All photos by: Dan Russell-Pinson
It all started when Gabriel Horn had a “a religious experience” at a local show. He went to see blankstate. tear through their album, The World Is Not Kind To These Things, at The Evening Muse in Charlotte. The performance hit him so hard that he did what any rational person would do: he texted them at work the next day, asking if he could join their band.
Maybe in some other world, there’s a four-piece version of blankstate.. But here, Gabe saw another path forward. If he couldn’t be in the band, he’d have to start a project that could open for them instead.
And, well, it worked. Gabe began writing songs as Between Two Trees, developing a live aesthetic that involved hacked Nintendo Wiis and hand-printed lyric hymnals. The beautifully ironic twist? It worked so well that Jacob and Seth from blankstate. joined the project live and in the studio.
I sat down with the expanded trio to get the whole origin story, how the album softlock picking came together, and what lies in store for the project.
What have y’all been listening to lately?
Jacob: I’ve been listening to Hourglass by idialedyournumber non-stop. The past two days, I’ve chosen to only listen to Pink Pantheress, and I don’t know why.
Seth: I’ve been hating all music recently. Kerosene Heights put out a couple of good songs and I fuck with those. But I’ve been avoiding music, generally. I’ve been getting to the point recently where I’ll just put on a video essay while I drive.
Gabe: I’ve been listening to Little Women on audiobook. [laughs] There’s a local band called Saint Logic that has a song called “Chernobyl Dogs”. I listened to the whole album [Dogs with Jobs], and it’s really good. HAIM has a song called “Take Me Back” that’s really good. And then there was a guy I saw at an open mic, John Brewster, who wrote a song called “When You Love Someone.” I’ve probably listened to that song for like 100 hours.
What is the first musician that you remember discovering on your own and obsessing over?
Jacob: My Chemical Romance was the first artist I can remember hearing and being like, “Oh, you can choose what music you listen to? That’s awesome.” It’s funny because I didn’t really choose it; my older brothers were like, “Check this out,” and made me listen to The Black Parade.
Seth: I remember obsessing over Michael Jackson as a kid, which is probably problematic now. I used to have a DVD of one of his concerts and would just watch it every day.
Gabe: I was so into Skrillex. I thought I was going to make Christian dubstep, which is one of the most embarrassing things I’ve ever said out loud. I was going to make the drops reference to the verse. It was just going to be like, “John 3.16,” and then bass drop. It’s so bad, but that’s what I thought I wanted to do.
How has your musical taste changed since then?
Jacob: I’m finally going to see My Chemical Romance this year. [laughs] I’ve always loved emo music since I was like a kid because that was what my family was also listening to. As a kid, you think anyone older than you is automatically the coolest. So when all my older siblings were listening to emo music, it was so cool. That has always stuck with me. That love has evolved into a lot of different niches.
Seth: I don’t think I started really listening to music or caring about music until I was like 12. Even my music taste now feels like it’s not anything specific. There’s no one thing that I listen to more than anything else.
Gabe: I didn’t like any slow music at all when I was younger. I don’t think I had any super emotional experiences to associate with the things those more emotional songs were talking about. Twenty One Pilots hit the thing that I was experiencing at the time and Skrillex really spoke to my emotional state. But I hadn’t had any romantic relationships, so I didn’t really care about music that talked about like losing relationships or struggling with that kind of stuff.
As I got older and experienced more things like the pain or the successes in other songs, they started to connect with me more. I also used to really not like people yelling in songs, but now I really like it.
Run me through the history of the band. How did y’all come together?
Gabe: Between Two Trees is like a blankstate. fanfic. I was in class with Jacob in college and I had written a song. I would send these demos to a mutual friend of ours, who was like, “You have to play with my friends in a band called blankstate.” She sent the demo for “Relative Motion” to Jacob.
Jacob: I was in an antique mall, listening to that song. I thought it was so good that I had to stop walking around and make my girlfriend listen to it.
Gabe: I went to see Jacob play for the first time at The Evening Muse. I listened to the whole album [The World Is Not Kind To These Things], but seeing them play it live was like a religious experience. I was like, “I want to be a part of this band so badly.” So I texted them at work, asking if I could join the band, which is embarrassingly desperate.
I think Jacob let me down easy by saying something like, “We kinda like our three-piece street cred.” I figured if I couldn’t be in the band, then I had to open for them instead. Between Two Trees was born out of trying to impress Jacob, Seth, and Faye. [laughs]
Jacob: At that point, I had been pushing Gabe with all of my might to put out the songs that he had sent me because they were so good. And he was like, “I just make them for fun.” That was crazy to me.
As much as Between Two Trees started to play shows with us, I never felt like I was inspiring the songs. They were their own thing that I wanted other people to appreciate as much as I do. I felt like a fan listening to unreleased demos and saying, “Why isn’t this out?”
Jose from SpiceHouse described your live shows as “a hacked Nintendo Wii” with synced up visuals and “lyrics in folded zines.” What inspired that aesthetic for the band?
Gabe: There are a couple of ways to look at it. One is that I have a deep insecurity about the quality of our music, so I felt a need to surround it with gimmicks that would make it interesting if the music wasn’t there. I need other stuff going on in the show in order for it to be a fun or enjoyable experience for people; in spite of my voice or my playing, there’s something else to look at or do.
Using the Nintendo Wii came about because I needed a way to play backing tracks and videos simultaneously from an SD card. That was the only piece of hardware in my house that could check all of those boxes. The other thing that inspired it was no longer going to church. I had a change in my religious views. I used to play in a lot of worship bands, but when I stopped attending church, I had no more live music. So I went from having live music all the time to none at all.
What I thought church did really well was getting people to participate. It was meant to be a group thing, but you didn’t have to know the songs. Many churches have giant screens with lyrics playing along, assuming that people have never heard the songs before, but may still want to sing along.
Despite all of the problems or issues in the church, I thought that was a really great way to approach music. Because when I went to local shows, I couldn’t understand anything that people were saying. So even if the lyrics were really good or impactful, I didn’t know what was going on. Or I had to have someone’s songs completely memorized so I could sing along with them at shows.
I wanted that not to be a thing for my shows. I wanted people to sing along. I wanted it to be easy to participate. And I’ve always felt like our lyrics were stronger than our music. In our songwriting, lyrics have always come first. So if I wanted to put our best foot forward, I needed to figure out a way to make the lyrics comprehensible in less-than-ideal sound situations.
The little hymnals I hand out have really helped me to engage with everyone at a show. It also starts the show off with me giving people things. I try my best not to sell things to people and I try not to take more than I give. I like starting the show off by going around and having one-on-one conversations with all the people that are there, handing them something, and saying, “This is for you. You can throw it away if you want. I’m giving you things and not expecting anything back from you. Thank you for being here.”
Jacob and Seth, what is your collaboration like in this project?
Seth: I started playing at the second show.
Gabe: I had played my first show, and Seth was like, “This is so awesome! Can I play with you?” And, of course, I felt like everything was going to plan. [laughs] Having live drums — and Seth playing those drums — has been the single biggest improvement to the band.
Seth: The songs were written already when I joined, so I just had to learn them. I recorded drums on the album, obviously. Jacob and I added our own stuff around the record. But for the most part, everything comes from Gabe first. It’s his baby.
Jacob: That’s the essence of what the project is. It’s a band that feels so distinct and like its own thing. I have always thought like Gabe is one of the most creative people that I know. There was no way that the project was going to exist and not have that bleed into every part of it.
The way I got involved was by trying to write a couple songs with Gabe, but we wrote one instead. We went on tour together shortly after and were playing that song every night, with me coming on stage to sing my part. I was happy to have a spot in the set, but there was a mutual feeling of wanting me to contribute more.
Gabe: Jacob is one of, if not my favorite, songwriters. I’m very lucky to ask him for input on different variations of a chorus or bass lines. Sometimes, he was like, “How about the secret third option where you just mix parts of this together?” Of course, that worked. [laughs] He’s always been someone I can talk to about the music or visuals like the hymnals.
Jacob: When recording the album came around, Gabe asked me to scream the section of “Jean-Claude Ramond”. Then that expanded to “If you need some harmonies, I could do it. Is anyone playing bass? I can play, it’s no big deal.”
What has the album’s reception been for y’all?
Gabe: I’ve tried my best not to know. Selling out the album release show felt special. There are so many metrics in being a band where “this thing equals success,” and sometimes I find myself fixating on it hard. Obviously, you want to sell out venues. But it’s hard not to correlate the value of what you’ve made and your value as a person.
The most important thing that has happened to the band was before touring with blankstate., we played a show at The Milestone and I could hear people singing the songs. That meant a lot. These were people who were not my immediate friends, many I had never met or even seen before. Before that, it felt like the only people who knew or cared about anything we weredoing did it because they knew us.
What are some of your goals for the rest of 2025 and beyond?
Gabe: Right now, my life is just working. I work at a hospital, which informs a lot of my songwriting. I’m trying to pay for my wife’s schooling and also go back to school myself. That’s all very expensive, so I’ve been working long weeks since October. I haven’t been able to write much music; the album came out, we played the release show, and then I disappeared back to work.
Who are your favorite local/North Carolina bands?
Gabe: On Mondays, I’ll get off work and then I’ll run to this open mic that goes until around 11 pm. So I’ve been listening to a lot of local people through there. This guy came through, John Brewster, and he’s so freaking good. He’s in South Carolina now, but he’s like an Ed Sheeran type. His voice is amazing.
Gotta shout out the GOATs in Moving Boxes.
Jacob: One of the best local bands making music right now is amorebeautifulversionofyou. It’s almost comedic how unbelievably good they are.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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