In the midst of quitting his job to help start a community-focused recording studio in Mexico City, Tyler Anthony of Cereus Bright still found time to write and record his new album, ‘Anything,’ which expresses the philosophical ideas he has been pondering during this tumultuous but exciting period of his life.

Stream: ‘Anything’ – Cereus Bright

Tyler Anthony, the musical mind behind Cereus Bright, couldn’t shake the feeling that something in his life had to change.

After years working in the tech industry and exercising his passion for music outside of work hours, he had begun to feel weighed down by the monotony of life in suburban America. That’s when he called up an old friend to lift his spirits.

“Do you want to blow up your life?” Anthony remembers the friend asking him, only partially in jest. The friend told Anthony that he had moved from Los Angeles to Mexico City and started a recording studio and community center—and mentioned that he could use some help with the budding project.

Initially, Anthony was resistant to the idea of upending his life and moving to a different country to help his friend start the recording studio. But when he and his wife took a trip to Mexico City, it didn’t take long for both of them to realize that they couldn’t turn down the opportunity for such an exciting adventure.

“I like to joke that the ‘check engine’ light had been on for both of us,” Tyler Anthony tells Atwood Magazine. “And we thought that maybe it’s time – if we can pull this off – to pay attention to that.”

So earlier this year, Anthony quit his job, and he and his wife moved to Mexico City.

“We’re certainly in way over our heads,” Anthony says of the move. “Everything that we’ve been used to is gone and reset – culture, language, friends. But it’s also very exciting and enlivening. We feel very activated and present.”

The recording studio Anthony is working with is called Casa de Copas, which the studio’s website describes as “the first interdisciplinary and community-first recording space focused on the creation of holistic music and creative projects in Mexico City.” It was this opportunity to build community and foster creativity that drew Anthony in so quickly.

And he has already gotten to see that mission become a reality by hosting music performances on the rooftop of the building that houses the studio. “Those really stand out to me as magical, helpful, validating moments in this whole process,” he says.

The events at the studio, which have drawn large crowds and musicians from all over the world, have also shown Anthony the value of face-to-face connection in our increasingly digital world. “I’m a real believer in the power of physical space,” he says, “and moments in time when people are in the same city, and they get to be together for a night. There’s some magic there that is really impossible to replicate.”

Anthony sees the journey he and his wife are on to build a home for themselves in a new country as a chance for them to take charge of their own lives. “It represents us trying to have some agency and control over our life. And not to feel like whatever shape our life has taken, that we’re stuck with it, but to ask, ‘what if we were able to build a different looking life – one that feels and sounds a bit more like who we are now?’”

It’s a question many of us ask ourselves at some point in our lives, and it’s one of the themes Anthony explores on his new album under the moniker Cereus Bright. Incredibly, while all of this profound change was beginning to take place in his life, Anthony was also working on the songs that would make up his new LP, Anything, with is now available everywhere via Nettwerk Music Group.

Since 2012, Anthony has made music under the name Cereus Bright, which originated as a band and has continued as a solo project as Anthony’s bandmates entered different phases of their lives. The project is named after the cereus flower, which grows in desert climates and blooms at night. Some varieties of the flower only bloom one night a year.

“There’s a wonderful metaphor there of this beautiful thing that’s growing in the last place you’d expect it,” Anthony says of the how the flower has inspired him. “And it’s also blossoming at night. All the conditions don’t make sense, but still it survives, and even more than that, it thrives.”

Anything sounds expansive and lush – the perfect complement to the big ideas the lyrics contemplate.

Over the course of the album’s twelve songs, orchestral and acoustic instruments sit comfortably beside synthesizers and electric guitars, all held together by Anthony’s soothing, immersive vocals and the sophistication of his sometimes abstract, always poetic lyrics.

In keeping with his desire to get people together in the same room at Casa de Copas, much of the new album came together when he gathered with a group of musicians he admired and let them each add their own musicality to the songs over four or five days of recording sessions.

The opening song on Anything, “Seven Wonders,” gives a taste of the album’s foundational sounds and ideas. A rhythmic bass riff and drum kit backbeat propel the song forward while strings and a flute dive in and out of the arrangement. “It’s sort of an overture that contains all the little themes and sounds that are being alluded to,” Anthony says.

Lyrically, “Seven Wonders” provides a starting point for the philosophical journey the album is about to take you on:

Everything we know melts away
There is nothing left but a face without a frame
Everything we know melts away,
There’s a door beneath the fire,
A sword to break

“It’s sort of an opening question,” he says of the song. “It’s an attempt to summarize the modern experience – the disillusionment with certain societal structures and the openness that is created when they are dissolved. It’s not my final thought, but it’s the start of it.”

On “City in the Sky,” a stunning acoustic ballad, Anthony draws on spiritual and religious imagery. It was one of the last songs recorded for the album, and he sees it as a track that helps round out the album, both sonically and lyrically. The city referenced in the song’s title represents an amalgamation of ideas about heaven or a sort of promised land from religion, mythology, and even fantasy literature.

“In fantasy novels, there’s often that far off place – the golden city, the spot,” he says, “and letting that be representative of our hopes and dreams. There’s something important about having a posture of hope and optimism.”

And just like the opening of a fantasy novel, Anthony begins “City in the Sky” with a masterful bit of world building:

It’s a long, long way to fall
Hidden in a golden cloud
Swim the rivers of time to find
The city in the sky

It’s a never-ending dream
Waiting for the final hour
All the color in the fire inside
The city in the sky

“Ride,” an upbeat psychedelic rock tune that opens with pulsing electric guitar feedback – shows yet another side of Anthony’s artistry. And it’s on this track that he most directly speaks to the theme of building a new life for yourself, even if it means taking risks.

“Haven’t slept right since we stopped believing,” he sings in the first verse. “Waiting feels wrong from the inside,” he adds in the second verse.

And it’s in the song’s climactic chorus that he really drives home the message of stepping out and searching for something new:

Do you want to ride?
We’ll all become a different kind
Take anything you can find
Do you want to ride?

“Yes, the weight of rethinking your life is heavy,” Anthony says of what inspired “Ride.” “But we must do it. We reach for many ideas or structures to make us feel safe, but ultimately, the song is about letting those go and pushing into the unknown.”

At the moment, Anthony doesn’t have any plans to tour in support of the new record—he’s focused on his work promoting community and the arts in his new home of Mexico City. But he still hopes to connect with people all over through the new songs. “To me the biggest win would be for people to listen to the whole record in headphones and reflect on themselves and their lives.”

Ultimately, all of the novelty and change – quitting his stable job, moving to a different country, creating a new album – has given Anthony a new outlook on his life. We’re living in a moment where there is a tendency to define ourselves by what we are against instead of what we are for. But after going through a period of deconstructing his own beliefs, Anthony has found himself ready to ponder what he stands for in new ways, both in his songs and in his own life.

“I don’t want to just say, ‘I’m not this anymore,’” he says. “Not being something is not a way to build a life. On the other side of that is the question, what do I accept? And If I’m still wary of accepting other things, I need to be a participant in building a better world.”

“I need to start building again.”

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Stream: “Ride” – Cereus Bright

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 © Ross Bustin

Anything

an album by Cereus Bright