By the time Andrew Heringer was 30, he had kind of made it: his band had played a summer festival circuit, appeared on late night TV, heard their songs on Grey’s Anatomy. They were consistently touring with bands that would go on to become indie staples, like Cold War Kids, Bahamas, and Stars. Milo Greene was on that slow ascent that a rollercoaster makes towards the sky before the big drop, but Andrew wanted to get off the ride.
Not many people become rockstars, and even fewer achieve and then eschew that dream to pursue other ventures, but Andrew is unlike anybody I’ve ever met. He has a prenatural self-assuredness about him, like a warm glow that lights up a room without being glaring. He is generous and attentive as a producer while being instinctively efficient. He is also extremely curious, a quality which I think has propelled him through life.
When he left Milo Greene, Andrew immediately got into the sync business, writing music for TV and movies based on briefs from executives. Rather than feeling like his creativity was hindered by these constraints, he found the challenge of maximizing listenability and visual compatibility to be endlessly interesting. “With music, we’re passing emotion through space and time. What is this person feeling in this scene, and how do I carry that emotion into my own creation?”
Milo Greene often wrote songs mimicking music they loved–who doesn’t–and sync music is based on very specific briefs; Andrew likes prompts and guidelines, stretching the canvas of his creativity over predetermined dimensions of a frame. This gamification of art makes most musicians cringe away, but Andrew embraces the industry as it is, preferring to work within the system and excel at it.
But it took time, and Andrew struggled like any other musician. “I remember living in converted dining rooms as my bedroom,” he says, “I was roughing it. But I pushed all my chips in–I think that’s part of what it takes, just saying, music is gonna work.” He told me he was in seventh grade when he knew he was going to be a musician (“I remember the classroom; I think I had a guitar in my hands.”) and did not mention a single moment of doubt throughout our conversation. He just knew it was going to happen.
Andrew is like a child that loves to take things apart to see how they work; he relishes in the analytical side of the creative practice that most musicians despise. When he realized that sleep and focus tracks were being streamed millions of times per day, he pivoted to his newest alias, Sound Bath. His most popular tracks, a few of which are just a minute long, have millions of streams and descriptive names like “REM Sleep (Theta 4 Hz).”
Andrew also has a more traditional project called The Guest and the Host which he sees as an antithesis to Sound Bath, giving him balance. While Sound Bath tracks often come together in a single afternoon, Andrew sits with The Guest and the Host songs for weeks or months. “Sound Bath is very stream of consciousness,” he muses, “I sit down and work on something and it’s done and I move on.” This process often entails Andrew sitting at a computer in his home studio, whereas the central theme of The Guest and the Host is collaboration (we did a track together in 2023). “I’m really trying to find ways to activate my community.”
“Ambient music is like waking up everyday and chopping wood. You’re building a library,” he explains. Andrew works with the algorithm; he’s noticed that it promotes his music more if he releases on a consistent schedule. What he’s learned via Sound Bath he applies to The Guest and the Host, tailoring his releases to land playlist positions. “I thrive on positive feedback,” he explains, shrugging, “The universe was taking me down this road.”
Certain keywords get more plays in the ambient world, and Andrew found that he could parse these out of the limited statistics provided by Spotify for Artists. “People love the word ‘heart’ and also really gravitate towards 285, 417, 528 Hertz,” he explains, “I’d make a ten minute piece of music, and I’d only allow myself to introduce a new thing every minute.” When the country went into lockdown in 2020, Sound Bath’s streams doubled overnight. “I realized people were using this stuff to chill out,” he says. Just like with sync, Andrew seems to be unbothered by the idea of creating something that does not bare his soul. “It’s fun to be ambiguous. Many musicians feel it is important to be known, and that hasn’t been a driving force to me so much as making music.”
This attitude shapes Andrew’s relationship with the music industry, which at this point is mostly a relationship with technology. “If you look at the history of music, technology is always at the forefront. The Beatles were getting 8-track recorders so they could make soundscapes people had never heard before. Michael Jackson had access to synthesizers and mixing equipment that put him in a different space,” he illustrates, “That’s part of the game, finding ways to use technology.” When I ask him about the widely held opinion by musicians that the algorithm has taken creative and emotional agency from them as artists, he again draws on the metaphor of the game: “If we sat down to play Monopoly, and I wanted to play by the rules of Catan, you would just tell me that’s not what we’re playing now. Catan is the game people were playing twenty, thirty years ago, where you go and make an album, you put it out, you do things around that album.
“There’s a new game–the rules have changed. The algorithm is no mystery; Daniel Ek [CEO of Spotify] has said that the more you release, the better your tracks will do. That’s the machine he built.” He pauses, then counters himself, “A million streams on Spotify is a few thousand dollars. People are right, the economics don’t make sense if you’re playing it a certain way.” But he sees a glimmer of hope for independent musicians. “The environment is good for people who can keep overhead low and make everything themselves.”
Andrew is even curious about AI, asking, “What if this machine can do a better job producing this chorus than me?” and sounding excited, rather than fearful. “It’s a tool,” he explains, “Since the beginning of computers, probably even before, everyone has been worried about how this is going to replace them, but now we’re just doing more.
“As a musician, I sometimes hear something that doesn’t feel right. It’s my job to put it into balance, to translate a feeling to other people. That’s the element that I don’t think machines will ever be able to get.”