I have read a lot of issues of the New York Times Magazine in my day, basically
So this is by far the most self-indulgent thing I've ever written. Set in the Guitar Hero universe.



IT'S A COLD 8:30 IN THE MORNING when I pull into the studio lot. It's an unassuming collection of warehouses but every piece of real estate in LA has security detail and I'm made to idle in the car while the guard checks my press pass. He's a burly man in his mid-thirties and when I tell him who I'm here to interview he breaks into a grin. "Three Tickets To... huh," he says. "Tell those guys I say hi."

The set for the photoshoot is generic as you are likely to find: white walls, a rider, a red velvet couch proudly out of place. It's milling with less PR people than you would expect and the band stands out easily. The four of them are in various states of readiness, ranging from artfully disheveled to genuinely bed-headed. They are all holding coffee.

Jamie Van der Hoyt, the drummer, notices me first and gives me a lazy two-fingered salute. "Hey, soldier," he says. "Reporting for duty?"

I reply in the affirmative. For a band that claims to have no particular political agenda, Three Tickets To... wages an impressive field campaign.

--

OVER THE PAST FOUR YEARS I've written dozens of articles about Three Tickets To.... I have interviewed them a good five or six times. A band with a valid reason to be wary of the media, they are friendly but more or less resigned to my presence on the twenty-four hours I tag along. Roger Tietney , the bassist and perhaps the most controversial member of the band, makes a show of being particularly welcoming. This morning he is by far the furthest along, already in wardrobe when I arrive. He makes small talk with me as the rest get ready.

Jeremy Monson, front man, rhythm guitarist and song-writer, is the least prepared, having barely sat down in the makeup chair. "[The makeup artist] is mad at me," he confides to me when her back is turned. "Because my eyes are so puffy." It comes out that he hasn't slept in two days. "Two full days," he confirms. "This is my fifth cup of coffee this morning." He'll have two more on my count during the course of the shoot. What was keeping him up so late, I ask. Industry party?

"I was looking at videos on Youtube," Monson, a life-long insomniac, says grimly. "Which is diametrically opposite of partying on the color wheel, probably. At least we get the night off, thank god."

"She's also mad that I wouldn't let them cut my hair," he adds. "That's [lead guitarist] Finn [Ruefenacht]'s job."

If the idea of one of the most influential bands of the moment giving each other home haircuts seems slightly off, then everything about Three Tickets To... is a study in contradictions. A mainstream rock band with hipster cred or maybe an indie darling that inexplicably found its way into the limelight; wholesome Christian rock drenched in sex and violence; a group of wet-behind-the-ears kids performing music almost too sophisticated for their fanbase, very little about Three Tickets To..., strictly speaking, makes sense. Four years ago I referred to them as Modest Mouse with a boyband appeal; too young and either too experimental or too safe, but definitely too weird to last. I was the last one to think I would be here, three albums and the inevitable drug scandal later, discussing the particulars of why their latest LP, Breathing Onto Mirrors, is arguably the best album of the year.

Monson clearly isn't lying about his exhaustion. After the photoshoot - which goes smoothly. The band poses like professionals - he drifts off on their tour bus as soon as he and Finn Ruefenacht sit down, leaving the guitarist to conduct the interview solo. He sleeps heavily but soundlessly with his head on Ruefenacht's shoulder, a fact Finn only acknowledges by occasionally tucking Monson's hair back behind his ears.

"We're halfway through the tour now," Ruefenacht says. "And so far it's been amazing. On tour you literally never know what to expect, but the response to the new material has been really enthusiastic, really great. You can't ask for more than that."

The way the band describes it, they more or less grew up on the road. Signed six months after forming to Vintage, they've arguably been living the VIP lifestyle since. When I share this thought with Ruefenacht, however, he snorts. "There is basically nothing in the world less glamorous than touring. And we're touring seventy percent of the time." At 6'3" and 170 pound, with a sharp European cut to his cheekbones, Ruefenacht is himself inherently glamorous. Google his name and you'll hit over twenty pages of web shrines. He is surprisingly down to earth and articulate in person, however, and undeniably one of he most talented guitarists working today. The collective attractiveness of Three Tickets To.. has arguably hindered more than helped them, taking away some of their credibility as legitimate musicians. Ruefenacht, however, is unimpressed with this thesis.

"If we didn't have substance, if it were all looks, we wouldn't have lasted as long as we have." He looks down at the sleeping Monson. "Jeremy is nothing but substance."

---

IN HIS OFF-DUTY UNIFORM of designer-framed glasses, skinny jeans and Vans, Jeremy Monson looks more like an NYU undergrad than the leader of a billboard topping, genre-defying rock band, and in fact it is a label he staunchly refutes.

"There's this whole media conception that the band's just my personal vehicle and that is absolutely not true," he says. "All I write alone are the lyrics. Everything else is a collaborative effort. I barely even touch the drum parts, that's all Jamie."

Still, with his hipster-next-door good looks, operatic vocal range and sunny smile, Monson is the public face of the band. In particular his almost gruesomely personal lyrics have given them their reputation of ambiguous sexuality, a subject of which he is equally dismissive.

"There's more to this band than sexual orientation," he says, but contradicts himself a moment later by adding, "Everything I have to say about the issue is on the albums. People can interpret them however they want."

Birthed from a scene notorious for its playful attitude towards homosexuality, Three Tickets To... is notable for being both more conservative and more authentic in its allusions to queer culture than counterparts such as Watershed and The Squeaky-Voiced Teens. While Monson's blistering lyrics speak more truthfully, if vaguely, about queer issues than their eyeliner-wearing contemporaries, missing are the coy stage antics, the infamous homoerotic party photos. Natives of Salt Lake and Monson himself a lapsed Mormon, it's as if that red state philosophy has steeped into their sense of self-presentation. They are here to perform, not to titillate.

---

WHICH IS NOT TO SAY that the guys of Three Tickets To... are in any way serious-minded. Spending time with them makes it clear how, now only in their early twenties, they are still painfully young. They flip each other off as punctuation, eat ringdings and coke zero for breakfast. Brightly colored party streamers and dirty dishes litter every square inch of the bus, and Van der Hoyt told me with a certain pride that Ruefenacht had gone five days without showering. At the same time Tietney, the youngest at twenty-two, spends most of the day on the phone with his accountant and Monson and Ruefenacht sequester themselves in the back of the bus to work out an arrangement promptly at three o'clock. Again, it's an odd dichotomy; a mixture of the veteran professionals they are and the college kids they chose not to be. As if they are stuck somewhere between being forced to grow up too fast and not at all.

"We got famous really young," Tietney acknowledges. "And that warps you. You wake up one day and you have a f*cking ton of money and free time but no supervision and even your responsibilities are essentially about having fun. I wouldn't trade this for anything, but I definitely also paid the price for it."

Tietney of course is talking about his brush with tabloid culture. In 2006 he checked himself into rehab twice. Once for alcohol addiction and the second, a short three months later, after overdosing on cocaine in a venue's supply closet. According to the band, the story was leaked on the internet before Tietney's parents were even contacted.

"If I ever met Perez Hilton," Tietney says. "I would totally pee in his mouth."

His second stint in rehab has seem to have stuck; Tietney shows me his eighteen months sober pin with a certain ironic pride. It helped that while in treatment he was diagnosed with Cyclothemia, a milder form of bipolar disorder and has been receiving therapy and medication since then. On the bus refrigerator is a smudged piece of graph paper on which someone has written ROGER'S KRAZINESS KONTROL KHART on top of a neatly-ordered grid with his medication dosage and the time of day, each marked off with a ladybug sticker.

"It was definitely a hard time for the band," Monson says. "And it put a lot of things into perspective. We kind of had to really consider what we were about, what our priorities were." He freely admits that much of their second album The Mechanics of Falling is about Tietney's addiction problems. "Rog has been my best friend my whole life and I had a lot of trouble dealing with the fact that he was sick and self-medicating. He adds, "because that's what it was, a sickness. I love the dude, seriously, and he is straight up mentally ill."

"Straight up," Tietney confirms from the bathroom, where he is flat-ironing his hair. Today the tour is, if not entirely sober, at least mindful of Tietney's struggles. The evening activity during my stay with them consisted of a marathon game of Taboo.

The entire band rallied behind Tietney after his overdose, issuing a statement immediately that there would be no permanent changes to the line-up. "There wouldn't be a band without Roger," Vander Hoyt says firmly. "We owe him everything."

---

ALL FOUR MEMBERS of the band could independently be considered the odd man out: Monson as the tortured artist, Tietney, short and zoftig and admittedly unstable, Van der Hoyt, a bastion of mellow southern hospitality and Ruefenacht, coiled with charm. But those disparate elements were united by talent and drive and have formed a unit that is surprisingly strong. The origin story of Three Tickets To... is well-known and, befittingly, a modern-day scenester fairy tale. Monson and Tietney, born in raised in the suburbs of Salt Lake were in high school when Tietney met Ruefenacht at a Starbucks. Tietney then contacted Van der Hoyt, a recent graduate, then in community college, about playing drums for the band.

"I moved to the SLC midway through my junior year," Van der Hoyt recalls. "And met Roger almost immediately. He was always bugging me to hear him and his friend play because Jeremy was so awesome, Jeremy had such an amazing voice. But the thing was Jeremy was super shy back then - I barely ever heard him talk - and I kept saying to Rog, 'dude, the two of you in your mom's basement, I'm sorry, but that's just not a band.' And I was really busy. I was in five other bands at the time, just small things with friends. But then one day Roger tells me he found this guitarist that I had to absolutely hear. So I check them out and meet Finn and they - man, they were just playing with a drum machine - but I was like 'that's Jeremy Monson? Really? Really? And I went outside and called up all the other bands and quit, right on the spot, because I knew. Sometimes you just know, and I knew."

Ruefenacht was also relatively new to Salt Lake upon joining with Tietney and Monson and, like Van der Hoyt, reports moving a great deal as a child. "Jamie's parents were teachers and mine were diplomats," he says. "We both never really got to settle in one place." In contrastMonson and Tietney both speak to their desperation not to be trapped in Salt Lake and saw music as a means of escape.

"I'd hear music coming from downstairs," Rebecca Tietney, Roger's mother, tells me in a phone interview. 'And I just assumed that they were covering something. And then Roger would ask if he could play me a song they had written and it would be what I had just heard. And that was back when it was just my boys, when they were fifteen-sixteen."

Monson is included thoughtlessly as part of the Tietney family as he stayed in their house for six months after leaving his own on reportedly bad terms. It's another subject he is not eager to discuss, saying only, "I chose to stick with the band instead of going to school. This isn't the life they wanted for me." The Monsons themselves declined to be interviewed.

Three Tickets To...'s first album Frames and Bridges is Monson's autobiography of that time, a raw and brilliant ode to a turbulent coming of age. "When our first album is criticized," Monson says. "It's on the grounds that it was adolescent and angry. And I always want to say, well yeah, we were angry adolescents when we wrote it. Not to say we don't take criticism seriously, we do. And I'd like to think our sound has evolved with each album and we've gotten more sophisticated over time. But I think it's short-sighted to be dismissive of art just because it's evocative of the artists."

A certain breed of music critic have been weakly attempting to dismiss Three Tickets To... for years, but Breathing Onto Mirrors might be the album that silences them. Softer if no less perceptive and technically flawless, the band's musical inspiration has clearly strayed to the post-rock side of the force. Their arrangements, which have always swung wildly between triumphant misery and frantic jubilation, have settled into a long, free-falling transcendence.

"It's a calmer album, in a way," says Ruefenacht. "As we've grown into ourselves."

"The first two albums were written during times that were really difficult for me," Monson said. "This one was written during a time when nothing was outwardly that hard but I had to really evaluate a lot of my preconceptions and my beliefs. It's a more introverted record, more thoughtful, less a blind reaction to stimuli."

I finished our individual interview by asking Monson for a one word summary of their new sound. Still sleep-rumpled, he looks at the bus' kitchen, where the rest of his band is eating sugar cereal and engrossed in a conversation about the video game Half Life. "I guess I'd have to say thankful."