How did you come up with the band Name? When Ron’s dad died, he was writing a song and looking for a word to describe “taking your last breath”. That’s where he thought of stifle. From there, it became The Stifled and kind of took on an extended meaning representative of those who are held back in one way or another.
Tell us about where you come from and how that reflects in the music? Baltimore, MD. Baltimore is an awesome city that we all love, but it is not without its problems. We are not writing about Baltimore specifically in our songs, but many of the issues we write about definitely affect our community.
Tell us about the song-writing process, how do you create your music? More often than not, our songs start with a riff that we build upon. I usually have a general idea for the subject matter of a song and will build the lyrics as I write the guitar so I can simultaneously come up with a melody. For songs where Tim writes the riffs first, I try to leave them untouched as best I can, but sometimes tweak a few chord progressions to better fit a vocal melody. Lately though, I’ve been writing the lyrics and vocal melody before the instrumentals and it has been a fun way to mix things up.
Who has influenced you the most? Rise Against, Bad Religion, NOFX, Four Year Strong
What was the first song you or your band ever wrote? Tell us if you performed it, trashed it, etc.…. Deception. Super fast heavy song with poorly conceived lyrics that don’t really mean anything. It’s fun to play though so we still break it out every once in a while.
What song are you most connected to or proud of ? Slow Moving Tragedy. It was a song written about the environment that has taken on new meaning during the pandemic. It is so easy to become complacent when things aren’t happening right in front of your face or happening too slowly to really take immediate notice. This is a way of thinking that we need to break out of with many things. Also, question everything, but do legitimate research and trust experts who know more than you.
Do you enjoy playing live and what do you enjoy about it? Heck yeah! Playing live is great. This is going to sound weird but one of our favorite things about playing live is messing up. We’re far from perfect, and every bump in the road pushes us to do better- to BE better. Also, we have some pretty hilarious memories all born from live hiccups. Like the one time Tyler and Craig played 2 whole songs in the wrong tuning. They spent the entirety of the two songs staring at each other trying to figure out what sounded weird… & it was them…
What is next for the band? Keep writing. As much as we miss playing shows, we have a lot of extra time right now that would usually be spent practicing our live performance. This is an opportunity to keep writing and release more material sooner than we would be able to otherwise. Can’t wait to scrape the rust off and play live again too though!
Any additional thoughts or Comments you would like to add? Check out “Everything’s Fine” and stay tuned for a lot more to come!
