Tony Sharpe and Henry Hutton have been writing songs together since they were teenagers, thanks to a chance meeting at a Star Trek convention. That pivotal turning point led to a series of bands that took them from Greensboro to college dorms to a decade-plus run with The Executives.
By the time they sat down to make what become You Me & Kyle’s debut record, They Promised Us There Would Be Flying Cars, Tony was living in Columbus and Henry was in Raleigh. Neither of them was thinking about playing the songs live. They were just two guys trading files back and forth, building an album from a home studio setup and a virtual drummer Hutton leaned on so often it ended up inspiring the name for their new project.
Of course, it was a matter of time before people started asking when they’d play a show. Tony recruited Chapel Hill guitarist Rainer Ng and drummer Bill Goodwin, and the bedroom project became a real band with a real stage presence, working its way through Slim’s, Neptune’s, and Bond Brothers Eastside.
What have you been listening to lately?
Tony (vocals): A lot of the female artists who are rocking it hard right now, like The Beaches, Wet Leg, Destroy Boys. There’s so much power there. It’s like somebody finally turned them loose. Not that it’s new, exactly; there were people who came before them. But now they can just do it. Nobody’s going to question it. They’re just rocking.
Who’s the first musician you remember discovering on your own and obsessing over?
Tony: I grew up with a bunch of nerds who were all really into The Beatles, but that was before my time. The artist I really latched onto and followed everything he put out was Elton John. I’m a guitar guy, not a pianist, but the songwriting from him and Bernie Taupin was amazing, and he executed it better than anybody.
The second one, funny enough, was another piano guy: Billy Joel. That Glass Houses album, all those guitars, it was eye-opening. You could do all these different things and rock. Even the Beatles were hard to define that way. Half their songs wouldn’t even qualify as rock songs today. That’s been an influence on me, not wanting to be defined.
How did You Me & Kyle actually come together? What’s the history?
Tony: This started when I was 16. I met Henry Hutton, my songwriting partner, at a Star Trek convention. Not a joke. About a year later we started messing around with a pseudo-band, and then our freshman year of college we started our first real one.
That lasted about a year, and then we teamed up with Rudy Mullins, a great guitarist out of Burlington, and Steve Worrell, a great drummer out of Como, North Carolina, and started a band called The Executives. We played together forever, until around 2021, when we played what I think was our last show at a music festival in Greensboro.
Around that time, I had an idea for an album. I released it under the name Accidental Mistakes, a completely different project, and I learned a lot from making it. I recorded it in Chicago while I was living there. Coming out of that and out of The Executives, I had this epiphany that I needed to find my own voice. One song came out of that process, “Side of the Road”, which ended up on our first You Me & Kyle album, They Promised Us There Would Be Flying Cars. That song established the voice of the project, and Henry and I just started writing in that direction.
When did you move to Columbus, and how does the long-distance writing process actually work?
Tony: After Greensboro, I went to Atlanta, then Kansas City, then Chicago, where I worked at a big ad agency as a creative director on one of the bigger accounts in the city. That took me all over the country. Eventually I took a job in Columbus, got laid off, and had nothing to do, so I put a studio together in my house and started writing. Henry lives in Raleigh and has his own studio.
I’ve spent time in recording studios all over the country because of the ad business, so I know my way around one. Henry actually owned a Pro Tools studio at one point too. What we found is that I can write here, he can write there, we send stuff back and forth, and we build the tracks out from both ends. That’s really what brought You Me & Kyle to life: our love of making music together, even with the distance.
A lot of people probably ask why now, after all these years.
Tony: They do. It’s because we can. Back in The Executives, studio time was so expensive we couldn’t afford much of it. We were doing okay playing live, and honestly I paid for most of college with that money, but studio time was still out of reach. As we got older, we bought our own gear, but the fidelity wasn’t there. We could do it ourselves, but it just didn’t sound good.
Now, with Logic Pro and everything else available, we can record in our home studios, and it actually sounds great. It doesn’t come out finished, though. We send it to an engineer who fixes and mixes everything, and then we get it mastered in Chicago before we release it.
What inspired “Kyle”? Was that a bit you’d carried over from a previous band, or something new?
Tony: The truth is Logic Pro X had a drum program built in, basically a virtual drummer with different personas, and one of them was named Kyle. Henry used Kyle a lot in his writing and building out his demos. After The Executives ended and it was just the two of us, Henry looked at me one day and said, “I guess it’s just you, me, and Kyle now.” That’s where the name came from.
When we released the album, I had the idea of turning Kyle into a robot, the third member of the group, and made some animation and artwork around that. Now it’s not just Henry, me, and Kyle anymore. We found a great guitarist in Chapel Hill, Rainer Ng, who I call the guitar wizard because he takes what I’ve written and makes it better than what you hear on the records. And our drummer, Bill Goodwin, effectively replaces Kyle, because I couldn’t go on stage with a drum machine. Bill’s about as close to perfect time as you can get. I call him the human metronome. The chemistry between the four of us is great, and it keeps getting better.
Honestly, when we wrote They Promised Us There Would Be Flying Cars, we weren’t even thinking about playing live. People started telling us we should. Henry did the recruiting and found Rainer and Bill in Raleigh, and it worked out great.
What’s it been like moving songs that were written long-distance into a live setting with two more musicians? Have any of them changed a lot, or are you trying to stay true to the recordings?
Tony: I’ll be honest, when we first started playing together as a full band, I was hesitant to let everybody do their own thing. My instinct was “These are the songs we wrote, we should play as close to the recordings as possible.” Rainer pushed back on that. He said people can listen to the record any day they want, but a live show should give them something a little different, like a treat. After a couple of months of working together, I came around. He was bringing something to the songs that wasn’t in the recordings, and it’s got a lot of energy. I have no problem with it now. It’s turned out great.
I don’t even play guitar in the live shows. Rainer handles all of it, rhythm and lead, and he’s built a rig that lets him create live loops while he’s playing. I can barely remember the words, let alone everything he’s managing up there, and I wrote the lyrics. He’s amazing. Bill is a phenomenal drummer with a great personality, keeps us all laughing. And Henry, I’ve been playing with him forever. He’d never say it himself, but he’s a phenomenal bass player. I never have to tell him what to sing for backups or harmonies. We’ve been doing this so long that whatever I sing, he knows where he’s going almost before it’s out of my mouth.
You’ve put out a few singles since the album. Are you working toward another full-length, or just releasing songs as they’re ready?
Tony: I’m an album guy at heart, honestly. But the way music gets released now doesn’t reward you for sitting on a record. Your best bet is to put singles out as you finish them and let people have the music right away. You can always compile an album later with a few things that haven’t been released yet, and that’s probably what we’ll do.
The single after They Promised Us There Would Be Flying Cars was “Killing Me”, and we put a B-side on that one called “You Keep Me Honest”, which was a fun, different song for us. Then we released “She Knows”, which became more popular than I expected. That one was mostly Henry musically. He sent me a chorus, a verse, and a melody for both, and I built the structure and lyrics around it. That’s often how it works: he’ll send me pieces and ask what I can do with them.
Then in May we released “Love You More”, which was a lot of fun too. That one was mostly me, sitting here with keyboards on one side and guitars on the other, layering it together. After I finished it, I honestly wondered if Rainer could pull it off live, since it had a lot of layers. He had no problem at all. He brings it to life on stage.
What’s it like doing a long-distance commute to play in a Triangle band?
Tony: It’s a good thing I don’t play guitar on stage, because those guys can get together and tighten everything up on their own, and I just have to come in and sing, which makes it easier. I also don’t have to haul equipment, so if I’m in a bind I can fly down and still make it work. I hate that I’m not there for all the practices, because it’s a lot of fun just being in the room making music. I usually come in a day or two ahead of a show, we’ll have a rehearsal, and then we’re ready to go.
We’ve been fortunate to play some good rooms. Slim’s downtown, twice this year, has been a ton of fun. Neptune’s, right around the corner, also great, with great sound. We just played Bond Brothers Eastside and the sound in there was really good too. We had a great crowd even though it was brutally hot. We want to keep going. We’ll be at Locked and Loaded on August 22, opening for Permanent Vacation, an Aerosmith tribute band.
Any local or North Carolina musicians you’d want to shout out?
Tony: We’ve played with some really cool people. Since I’m not on the ground in North Carolina, I don’t get out to see a lot of shows, so I’ll talk about who we’ve shared a stage with. Lauren Nicole is a great band, and she’s fantastic, so talented, great voice. Kitt Ramble is a solo artist who’s mesmerizing, she holds an audience so well. We played with a Durham band, Snowflakes, recently, and they rock, just really solid. Funny enough, we ended up rehearsing in the studio right next to theirs before that show.
There’s also a Durham guy, David Baldwin, whose band is called The Gumbys. He just released an album, and he’s set up a lot like we are, his songwriting partner is out West. I asked him to open for us at Neptune’s, and he said he’d have to throw a band together, which he did, calling it Half a Gumby instead of The Gumbys. He’s incredibly talented, a great guitarist and songwriter. We actually have similar backgrounds in advertising, and it’s interesting how much crossover there is between that world and the music world.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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