Rate of Exchange: Anberlin's Deon Rexroat on The CURRENCY Era
Photo credit: Jacob Moniz
Anberlin’s ninth album CURRENCY arrives November 11, via Equal Vision Records. With it comes the start of a new chapter, as the band’s first full-length with Matty Mullins (Memphis May Fire) fronting it, and creative closure to material that had been sitting unfinished for years.
Beginning September 18, Anberlin will depart on tour as support to longtime friends Switchfoot. Among those support dates, Anberlin has also scheduled a handful of headline dates in smaller rooms, including the Webster Underground in Hartford, Connecticut on September 29.
A couple days before the band hosted a listening party for CURRENCY in their home state of Florida, I got bassist Deon Rexroat on a call to talk about the making of the album, the fall tour, and how Anberlin decides what's worth keeping
ACCRUED INTEREST
Anberlin had mentioned in press releases that much of the album materialized from songs that sat unfinished for years. When I asked Deon which song on the record had been waiting the longest, he responded with landed on the opening track, “Neverafter.”
“We’ve been kicking that one around for a while, working on it, retooling it. We never really got to a point where we felt that the melodies or lyrics were matching the song.”
Deon continues “We never discount any idea that we don’t use on a previous album, so after 20-something years, there’s been a bit of a bank that’s built up. Sometimes at different points in your life, different stuff hits you. That’s the way a lot of these songs are on this album. You come back to something after letting it sit for a bit, you get a different perspective, and next thing you know, it’s a fully fleshed-out song.”
face value
The album title CURRENCY came from drummer Nate Young, and Deon walked me through the thinking. “The idea is that currency doesn’t mean one thing. Many things can be currency. Time can be currency. Money, obviously. Love is currency. There’s just so many things that can be considered valuable to somebody.”
Deon’s response was very much aligned to the theme Matty laid out in the album announcement, about what happens after everything you built your identity on falls apart.
“Maybe what you valued in your identity, and put everything into, wasn’t actually that. It fell apart because that wasn’t actual currency. It may not have been the thing of value in your life, and you could have built your entire life on that, only to find out, only to find it fall apart.”
The artwork for the album is simple, a washed out purple background, with CURRENCY in bold red letters, flipped so it reads as a mirror image. Deon connected the simplicity in the cover design back to the bigger statement the band is making with this record. “They don’t need to be complex to be bold.”
CURRENCY album artwork
Retained Earnings
Anberlin’s longtime vocalist Stephen Christian stepped back from touring in 2023 and we noticed he isn’t credited on CURRENCY.
“We wanted it to be what it is in this era, in its own right. And he was fine with it. He was actually really interested to just go into this album blind, not hearing anything before it was done.” Deon says he got a text from Stephen the day “Neverafter” dropped, giving high praise to the band.
On that note, the band as as whole has remained close with Stephen as he settles into his new chapter. Guitarist Christian McAlhaney lives half a mile from Deon, Stephen is ten or fifteen minutes away, the drummer Nate Young is over the bridge in Tampa.
“Stephen is very much comfortable with where he is in life. He’s got three kids. He had kids before any of us did, so two teenagers at this point. To him, it’s more important that he is home being dad to them in such a pivotal point in their life than it is for him to be on stage, and we back that 100%. But he also enjoys watching what Anberlin is doing, being that it’s something that he helped build for all these years.”
joint account
Vocalist Matty Mullins fronts two active bands on two different labels and I wanted to know how that gets planned from the inside. The answer is boring in the most Millennial way, a shared calendar.
Both management teams “know what is going on with either band at all times, because Matty is in the middle of that. If we get an offer to do Warped Tour dates or whatever, it’s immediately discussed and made sure that Matty is free and there’s no conflict, because as much as he loves what he’s doing with both bands, our goal is also to not burn him out.”
He described Matty as “a metaphorical workhorse” and said the hard part is getting him to stop. “There’s definitely been times where he’s flown home, and then less than 48 hours later, he’s had to leave again. That’s rough, that’s tiring. That’s a recipe for getting burnt out.”
Deon offered wise advice for any band, whether new to the scene or veterans: “That’s how any good band should operate. So many bands fail because they don’t have good communication, or because they don’t have good planning. We just have to kick it up to another level, because there’s two bands involved rather than one.”
BLIND TRUST
Included in CURRENCY is the track “Trenches”, which features their current tourmates Switchfoot. So, I asked how this collaboration came about. Having been friends for the better part of fifteen years, Deon felt the song’s message sat right in Switchfoot’s wheelhouse. “That ultra-positive message about what life can be, that you don’t have to be alone, that someone’s got your back. It just all clicked.”
Anberlin sent over a finished recording with every part already in place and told Jon Foreman to do what felt right. “We’ve had other singers come in and do small things on songs, never really necessarily prominent things, or singing entire verses. This was the first time that we really wanted to take the song and hand it to somebody and say, just do what you think sounds good here.”
And Switchfoot knocked it out of the park! “The first time I played it, I was in the car with my wife, and she cried. She was like, it’s just so beautiful.”
Will fans be lucky enough to see the song performed together on this tour? Deon acknowledges it may be a bit much to ask a headliner to sing before his own full set. That being said, it’s not entirely off the table. “We’re like, we gotta do this a couple times, right? And Jon was like, sure.”
Small change
Anberlin has a few headline dates wedged between the Switchfoot shows, and Hartford is one of them. They’re in Webster Underground, the small room, not the main hall. I asked what he gets out of a room that size that he can’t get from a larger music hall or theater.
“That more intimate connection with fans at smaller venues is always great. You don’t feel ultra-separated from the crowd. There’s some venues where you just feel like you’re 20 yards back, and you can see people enjoying it, but you can’t really feel people enjoying it. In the small rooms, you kind of feel that energy a little bit more being that close to the crowd.”
He’s played The Webster before and said, “Even in the big room, it’s kind of one of those venues that even when it’s packed, it still feels intimate. It’s one of the reasons I’ve always liked playing there.”
As one can imagine, these headline shows exist partly because sitting still on tour can be expensive. “Speaking of currency, time is money when you’re on tour. Every day you’re not playing a show, you’re still paying your crew, you’re still paying for a bus.”
Anberlin intends to make the most of those intimate headline stops. “We’re bringing back some songs from the first album that we have not played live, even before Matty was in the picture. We’re gonna try and make it something more special for the fans, where they’re gonna get to hear songs that we don’t always play live, in addition to being introduced to some of the new songs.”
Photo credit: Jacob Moniz
fringe benefits
As we wrapped up on the interview and chatted more about the upcoming tour, I asked Deon for his take on the best and worst green rooms he has experienced over the last 25 years. He quickly named, D.C.’s 9:30 Club and The NorVa in Norfolk as some of his favorites, but stopped short of naming the worst. (Very diplomatic. Somebody's been media trained!)
“What makes a bad venue a lot of times is a venue that doesn’t invest in itself. They’re like, well, we’re the only venue of this size in this town, so people have to come here, so we don’t need to fix our bathroom stalls, we don’t need to put in a better sound system.”
Deon mentioned Anberlin travels with a Traeger and cooks big family dinners on days off when they’re on a bus. “It’s kind of our way of decompressing and feeling a little bit of home.”
But when the band does ventures out for local eats and you just may find Deon at Ishkabibbles for a cheesesteak, when the band passes through Philadelphia in early October. “When the venue staff at the TLA tells you that Ishkabibble’s is the best cheesesteak, I’m like, alright, these people work here every day, it’s two blocks away, and it’s a block away from Jim’s, and they’re still saying it’s Ishkabibble’s. I’m gonna trust them. And you know what? I’ve never had a bad cheesesteak there.”
With the recent Turnstile release of Never Enough: Versions, I asked what band and song Anberlin could see themselves covering.
Deon didn’t take long to settle on “Free Radio Gainesville” by Hot Water Music. “That would be absolutely one of those songs that I think we would record and love every second of it […] Collectively, we’re all massive fans, especially those of us that are Florida boys. We’re very proud of our Hot Water Music down here!”
