TYBIRD’s ‘Out of My Mind’ was written in a bedroom, against advice
The song began with an acoustic guitar in a high school bedroom, and with a lot of people telling its author what he should be doing instead. Ty Morgan was a senior at the time, and the expected next step was college. He chose to put everything he had into music, and “Out of My Mind” is where the pressure of that choice went.
“I poured a lot of emotion and frustration into this song,” he says, “and I think that’s what makes it so personal to me.” The Southern California band he now fronts, TYBIRD, keep the song’s structure true to where it started. It opens with the acoustic guitar and then gives way to full-band hard rock, building toward a heavy guitar solo. The move from one room-sized sound to a much bigger one mirrors the song’s subject: pressure arriving from every direction until something has to give.
It was also one of the first songs the band recorded together, which gives it a particular weight in their catalogue. Morgan describes it as representing what TYBIRD stand for: “trusting yourself, taking the risk, and going all in on what you believe in.” A band’s earliest recording usually shows what it hoped to become. Here, the answer was already written, years before the band existed to play it.
The mixing was handed to Brian Scheuble, whose work with Tom Petty and Mötley Crüe sits in a lineage of American rock records built around guitars and a band playing in the same room. TYBIRD’s own stated aim is to take the attitude and songwriting of those greats and make something that feels current. Scheuble’s credit suggests how seriously they take the first half of that.
Their audience has grown on a smaller scale, and in a way that suits them. The band’s fans call themselves the Birdies, and the name points to how the relationship works: people who feel like part of the group rather than onlookers. The previous releases have passed 35,000 streams, found local radio play in Laguna Beach and been reposted by Instagram accounts with over a million followers.
“Out of My Mind” has no interest in telling anyone to ignore their teachers. It records one person’s decision at the moment he made it, loudly, and in the room where he made it.
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