Good Hangs did not arrive at its current sound through a straightforward plan. Before finding an audience with its blend of pop-punk, emo, humor, and adult frustration, the band spent years moving through different projects, testing genres, stepping away from music, and starting over.

In separate written interviews, vocalist and lyricist Michael Steinheiser and guitarist and producer Anthony Pierri discussed the band’s history, their longtime creative partnership, the work that goes into keeping Good Hangs alive, and what success means to them now.

These interviews were conducted separately by email. The responses have been lightly edited for grammar, punctuation, and clarity.

Michael Steinheiser

Before Good Hangs existed, what were you hoping to create that you felt was missing from your life or from the music you were hearing?

Michael Steinheiser: It was never a conscious decision on my end to start bands and make music. In reality, I have been dragged kicking and screaming into the scene by Anthony Pierri—guitarist, producer, and one-man recording studio—for most of my childhood and adult life.

I am not what I would consider a musically inclined person. I never discovered any talent for playing an instrument, and I was never a gifted singer. My parents homeschooled me until my freshman year of high school, so I was culturally stunted when it came to the popular music most people feel nostalgic for these days.

Growing up with Anthony, whose favorite thing to do was write, record, and perform music, caught me by osmosis whenever we hung out. Other kids skateboarded or played baseball. We played with GarageBand on his brother’s Mac.

It became our “thing,” and it was forever sealed into my psyche when we were 14 or 15 years old. We sat on the curb outside his parents’ house and wrote a love song for my girlfriend called “Turn to Me.” She had told me she was moving to Wisconsin, so we wrote this sappy song and recorded it.

When I played it for her, she cried.

That was it. I was sold on making music from then on.

We still have the recording, and you can easily tell I had humongous braces on my teeth.

That turned into our first band, Grand Finale. It was mostly pop music with a little experimentation. We performed shows acoustically and then with a full band.

Before that, Anthony was in a metal band called The Dial with his brother Frank Pierri, so we eventually started our own metal band called Lake County Kids. I lost my voice at every show, but it was by far the most fun I ever had onstage. You just cannot beat the energy at a hardcore or metal show, the violence, danger, and camaraderie.

Naturally, I quit all these bands at some point because I really sucked at singing and screaming, and they took an enormous amount of time and energy that I wanted to spend on drawing.

Sometimes we would restart them, but people got older, moved away, or moved on to bigger and better things. We watched kids who used to come to our shows start relatively successful bands in a short period of time. We had been toiling for years and had hardly anything to show for it.

It became demoralizing and lost the fun. What was the point?

That laid the foundation for what would become Good Hangs, along with the long period when we all stopped making music together.

Looking back, what moments or decisions shaped Good Hangs into the band it is today? Were there any points where things could have gone very differently?

Michael: Even though we stopped making music together for many years, I still had the urge to write melodies and song ideas. I just could not help it.

Some internal force inside me wanted to make music for the sake of making music. There was no end goal. I would just make a melody and send it to Anthony.

Eventually, this became too frustrating for him to tolerate without turning it into a band.

We basically picked up where we had left off. We were going to call it Grand Finale again, and it was more pop-focused. Anthony, his brother Dominic, and I started writing and recording pop and experimental songs.

This became Good Hangs’ defunct album, The Things We Think About. We even performed the songs at a show.

It sucked, and no one liked it.

Anthony sat us down and said, “We are going to focus on one genre. We are going to do pop-punk because none of us can sing well, and it has the most leeway for that.”

We wrote the Life Is Highschool EP with that in mind, then deleted the old album and the old music.

Then something strange happened that had never happened before. We were approached by a small label run by the drummer of Less Than Jake. He specifically said the song “JPEGS,” from the EP, spoke to him and that he believed in the song.

We ultimately agreed that we did not want to sign with a label, but it gave us confidence that we were moving in the right direction.

We also retooled some old songs with the more focused pop-punk genre in mind. Our current biggest song, “I Only Do Pushups When I’m Drunk,” is a reworked song from that first shitty album no one liked, and it has now racked up millions of streams.

If we had never written that album, we would not have had the newer songs that gave us the traction we needed, if we would have gained traction at all.

You’ve been very honest about balancing music, family, work, and the pressure of keeping a band moving forward. What has been the hardest part of building Good Hangs that fans never see?

Michael: The person with the hardest job is Anthony. I have the easiest job, but I make the biggest stink about it.

Anthony pulls the whole band together, coordinates practices, writes the music, keeps everyone on task, records everything, edits the vocals, mixes the tracks, writes his own song ideas and lyrics better than I do and with a clearer concept in mind, and figures out all the technical crap involved in playing live.

To top it all off, he is raising two children while running his own business.

All I have to do is send him half-baked voice memo ideas, track my vocals, design and ship some merchandise, and draw the cover art when needed. The exception was Greatest Hangs, which used fan art painted by Kody Barton from a photo I took of my cat with a beer.

Even at shows, I am the obligatory useless frontman who loads in and does nothing until showtime.

I do not have children or run a B2B SaaS positioning company. But from the sound of me whining about the band, you would think I am the one being forced to do what Anthony does.

The difference is that he likes being in a band.

I do not think anyone wants out of Good Hangs more than I do. I have signs in my house that say, “Don’t quit, Michael,” from when we started making music again.

It is just in my nature to quit bands and stop worrying about them. It is honestly disgusting. I am such a hypocrite about it.

I would probably be equally miserable if Good Hangs lost all its fans as I would if it became famous and we had to tour the world. That sounds horrible to me.

But if I am going to be miserable either way, why not try for the one that is more interesting?

All I want to do is sit alone in my basement, tinker with arts and crafts, watch a nice movie, and make a song for myself.

But it is ultimately not good to silo yourself away from the world. You have to force yourself to be uncomfortable to grow, or something.

Many artists give up long before they find an audience. What kept you and the band believing in what you were doing during the years when success wasn’t guaranteed?

Michael: I do not blame them. I would like to join them again in their freedom from the pain of being in a band.

When we were slogging along, I would say to Anthony, “What are we doing? This is a nightmare, and no one cares. I hate this. I do not want to play shows. I do not want to practice. You have so much on your plate. You should focus on your business and family.”

He would say, “You don’t understand. I need this.”

So I begrudgingly toiled along with him.

Dominic posted some good TikTok content that brought in new fans. We released Greatest Hangs, and that added a lot of momentum on Spotify. It has been slowly building ever since.

Now that we make money through streaming royalties, it becomes less of a question of “Why are we doing this?” and more of a feeling that I need to keep doing this to survive.

I am beyond grateful for that. I do not need to kill myself with freelance drawing anymore to pay my bills, and I have much more time to complain about being in a band now.

When people listen to Good Hangs, what do you hope they connect with beyond the music itself?

Michael: My ego and pride hope they listen to at least 30 seconds of seven to ten songs so our streaming numbers go up, our monthly listeners increase, and we make more money.

The monthly-listener count can determine whether I am happy or sad that day.

When the numbers go down, you feel like shit. You start thinking, “Why doesn’t anyone like us anymore? Is it finally over?”

Then the number jumps by 1,800 on a good streaming day, and you feel like a king again. So today, I am happy.

From an artistic standpoint, I hope the songs make people want to sing more than anything else. I want them to be songs you belt on the way to work or on the way home after a shitty shift.

I want people to feel catharsis, nostalgia, and escape for a little while, whether that means pain or joy depending on the song.

Sometimes it feels good to make yourself sad, the good kind of sad, when you remember a time you cannot visit anymore.

Has your definition of success changed since the band started? If so, how?

Michael: My current definition of a successful song is how it plays live.

A song can have hundreds of thousands of streams, and that feels nice. But when you play it live and no one is climbing through the crowd to steal my microphone and sing the words, I feel like it bombed.

When an entire room is blowing out its lungs screaming a chorus with you, nothing compares to it.

That is a feeling I have chased since we were kids.

It has almost ruined attending live shows for me because I know what that feeling is like. Watching someone else’s band is like Tylenol compared with the hard stuff you inject directly into your arm when you are the one onstage driving a crowd into a frenzy.

I know that is disgusting and egotistical, but it is true. I want to feel that rush, and I do not get it secondhand from watching someone else.

If someone was telling the story of Good Hangs ten years from now, what do you think would be the most important chapter?

Michael: This answer will be different for Anthony or Dominic.

Personally, I think my life slowly falling apart after I dropped out of community college gave me the fuel I needed to create the songs we make today.

I am not big on the idea that suffering automatically creates good art, but I would not have had the life experience to commiserate with people if I had succeeded in the path I originally imagined.

I probably would not have bothered doing the band at all if I had something better going on in my life at the time.

I tried and failed to become a freelance artist. I could hardly pay my $200 studio rent, and I was buying Domino’s Pizza with PayPal Credit while getting fatter and fatter.

I was sober all my life until I turned 25 and started drinking. That was when I understood firsthand why people drink the way they do.

I had just moved to Wisconsin, gotten a job at Menards in the millwork department, and could not help feeling like this was not what I was supposed to be doing.

I got a decent job after that, but I still felt like a personal failure for not becoming rich by drawing metal album art.

I was not being honest with myself about my skills back then.

Is there anything about the journey of Good Hangs that you’ve never really had the opportunity to talk about but feel is important to the band’s story?

Michael: I think I covered most of it in my ramblings.

Good Hangs has seen me through my 30s so far and has been nothing but good to me, despite all my bitching and moaning.

Some of the most painful moments were spun into songs, like turning lead into gold.

When something bad happens now, my comforting thought is, “Use this for a song.” That makes me feel better.

I was right to ignore my instincts and keep pushing forward with my friends, who have spent years brushing off the negativity I throw at them.

If we are lucky, we will have a brief moment of success. Nothing lasts forever, and it is important to remember that.

When an opportunity comes, I will grab it by the horns and not let go until my corpse falls apart.

Anthony Pierri

Michael talked a lot about the band’s history, but I’m curious about your side of it. Looking back, what do you consider the true beginning of Good Hangs?

Anthony Pierri: There were a lot of moments leading up to the actual beginning.

We had been making music on and off going back to 2014, but we never released anything. It was probably not until 2021 that we started pursuing the band in earnest.

I had left a job working for a church, which was a big reason I had not been able to release music with swearing in it or songs that talked about getting drunk.

We wrote an entire album that spanned five or six genres and put it on Spotify. It got hardly any streams, and most people only liked one or two songs that matched the genres they already enjoyed.

Eventually, we realized that if we wanted to build a dedicated fan base, we would probably need to pick a lane.

We made five different Spotify playlists, one for each genre we liked, in an effort to narrow down where we wanted to land.

We almost decided to make electronic music in a style similar to Golden Vessel. Then we realized he is literally a DJ.

Pop-punk and emo seemed like the best fit based on our musical talents.

You and Michael have been making music together for years through multiple bands and projects. What do you think has allowed that friendship and creative partnership to survive when so many bands eventually fall apart?

Anthony: I think it is partly because we have been friends since we were seven years old.

We went through almost every formative growing-up experience together, including both of us transitioning from being homeschooled to attending public school.

But it is also our mutual respect for each other as artists and our shared love of building a following that has kept us going.

We both got bitten by the fame bug early with our first band together, Grand Finale. It was an acoustic project similar to Dashboard Confessional. We would play local shows, and around 100 kids from our high school would come and sing all the words.

From then on, we were hooked.

We also had older brothers who played in bands together, so we were following in their footsteps in many ways. They taught us how to get booked at venues, promote our music, work a crowd, and function as a band.

We also grew up in a thriving local music scene and went to countless shows together.

Michael described periods where projects ended, people moved on, and music took a back seat. What kept pulling you back toward creating music, even when success wasn’t guaranteed?

Anthony: Michael has described it best by saying it is something we cannot not do.

Music is such an important part of both our lives that there is no universe where we could ever stop for good.

When we started Good Hangs, we explicitly asked, “How can we make a band that we can still be in for the next 20 years while also having jobs, families, and being responsible adults?”

We structured the band around that core idea, knowing that even in adulthood, we wanted music to remain an essential part of our identities.

Was there a specific moment, song, recording session, or realization where Good Hangs finally felt like Good Hangs? When did you know you had found the band’s identity?

Anthony: For me, it was when we wrote and recorded “JPEGS.”

It is the most quintessential Good Hangs song, in my opinion. Sadly, we released it before we had any real fans, and now it has completely languished in obscurity.

I am sure 99 percent of Good Hangs fans have never heard it.

We are planning to redo it at some point to see whether we can breathe some life back into it.

Looking back at the early bands, the failed ideas, and even The Things We Think About, how important were those experiences to becoming the band you are today?

Anthony: To me, the biggest importance was building the skills that allowed us to run the band fully DIY as adults.

From the beginning, long before we had real fans, we decided to learn the skills ourselves rather than outsource everything.

That included writing the lyrics and music, recording, creating artwork for shirts and albums, learning how to shoot and edit videos, understanding our gear, and figuring out the technical side of playing live.

Now that we are older, we are fully using all those muscles we have been working for the last two decades.

Why do you think Good Hangs connected with listeners when previous projects didn’t? Was it timing, songwriting, maturity, luck, persistence, or something else entirely?

Anthony: I firmly believe it was primarily extended focus.

I was in a band called The Dial for about five years, starting when I was 11 and ending when I was 15. During that time, we went from having almost no fans to eventually selling out venues that held around 200 or 300 people.

It took a long time to get good at that specific sound.

After we broke up, I tried a lot of other bands, but I did not give any of them the time it would take to develop a sound and gain a fan base.

We would do them for a year or so, break up, and try something else.

Good Hangs was the first band since The Dial where we kept moving in the same direction. We kept iterating and trying to get better, and I think it has really paid off.

Unless you get a viral hit, most bands are built one fan at a time. That takes a really long time, so you have to be willing to endure those periods.

As someone who handles so much of the writing, recording, production, and behind-the-scenes work, what do fans rarely see or understand about what it takes to keep Good Hangs moving forward?

Anthony: People constantly ask, “When is new music coming out?”

What they do not realize is that each individual song represents somewhere between 30 and 40 hours of work.

As a dad with two kids, I can only chip away at those hours, maybe one hour at a time, a few days each week.

If we play a show, that adds another endless amount of work that nobody sees, including practicing, preparing the gear, and handling all the logistics.

That further slows down the writing and recording.

People always want us to play more shows, but it is a direct trade-off between time spent writing and recording and time spent practicing for a show.

There are only so many hours in a week.

Where does the name Good Hangs come from, and what does it mean to you today?

Anthony: I honestly do not remember.

It felt like a good label because so much of the music is nostalgic about the good old days when you had a lot of friends.

As an adult, everyone moves away, and you are never able to get that same solid core group of people together in the way you could when you were young.

The name tries to capture that feeling of when everyone would get together for a truly good hang, something that does not happen for grown-ups, at least not in the same way.

When people listen to Good Hangs, what do you hope they connect with beyond the songs themselves?

Anthony: I hope the music helps people relive some of their best times.

It sounds strange to say that new music can make you feel nostalgic, but that is what we are going for.

When you listen to Good Hangs, we want it to feel like you are back at Warped Tour or discovering a new artist on MySpace.

It should feel like going to the skatepark after school or walking around endlessly with your friends because nobody’s parents wanted ten kids coming over.

Looking back on everything you’ve built with Michael, Dominic, and the rest of the band, what are you most proud of?

Anthony: This is going to sound very vapid, but I am proud that we have more than 100,000 monthly listeners and multiple songs with millions of streams.

I have always believed that we make good music, but there were many moments when reality seemed to be saying, “No, you don’t,” because we had so few fans.

Now it is starting to feel like maybe we do make good music and that it has had a positive effect on a lot of people.

The hard work over so many years finally feels like it is paying off.

Is there anything about the journey of Good Hangs that doesn’t get talked about often but feels essential to understanding who the band is today?

Anthony: There is literally nothing better than everyone in a room singing a chorus as loudly as possible.

That trumps every other aspect of music.

We write every song with that goal in mind: How can we get every person in the room to belt this at the top of their lungs?

There are other bands in our genre that are more riff-driven or atmosphere-driven. Their lyrics may be cryptic and require interpretation.

For us, the question is, “How can we write something unbelievably straightforward that everyone understands immediately and wants to sing as loudly as possible?”

It is all about the chorus.

That is why we started calling ourselves “Anthem Emo.” It feels true to the early-2000s pop-punk we grew up loving.

That music was all about soaring choruses.