Exclusive Interview: Pop Culturalist Chats with The Living Tombstone

If you’ve ever been on YouTube or are a part of the gaming community, you know who the Living Tombstone are. The duo, composed of Yoav Landau and Sam Haft, have taken the industry by storm with over four million subscribers and over one billion streams. This year, the band is showing off a different, more personal side to their artistry, and we caught up with Yoav and Sam to learn more.

PC: How did you each discover your passion for the arts and music?
Yoav: I started the channel nine years ago. Besides making music, I’m very much into gaming. I grew up very into electronics. It was a way for me to connect with people through the internet. Through that, I discovered FL Studio.

Sam: FL Studio is what we use to create.

Yoav: I wanted to combine my two passions. Besides being musically included, I wanted to come back to gaming because I grew up on the internet.

Sam: On my end, I found my way into music in a roundabout way. When I was around seventeen, eighteen, or nineteen, I started doing sketch comedy in New York. There were elements of that that would be more on the musical side. Comedy is why I started performing music. Before I joined the Living Tombstone a few years ago, I was working with a comedy band, and that was primarily the musical outlet that I had. It was definitely two different paths.

PC: Who or what has the biggest influence on your career?
Yoav: Video games have been the biggest influence. Old video game music loops a lot. A lot of it has to do with trying to be as catchy as possible.

Sam: I guess a video game song is basically all hook?

Yoav: Yeah, I feel like it applies to pop music and the music that we make. We feel that part of being entertaining is to let something really catchy play and catch your ear.

Sam: Again, I hail from the world of comedy and TV/film writing. I don’t have a traditional music background, so I feel like one of my first primary influences is Tim Minchin, who is a comedian and pianist and obviously a songwriter, based out of the UK. I feel like on a lyrical level, what he does with clever references and internal rhyme is very fundamental to how I write a song.

On a musical and structural level, there’s a band from the ’90s who I adore called Jellyfish. They’re kind of a big rock prog band of the ’90s. That’s how I would describe them. I feel like they’re the intersection of the band Queen and Queens of the Stone Age—their hodgepodge style and the way they structure music, not being a traditional verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge, chorus. That stuff is huge when it comes to my musical approach.

PC: For readers who may not be familiar, can you tell us how this partnership initially formed?
Sam: We had a lot of friends in common just being around the geek culture space. I do a lot of voice-over work when it comes to cartoons, video games, and anime. A friend of mine was leaving New York City to move to Dallas. There’s a lot of dubbing work down there. Her goodbye party was karaoke. Lo and behold, I met this Israeli guy at this karaoke going-away party who’s friends with my friends and likes the music that I like. At the time, I just released an album with my comedy band, Sam & Bill. We were looking for an audio workspace in Manhattan where we could build a studio. I met this music producer and he said, “Well, I moved to New York City two weeks ago, and I’m looking for an audio workspace.”

We actually started working together separately. We started working in the same room on different things when we found an office together, and then pretty soon we just couldn’t keep our noses out of each other’s work. Yoav would do some production on a Sam & Bill song. I would do some lyric writing or singing on a the Living Tombstone song.

Yoav: Small projects like that.

Sam: It would be on a case-by-case basis, and pretty soon our work became inseparable from each other.

PC: Throughout the years, the two of you have had tons of success. When you look back, is there a particular moment that stands out?
Yoav: “My Ordinary Life” helped us figure out where we’re going.

Sam: Absolutely.

Yoav: The Living Tombstone is very much known for the influences we mentioned earlier. We’re known for songs like “Five Nights at Freddy’s,” “Overwatch,” and so on that have a gaming tie-in. “My Ordinary Life” is interesting because it’s the first time when Sam and I decided not to make it about video games. We wanted to see if this music would speak to people, or is it because we’re creating songs based on things they know?

Sam: That was a turning point for us. “My Ordinary Life” was the first song that we released that didn’t have to do with video games or geek culture. It was a personal song that we got together and we wrote one night over an order of fried chicken.

Yoav: Exactly. We just ordered barbecue. We enjoyed putting the song together. We were like, “If people don’t like it, then at least we know where we stand.”

Sam: If that song failed, we would have just kept to geek culture and not branched out.

Yoav: It’s the moment that we knew we wanted to participate in writing songs that we feel and deal with on a day-to-day basis and not just video games.

Sam: It was a big turning point for us because that was when we knew we could be something more than the video game music YouTubers.

PC: You’ve got a new single out now. Tell us about “Sunburn” and what inspired the track.
Sam: “Sunburn,” like our upcoming album Zero One, focuses on a particular aspect of mental health. The mental health angle has been an undercurrent of a lot of the Living Tombstone work. It’s really in this album now that we can make it less subtext and more textual.

“Sunburn” is a song that is about codependency, to a degree, and it’s about the lies that people tell themselves to maintain a toxic relationship. You have to hold this sense of delusion where it’s like, “They do bad things to me” or “They make me feel terrible about myself, but…” Then you come up with the excuses. It’s the danger of making excuses for someone who’s being abusive towards you.

PC: As you’re adventuring into this more personal storytelling, what was the biggest takeaway from creating Zero One?
Sam: How incredible it is to have a lot of time to make the music and to develop it. We put a hiatus on the channel for about ten months while we were making Zero One. The schedule we were on before, we would release a new track every week or two. That’s the grind of a YouTuber who has to keep pumping out content, content, and content. It doesn’t let you marinate in your creativity.

Yoav: You rush.

Sam: You rush. Absolutely. You still end up with good stuff, but so many of the tracks that we ended up with in Zero One only came together a month or two after we first conceptualized them, which is unheard of in the YouTuber schedule. There would be no way to sustain spending two months on every release. The idea that tracks start out as one thing and then gradually become something else was totally new for us. It’s really paid off. The tracks feel uniquely three-dimensional.

Yoav: We’re hoping that with the first song that people can see that this album is special to us. The reception, so far, has been great, and that gives us a lot of hope that people like the fact that we took the time with it for once as opposed to making a release every month.

Sam: As a YouTuber, it’s easy to fall into this hole of pumping out content all the time. Do people enjoy that I pump out all this content? Are people invested in me, or am I a weekly distraction that they go, “That’s nice”? Do people care about what we have to say? After “My Ordinary Life,” we realized they do. Zero One is the fulfillment of that sense of people actually wanting to know how the Living Tombstone feels, more so than the game the Living Tombstone is playing this month.

PC: As you’re embarking on this new chapter in your career, if you had to pick one song off of Zero One that best encompasses who the Living Tombstone are as artists, what would it be and why?
Sam: That’s an interesting question. I would argue the title song is the most encompassing of everything that we are. First of all, the song really takes a journey. It starts in one place and ends in a completely different place. It’s really the marriage of our personal narratives that enter into the music, but still has that aesthetic of the video game, digital era influence. It’s the song that’s the most encompassing of the storytelling that we’re trying to create with the album.

Ultimately, the YouTube work that we’ve done when we’re making a song about a video game or a TV show is storytelling. You’re dealing with someone else’s world and you’re telling stories inside of that. “Zero One” is the song that really fleshed out a world of our own that we get to tell stories inside of.

Yoav: I agree. “Zero One” is the anchor track of the entire album, given the fact that it revolves around so many ideas in one song. Creatively, it’s five different songs we melded into one.

Sam: It’s also the reason that it’s not one of our singles. It exists as part of the album. You can’t really separate it. It doesn’t make sense for us to release it on our own.

PC: The album touches on a lot of personal issues like mental health and isolation. Was it ever a daunting idea or scary prospect to tap into that vulnerability?
Sam: Totally.

Yoav: Yeah!

Sam: There’s a track called “Long Time Friends.” It was genuinely painful in the degree of its vulnerability. For that reason, it’s one of our favorite tracks on the album.

Yoav: I can only speak for myself, but Sam knows this. As a musician, you always try to make sure that you incorporate your vulnerabilities and experiences into your craft. To finally be able to make a song that explores what I’ve been through when I was younger is really special.

Sam: It can take a long time for hurt to turn into art.

Yoav: This song has been a turning point for me. The entire album is. The album is us expressing what we feel and what we’ve been through it.

Sam: I feel like there is this a very false sense that is perpetuated of, like, when you’re hurt, you can turn that into art. I feel like what that fails to take into account is that it can take really a lot of time to heal enough to turn that vulnerability into something artistic.

PC: Besides the album, what does the rest of the year hold for you two?
Sam: This is an interesting answer! Our background is content creators. When everything started to shut down, we had to strategize carefully. We are not, thankfully, in a situation where we’re like, “Well, there’s a pandemic, so we can’t do anything.” We’ve prepped a lot of stuff. Among the things that we have coming down the pipeline, we have two different video games. One of them has already had a demo release. It’s a game called In Sound Mind, which is very mental health focused. There’s a second game that we have not announced yet that’s still in development, with some really great, big, experienced video game producers. In addition to that, there’s a Living Tombstone comic book coming soon. We’re already developing the second full-length album. We definitely want to do a digital concert once the album is out.

To keep up with the Living Tombstone, follow them on Twitter, Instagram, Spotify, and YouTube. Check out their latest single, “Chosen,” below!