Mental Health, Touring, Family Life, Creativity & Anxiety - Underoath

Tim has been the uncompromising guardian of this rule for the band’s entire career. He argues that if you let the song drive, it will find its own path. This approach was forged in direct defiance of the label pressure after ‘They’re Only Chasing Safety’ to write a commercial follow-up; instead, they made the heavier, weirder ‘Define the Great Line.’ The protocol extends to avoiding any listening to current scenes or competitor bands during the writing phase, so the work stays as pure ‘us and inspiration.’ Tim acknowledges this has been a source of conflict—Aaron initially found it frustrating—but believes it’s the only way to make art that will age well and feel honest.

Tim returns to this theme repeatedly: he asks himself, ‘If the band broke up today, how would I feel?’ The answer he aims for is ‘I can’t believe we made it 23 years.’ He then contrasts that with the alternative—‘The best years are over, I’ll never do anything meaningful again’—and points out that both are true depending on the story you tell. He openly admits there have been times when Aaron’s open-handedness frustrated him because it looked like not caring. But over time, he’s come to see it as a superior way to live, especially after witnessing so many peers burn out or become bitter chasing the next level.

Aaron admits he used to get sucked into the game, especially when it was tangible with Soundscan and record sales. With streaming, the lack of physicality makes the numbers even more abstract and harmful. He’ll hear a big number and feel good, then open his phone and see another band’s quadrillion streams and feel worthless. He compares it to the book industry where Mark Manson can’t escape ‘The Subtle Art’ as the unreachable benchmark. Aaron’s strategy is to simply not look. Even looking at smaller artists to feel better is still comparison, and it still reinforces the wrong mindset.

Both Aaron and Tim describe the surreal deceleration from being the center of screaming fans to being told to take out the trash. Aaron’s wife has explicitly told him she needs a couple of days just to get used to the sound of his footsteps in the house. He now sees that his impulse for instant emotional and physical connection is selfish, not loving. Tim adds that home can feel like the least valuable place because it’s the only place you have responsibility, and that the real work—the meaningful sacrifice—is serving your wife and kids, not playing a show.

Aaron’s entire story is a vivid illustration of this cycle. He describes the onset in 2004 with chest pains, numbness, jaw pain, nausea—classic panic attack symptoms—yet each time he went to the hospital convinced he was having a heart attack. The medical reassurance never lasted. Over two decades, he’s accumulated over 300 EKGs and countless ER bills. He now knows the pattern and still finds it terrifying, but mentions that simple activities like fishing with the guys or just not breaking anything for a day can be more effective than the hospital run. The meta-lesson he absorbed from the Dry Creek Dwayne episode is that sometimes the best day is one where you simply don’t break anything—no crisis, no drama.

Aaron describes a lifelong pattern of converting internal pressure into physical symptoms: searing chest pain, numb hands, nausea. This began right as Underoath’s popularity exploded in 2004 and never fully left. He’s had over 300 EKGs and knows the medical jargon by heart. The core insight he surfaces is that the very wiring that lets him do a hundred takes of a vocal or obsess over a drum fill is the same wiring that hyper-scrutinizes every bodily sensation and spirals into panic. He now believes that the quest to ‘fix’ this anxiety misses the point—it’s part of the package of who he is, and trying to remove it would mean sacrificing the creative edge.

Aaron explains that the guilt isn’t rational—he knows he’s providing for his family and that the time away is part of the career they’ve all benefitted from. Yet the sheer contrast between the dopamine highs of a sold-out show and the mundane domesticity of home creates a dissonance. He describes moments of looking at his bandmates and realizing that, measured in hours, his deepest adult intimacy has been with them. This hits hardest when he returns from tour and expects immediate connection, but his wife needs days to adjust to his presence again—a dynamic he finds painful but now understands is normal.

Tim and Aaron both wrestle with the legacy of their early work. They describe how, after the success of 'Chasing Safety,' they would sometimes convince themselves that if they wrote a certain type of song in a certain key with a certain vocal arrangement, they could recapture that lightning. But they’ve learned that the real magic came from the total absence of career thinking—they were just making noise in a storage unit. They contrast that with the modern waterfall-release strategy and the temptation to cater to what the audience wants. Aaron admits that when he hears the crowd explode for a 20-year-old song, he has a choice: feel grateful or feel like they peaked at 19. He strives for gratitude.

Aaron explains that after 25 years of the intense, marriage-like dynamics of Underoath, he completely understands why some musicians refuse to do it again. He shares that when he did a side project, he brought all his anxiety and control issues with him, and it was even worse. The appeal of a solo project is the removal of veto power and democratic friction, but he argues that the friction itself is what forged their best work. The irony is that many solo-project leaders left real bands precisely because they couldn’t handle the interpersonal labour, yet they often end up recreating the same misery inside a structure they have full control over—just without the brotherhood to pull them through.

Tim’s stance is not about lack of ambition; he works as hard as anyone. But he’s trained himself to see every achievement as a bonus, not an entitlement. He describes a thought experiment: if Underoath ended tomorrow, he could look back with nothing but gratitude for a 23-year run that far exceeded his teenage dream. He contrasts this with the author Mark Manson’s regret that 'The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck' set an unreachable bar for all future books. The key, Tim argues, is remembering why you started and holding that core motivation above the numbers. He takes no issue with bands like Bad Omens or Spiritbox outgrowing them—he’s genuinely proud of them—because he knows comparison is a drain and doesn’t make his own work better.