From their start on Netflix’s Building the Band to concluding their second North American tour, Midnight Til Morning are truly just getting started. The quartet’s fanbase- known officially and affectionately as Midnighters- have launched the group to new heights as they prepare for even more shows and plenty of new music later this year. Atlas spoke with Shane Appell, Zach Newbould, Conor Smith and Mason Watts before their Phoenix show about their start, their vision for MTM and building a community of genuine connection with their fans.
Atlas Artist Group: This is your second U.S. tour and you’re hitting different markets and seeing new places. With being back on the road, how are you approaching touring on this run?
Zach: I would say we’re definitely a lot more comfortable onstage. We’ve done a bunch of shows at this point so we can focus less on nerves and more on just enjoying our time up there and putting on a good show and interacting with fans and really enjoying every moment of it- rather going into that blackout mode where your nerves kind of take over a bit.
Conor: It’s just like second nature to us now. There are obviously some nerves on that first run as it was probably our first time performing as a band in a year. And I think it’s just a little more comfortable on this one. I think we are putting on- I wouldn’t say a better show, but it’s a more comfortable one. The fans have noticed that as well, which is great.
Atlas: Are you seeing familiar faces at each stop as your fanbase is growing and expanding? How do you feel that you’re connecting with your audience with more people coming to the shows?
Shane: We’ve definitely developed a hardcore set of superfans that come to a lot of our shows, which is so awesome to see them show up over and over and over again. It just shows how dedicated they are and they’re all doing lots of posting for us, which helps more than anyone could imagine. People are posting from all these different accounts promoting our music and promoting our shows, which is awesome.
Conor: It’s great too- we are also building a massive fanbase in every city we go to. We have people there who are like, “oh, we just saw a post three weeks ago and we thought you guys were cool” and they come along to the show. Every show we obviously do see a couple of the same people, but also so many new faces and people who just found us a month ago or they heard of us through a friend of a friend or it’s friends bringing them. That’s a great feeling, it’s a really, really good feeling.
Atlas: Is there a particular song that you all get amped up to play every night? Is there a song that you see the fans getting hyped up for as well?
Mason: I think the first song that we play when we come out is always pretty fun. It’s called “Ghost of Us”, which was one of our first two songs we released. That’s just a super high-energy way to start the show. We do like a dramatic entrance as well. It gets me pretty hyped up.
Zach: I think the fan favorite right now is a song called “Math” that we have that comes out April 16th. Just the fan response to that song from like the first day we played it because we’ve played some unreleased stuff. People just loved it. Everybody knew the words by probably three shows in. People were singing it already. People posted it everywhere and all learned it as if it were a song that was already out. So that was pretty cool to see.
Mason: That probably is the wildest thing. Every song that we play- there’s probably four or five songs in the set that aren’t out yet- I would say three quarters of the audience are singing the word which is pretty nuts considering you can’t get it anywhere other than YouTube or TikTok.
Shane: You’d think [with] a lot of unreleased songs, if they’re catchy enough, you’ll have them singing the last chorus with you. But it’s funny- we have a song called “Easy” and as soon as Conor sings the first note, everybody’s singing every lyric, even on the verses. And it’s like, how do you guys know all the words to these songs?
Conor: They’re invested. It’s really cool.
Atlas: You all entered into this project through Building the Band, which could be considered a more unconventional way to launch a career in the music industry today. How has that experience strengthened your resolve as a group now that you’ve gone all in on MTM? How did you approach that entrance into the music industry?
Conor: I think even beforehand though- I know these boys were already pretty much in the music industry, Mason especially and Shane was really big on social media. Zach and I would play gigs at bars and restaurants and stuff, so we’re already kind of a part of music. I think a big thing for us with that show was it was a Netflix-based show and we knew it was gonna be big and we knew that it could kickstart our careers. When we found our band, we were already passionate about it. The show ended and we went to Australia, did a few songs and signed to a really great company called Chugg Music.
I think we just saw the passion as the show aired with all the fans and their enthusiasm with us and obviously our enthusiasm with each other and the industry’s enthusiasm with us was just a bigger drive for us to keep going. Obviously the popularity of the TV show just helped. And having each other helped us so much with what the hell we’re doing. I can’t imagine doing this alone. It’s just the passion that we saw from the fans and the industry and the entertainment industry and the people around us- it was just a really big drive for us to keep going and do it.
Atlas: You all bring something unique to the table in this group. How do all of your separate influences come together when you’re creating music?
Shane: I think it’s a blessing of how much different we all are as artists and I think it gives us this opportunity to make every song sound so unique to MTM. We all had similar but very different styles of music before the show. Zach loves his country music, I love my power ballad, big notes and stuff like that. Connor has this really cool punk tone that just cuts through and Mason’s got this really emotional singer-songwriter tone. You get to really listen to four solo artists on one song, which I think is really cool and we’ve finally learned how to make our voices sound good together as well and blend and do the harmonies and stuff. We continue to get better every day because we’re always singing so much. I think that’s what really makes it unique.
Atlas: What else is coming up for you after this tour? Are there any spoilers you can share?
Mason: That’s pretty much everything we’re probably allowed to talk about right now. We do have a lot of music coming out in the next year. We’ve probably got like 70 songs that we’ve written and probably at least 20 of those are coming out.
Conor: I think any chance we have off tour as well is…all we want to do is write. We’re finishing this tour and hopefully going to write some more and get in the studio. It’s just a constant desire to write for us because we write songs and we’re like, oh, this is sick and then we all listen to unreleased songs that we think are so sick and we’re excited to get them out there.
Shane: We did a couple weeks in LA just recently and I felt like we were doing so much touring that our creative energy was a little weird for the first few weeks, and then the last week we had a really good week we’ve locked in some really cool songs that I think we’re all very, very excited about.
Atlas: With being a fairly new band, there’s so much ahead of you. What’s the biggest goal or vision you have for MTM?
Mason: We have a really cool community in our fanbase. People find their friends just by having us in common, which is really sick. We just want to foster that community and a place for people to have a good time and forget about life for a bit or connect with the stories that we’re telling. If we can just keep growing that to as big as we can, hopefully we’ll play stadiums one day. That would be the dream.
Shane: Just off of what Mason said, too, is I think that’s one of the coolest things for me is seeing how our music and our shows are bringing fans together that might have not been friends or live in different places across the world and now they’re traveling in a car together that says Midnightermobile on the back of it. There’s all different ages traveling in this one little minivan and it’s so funny because you would never put these people together but they’ve grown this amazing bond together and maybe they needed a good friend in their life and I think that that’s so cool that we were able to do that.
Atlas: Is there anything else you want people to know about you or your music or is there anything that you wish you could talk about more that people may not ask?
Conor: We’re just really excited to bring this project and this band to bigger parts of the world and smaller parts of the world. Like we’ve done America and Europe and Tokyo and want to get back to Asia and do more there and more in South America, but I think it’s on its way. We’re really excited to get to those places and if you haven’t seen us yet then we hope that you do in the future. We’re excited to get out there and release more music and, as Mason said, have this community just expand and expand and expand because it is so nice to see people just coming together for one thing which is good music and a good community. We just want to expand that to bigger parts of the world and to everyone.
Shane: I think I also want people to know- I feel like a lot of people ask me in the lines outside and after the show if we’re tired of doing this because we’ve been doing it for six months nonstop now. We all just love what we do so much so I think that I’d love everyone to know that- this is like what we’ve been wanting to do our whole lives and touring and meeting the fans and hearing them sing the music back is worth so much to us and it refuels us in a way where we feel like we could keep going.
Zach: Even when there are times if you’re ever missing home or anything like that, there’s nothing else we’d rather do. Just seeing people smile- everybody’s so happy when they come in. They’re all singing back to us and it just means a lot.
Stream “Math”, out now!
