For The First Time, Again melts ice. Warm, meditative, and familiar with its glam rock-meets-power pop charm, the debut record of LA singer-songwriter Tyler Ballgame serves as a testament of his artistic birth: moving to the Sunshine state of California, becoming a full-time musician, and finding a band that could bring his lyrics to life. The songs radiate love and acceptance; “I Believe In Love”, which swiftly follows the titular track’s calm affirmation that all people will someday find each other at their best, becomes the record’s anthem, shirking off heartbreak and rejection by proclaiming, “I believe in love, that’s fine!” It’s playful, humorous, and sincere, arguing perhaps, that the best part of adulthood is reconnecting with our simplest, most childlike feelings.

Earlier this week, Northern Transmissions met with the artist to learn more about his peaceful disposition, how he came to such lucid and comforting realizations about a new life he had created only recently. Among many things—the production, the story behind some of his tracks, our favorite movies of 2025—we dove deep into the most striking part of his record: his unique, evocative writing style. He beams with a joyful personality both on paper and in person; here are some ways he finds it in everyday life.

Northern Transmissions: For The First Time, Again has been so many years in the making for you; a lot of life decisions had to happen in order to make this album. So, to start, could you talk about the process of putting it together, of taking this big swing and releasing solo music under your own name?

Tyler Ballgame: Yeah, it has been a couple years in the works now in terms of just building the team, finishing the album, and starting to work with a label for the first time. It feels like a big culmination, a transference. This album changed my life in so many ways, and it was really my birth as a full-time artist. Now it’s being handed over, and hopefully it will become part of people’s lives, you know? Just like all my favorite music, which is such a big part of me. Hopefully people listen and enjoy it, and that I’m able to keep making music as a career.

NT: I really want to talk about the production. It’s such a peculiar sound: there are bits of a 60s baroque pop, Revolver-esque flavor. There’s a lot of Bowie and glam rock in there. It’s also crackly and very textured; how did you manage to create such a vintage sound with fresh technology and production?

TB: I think a big part of that is literally using the analog process, you know? Using 2-inch tape machines, making music the way “they” used to make music, the way Bowie made music… I didn’t really touch a computer until the very end. It’s a very different type of process than making music on Pro Tools or something, which I’ve also done a lot of: it makes you use your ears and your heart, rather than your eyes.

I feel like a lot of modern music is made with your eyes because you can see it populating the waveforms in the DAW on Pro Tools or Logic. This is very “inside baseball” production talk, but, I think when you make music to date, it becomes about the performances of the artists in the room. That gives you less choice, less freedom to do whatever you want. “Oh, we’ll fix it later! or “Oh, we’ll try a thousand different things on it!” No. You have to make the sound there with your body and with the instrument, you know? So, it’s limiting in the best way. I think limitations are style, and I think maybe that’s something that’s kind of lost on a lot of music today.

NT: How long did the recording and production process take?

TB: When you use the analog process, it can go really quickly. This album was made across two sessions; maybe each session was two or three days long. Maybe 6 days in total probably a song or two a day, and then maybe another week of finishing touches and mixing. So, I got it all probably in less than a month, you know? Probably two or three weeks of work across two years. Putting it together involved a lot of sitting around and listening to it, wondering what it could be, and then finalizing it. Yeah, it’s a strange flash in the pan that you also just sat on for years and years.

NT: Yeah, I guess for you, because this is such a lyric-forward album, it was seeing your words at one point just materialize into a full song. Getting into the writing and the themes that you discuss—(re)birth, change, and like starting something for the for the time (again!)—how did you draw from life experiences in order to create this concept and write an album that has so much love and excitement? It’s an energizing kind of album.

TB: Yeah, I think songwriting is best when it’s kind of a mystery, you know? Like, even for me, I write frenetically: I kind of just turn my mind off and strum a guitar or play the piano and just babble. Whatever comes out I’ll record, and I’ll listen back and say, “What was I trying to say? or “What did I say?” Usually, phonetic things or words come through, but sometimes if I’m lucky, a full sentence will come out of a phrase. And then I can explore that theme. Um, and sometimes it’s just like words you’re like, whoa, what am I saying? It’s like the subconscious is bubbling up into the conscious. I think I end up writing songs that mean more to me like that, rather than just sitting down and saying, “I’m going to write a song about being sad!” It kind of takes me months—years, even—of playing the songs to understand what it might be about.

I also just love songwriting as craft, and as play. I love wordplay; I love jokes. That’s all throughout the album: using delicious words, words that are interesting or that strikes something within me. They’ve got that buzz within my stomach that makes me go, “Ooh!” I think it’s a pretty honest capture of myself as an artist and the other artists I collaborated with on this record.

NT: That’s interesting because in the past few years, I feel like music, especially in the indie alternative rock space, has gone through a dramatic stylistic change. Like, the beginning of this decade praised writers who were so confessional and direct, and now the celebrated people are those who go into that more esoteric space. Looking at the past five years and developing your own songwriting style, what are your thoughts on the way that songwriting is a craft that’s not just about communicating feelings but also working with the sound and energy of the song?

TB: Yeah, I think it’s an interesting trend, but I think there’s a spectrum on which you find yourself as a writer, and each song is a new chance to make a new marker on that spectrum. Some songs on the album are more esoteric than others, and some are…I maybe feel jealous about other artists if they’re able to be super confessional, direct, and simple. I kind of live in these lofty spaces but always am brought back by personal things. It’s a mystery to me…

I’m writing the next album now, and I’m trying to explore by asking myself, “What if I just wrote super honestly about this one thing in my life? How can I develop as a writer and pull a little bit from column A and a little bit from column B to find this blend that feels exciting to me?”

NT: You’ve been in a lot of session bands, and I know that you’ve had experience playing in regular bands before, but was the difference in creating For The First Time, Again with the group you assembled? [Jonathan Rado (Foxygen, The Lemon Twigs, Weyes Blood), Ryan Pollie (Los Angeles Police Department), Amy Aileen Wood (Fiona Apple), Wayne Whitaker] Like Amy Aileen Wood works with Fiona Apple, which is crazy.

TB: Yeah, Amy is her producer, and Wayne is more of a session player. I myself have played in a lot of session bands for studio projects in Los Angeles. It’s part of the fun of being in LA, just getting pulled into all these sessions and things. Luckily, Amy, Wayne, Rado, and Ryan really care about the music and feel like this is their project too, which I think is rare in terms of session players. They’re extremely talented and stylized; I guess it feels like a session player-type album in that sense, but not in the sense of the involvement of the players. Like, I feel for Amy and Wayne, ‘Ballgame’ is very much theirs as well. Sure, I write and sing the songs, but they’re also in the touring band and invested a lot of time and energy before there was ever any money. They had probably two years of playing just for the love of it. So, I think you feel that love on the record, you know? The personal touch of it really comes through. It’s not just, like, “Hey, I’m showing up for three hours to play on this record, and then I’m gonna go home.” They were there for the whole thing, and that’s part of what makes it special. It feels like music for music’s sake.

NT: I think that comes across so much because, at least in my experience of listening to that album, there’s such an interesting pacing when it comes to the rock songs with the big band, followed by the smaller songs that go by very quickly and just pour out of the guitar. When it comes to getting a folksier sound versus a rockier sound, do you follow the lyrics, or do you follow the sound? Or, is there something either in between or outside of all of that that points you in a direction where you want to pace the album?

TB: Yeah, I think it’s part of the fun and joy of exploration within the studio space. I brought all those songs in as guitar songs, except for “Waiting So Long”, which was a piano song I wrote on a self-triggering Casio keyboard. So, when you bring it to the players, and, and you get Rado and Ryan as the producers, they’re going to have ideas and want to try new things. I think it’s all, as you said, being guided by the lyrics and by the essence of the expression. And it’s how the arrangement and the choices you make in production echo the sentiment—or go against the sentiment—of the expression. We’re all asking, “Is that interesting?” Is it additive? Does it make you feel like the words? Does it make you feel like you are the one expressing them?”

NT: What did you learn from making the first album and stepping out for the first time that is going make the next record either easier or more challenging? What kind of things do you want to push yourself in towards the future? What were things that you noticed while performing and recording this one that you really enjoyed and wanted to keep doing?

TB: Having written most of these two years ago and still performing them into this next year. Um, a big thing is that I want to write lyrics that make me feel something every time. I want to sing it for a crowd and not feel like I’m going through the motions, you know? Luckily, with these songs, I still feel something every time; I’m still able to conjure up that feeling when I wrote it—or as we recorded it, to be honest—and not have to put on too much of an act. I’ve also become way more aware of the power of dissemination of words in a concert space, making me think about music as product into the cultural zeitgeist. Like, if all my songs said, “Fuck everything, steal your parents’ money, and blow up the UN!” that’d be…strange and not me. Like, I just write about connection, love, longing, yearning, and these things inside us that a lot of people can feel. There’s power in going out and repeating that into the global consciousness over and over and over again. That helps me to codify what it means for me to be an artist.

So, I’m thinking about all that in terms of writing new songs. I want to make sure they’re really good, that I feel like the lyrics are true or interesting, and that it feels like the joy we captured on the first record, you know? Like it has some urgency to it, in its expression. Like it just has to get out.

NT: A song that I really wanted to talk to you about is “Got A New Car”. I found it slightly humorous and very fun, and it really gets at the joy you were talking about earlier. I wanted to know more about the story behind it, and how you used this concrete image to also contribute to the main theme of doing the necessary work to find happiness sometimes by starting completely over.

TB: It’s the oldest song in the record; I wrote it when I was living at home in Rhode Island. I didn’t really have any prospects or anybody asking to hear my music. I was making music pretty much for myself and was really disappointed that it wasn’t changing my life.

I wrote this song in the middle of a kind of spiritual awakening that I was having around the pitfalls of identity and being too attached to the nature of ego. Like, I just decided to start clean and think of myself like, “I’m Tyler. I am aligned this way. I feel good when I’m doing this. I feel bad when this happens to me.” Our true essence, as people, is spaciousness of consciousness: the space within which all those thoughts and feelings can pass through like clouds through the sky. I was able to pull back the mask of my suffering and really see it for the first time; “Got A New Car” was me naming everything that was happening in my life and diagnosing and laughing at the face of my suffering. It was kind of absurd, kind of playful and unique to what I was writing at the time.

It’s the only song that carried over from that era. I started recording again in Los Angeles and was trying for real, and I remember Rado told me that song was a masterpiece. I said, “Oh my God! Like…what?” That was the first ever, real validation from somebody who I respected (I mean, Jonathan Rado!)— they liked my work and thought it was brilliant. So, we decided to record it again, and I think it still carries a little bit of that kernel of study on identity.

NT: How did you build this philosophical education and come to all of these ideas of finding peace with yourself and comfort with the world?

TB: I think where that interacts with “Got A New Car”, was object writing at Berklee College of Music, where I learned a lot it about from teachers like Pat Pattison. It’s when you free your mind and put your pen down on the paper. Practically speaking, let’s say you have a title, and you write the title. Then, you just start writing, and then you just let your mind jump around. Our minds are so playful; they want to make new connections between different things and build a web of association. That’s what a song is: it’s a web.

Songs are also an economy of words and choices that all carry a weighted context within the cultural consciousness. In that way, I think of them like Jung’s collective archetypes—concepts that we all carry around like love, or fear, or hope. Each word you choose is going to pull on these strings that are interwoven in between us, right? So, as you build the economy of your song, there are all these different ways to play with those universal feelings. It’s endless; it’s like Shakespeare where everything down to how you structure each syllable is up for play.

I think, on this record at least, “Got A New Car” is the height of that style of writing for me. I really got obsessed with that song and spent like, three or four days writing it. Setting my mind loose and building that economy, where each word is kind of playing on two or three others and then leading to another two or three, became the best part of the fun and joy of being a craftsperson as a lyric writer.

NT: I was wondering how you approached songwriting and composition in regards to how long you think a song should be. The 10th track “I Know”, for example, is the shortest one; it’s not even two minutes long. How do you decide when a song is over, and when you’ve said what you wanted to say and consider the song “perfect” in the way that it communicates an idea?

TB: I think it’s also a mystery. Honestly, with songs like, “I Know”, or “Goodbye My Love”, or “Seeing How I Feel”, I don’t remember writing them. I honestly did not remember where I was or what I was doing. For “Got A New Car”, I remember being in my mom’s basement. I remember seeing it on a piece of paper, and I remember having fun playing and pulling in different directions. Those songs, I think, came in one sitting and were done. They felt honest and real, and more importantly, like an inner part of me that needed to say something. I just needed to speak truth without trying to hide or qualify anything, or protect myself at all. Still to this day, I can’t tell you what “Goodbye My Love” is about, or what “I Know” is about, but they’re just beautiful language that makes me feel like there’s truth there.

NT: To me, For The First Time, Again is a record that you just need to play through and listen intently. It’s record that lends itself to playing a lot of times because the lyrics sink in at different moments. Like, for me, I think the, like, first moment that I looked up and was like, “This is something special” was “You’re Not My Baby Tonight” and “Matter Of Taste”. But then on the second listen, there were other songs that popped up.

TB: I think ideally, I’m an album artist. You kind of have to get into the singles game just as a necessity of modern promotion, but, this album feels like a real slice of an artist’s life and time. Going in to it, I saw the movie Bugonia. Did you see it?

NT: Yes! It was my favorite of 2025, which I feel like says a lot.

TB: I know! I was extremely moved and disturbed, and it was my favorite. Bugonia pulled me in immediately, and I thought it was so dark. Like, what Lanthimos thinks about the world was so dark and disturbing; I was just weeping in the theater, trying not to ugly cry. Everyone around me was laughing at all the little gags, and I was trying not to cry and didn’t think anything was funny. But every time the cousin came on screen, I just started crying.

All that is to say that the movie made me think, “What does an artist’s piece say about their worldview?” Other favorite artists of mine—someone like an Alex G or Joanna Newsom—are these people who build whole audio worlds. All this stuff made me start thinking, “What does my album say about my worldview?” And for the people I work with, “What are we saying about the world?” The themes that I keep coming back to are that universal love, and that, I think, is hopeful. I think it’s an anathema to something like Bugonia, where we don’t see each other as humans anymore. I think that, maybe the worldview of my art is that nothing can ever divide us, you know? It’s just the oneness of all things and that these things like danger, and violence, and death itself are an illusion. That there is no difference between you and I. There is, at the cellular level, no line of demarcation where we are separate. And, in this grand sweeping firmament of love, I’m
like, putting those themes into little pop songs to then dose the reservoir of thought with the attitude of, “It’s all okay. Everything is okay.”

How special is it that we are here? We get to look at one another and celebrate through the vibrations of music, imbued with meaning and little slices of the human condition. Like, it’s just magic! Hopefully we can bring some of that energy back in in 2026—not all this negativity, division, and fear.

NT: I like that mentality of turning a new leaf, especially because we really need to turn a new leaf at this point. I also got a little bit of that from Bugonia: like, yeah, we are too divided, but at the same time, a lot of it is a choice. I’m looking at Jesse Plemons’ character, and yes, I can acknowledge he has been through so much suffering, but he does not pull himself out of his hole. Instead, he just digs himself deeper into it. And I think that with music like your record, and with this mindset of pulling yourself up and starting again, it could bring a lot of people comfort when we have all been in that crazy, bouncing around, super-charged up mindset for five years.

TB: Totally! I appreciate you feeling that within the record. Art is the real battleground, you know? It’s what wins within art that will truly change things.

Order by For The First Time, Again by Tyler Ballgame HERE