeah, there’s definitely some moments on the record that come from personal experience. Taylor actually wrote that song about his friend and used James as the character.
Taylor: Yeah. Based in facts and elevated with fiction.
Reagan: Right. And there are other songs like Golden Hour that are purely hypothetical.
Taylor: Yeah. I mean, maybe we were talking about someone, but uh…
Reagan: They’ll remain nameless, though.
Megan: Sometimes I bet it’s probably a little bit more subconscious too. Like if a song comes out and you’re like, ‘wait a minute, this could be about someone, huh?’
Taylor: Oh yeah. And we love a diss track.
Megan: Oh, I won’t dig into that! I don’t wanna start any drama for you guys.
All: [laugh]
Megan: Well, thank you guys so much for talking. It’s been a joy.
Taylor: Yeah! Thanks so much for having us. Thanks for spinning our record.
Megan: Oh, of course. I’m excited to hear it on regular rotation too. We’re going to be having it playing during our 24 hour stream on the website pretty soon. And whenever the next record is slated, hopefully barring silliness in August, you’ll be hearing me talk about it again. Maybe I’ll post a little cheeky review.
Taylor: I love that. Well, we’ll send it to you when it’s done.
Megan: Thank you very much!
Reagan: We’re calling it Perfect Heaven.
Megan: Perfect Heaven!
Taylor: Yeah, it’s called perfect heaven.
Megan: Awesome!
Taylor: Yeah, we’re shooting the album art tomorrow.
Megan: Oh my goodness. It won’t take eight to nine months this time?
Reagan: No silliness.
Taylor: No, no, no, no, no. We’re gettin’ after it.
Megan: Oh my goodness, hitting the ground running. Well, hopefully you guys are back around to perform sometime soon. I’d love to hear some of the new material, you guys were a very explosive set [at El Rocko]. It was a ton of fun to watch.
Taylor: We’ll be back!
Megan: Very exciting. All right, I’ll be there.
Taylor: Okay, nice to see ya!
Megan: Nice to see you too!
Taylor: Bye!
Reagan: Bye!
