Denver-based high-flying blues-rock band Shady Oaks has always felt dangerous. Their songs are these raw, destructive things that feel like navigating a burning house with a glass of whiskey in your hand, more concerned with not spilling a drop than ever actually escaping. Shady Oaks is staring that danger in the face with their new video for their recently released single “Not Coming Home.” The video features a flipped vehicle, pyrotechnics, paramedics, blood and a rise from the dead. It’s the most ambitious visual the band has attempted to date and it perfectly matches the chaos of the song, the grit and the blood and the torn vocal chords. Plus, it fucking rips. Read the article to see the video at the end.
Denver Dive recently spoke with Shady Oaks frontman Ty Gallaway about living his zombie dreams, how the song itself came together, acting alongside his best friends, making sure there’s still beer in the fridge and more.
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Denver Dive: First off, love the song. It absolutely rips. It’s your first release in a couple of years. How did it come together? What prompted you to write the song?
Ty Gallaway: First off, just wanted to say WHATS UP MAN and thank you for featuring us on your new platform. I am loving the coverage you have been putting out. Yeah we have been on a journey since our last single release of… “Vices”? Yeah, that was in 2025 followed by the EP “Boys Weekend”. When you said a few years since a release, I was like “nah that can’t be right..” but you were right. We can get into that later.
I actually wrote this song a year or so ago in the ol’ basement dungeon with my pal, Logic Pro Drummer, and my other homie, Logic Pro Bass Player. The computers never judge so I feel comfortable writing alongside them. Just kidding, I just happen to write really well when the inspiration hits and I don’t have to call anyone to get together to jam. I really didn’t even start with an idea other than getting a massive update for Logic Pro that had some cool new virtual musician updates. I just programmed the computer bassist to play in Gm (my favorite key if you don’t already know that), and the rest is history. He/it came up with the cool bass riff after tweaking a few parameters and I started jamming the intro riff you hear in the song. I was really trying to write the most sell out Ford commercial Black Keys song I could think of while ripping off the vocal effect in “Pumped Up Kicks”. I think it turned out just right.
Lyrically, I was writing about my good friend who was in a really rough relationship that prompted him to stay out all night with me/other friends at the bar instead of going home to face the chaos. Will continue more on that with your lyric question.
DD: The whole arrangement of the song is incredible. That drum-heavy opening, that central riff, the huge bridge, the solo at the end. Tell me about how you put the pieces of the song together.
TG: We started tinkering with my demo with the last band lineup (Hunter and Jonah) and it never really hit the way I wanted it to. It fell flat a ton of the time and didn’t have the ass on it that I was looking for. We played it out a few times on tour and it was fun but not quite there. Once we made some switcheroonies to the lineup and hired Avery and Augustus, we tried to record it in Austin in the first two weeks of playing together. Didn’t go well to say the least but we definitely saw the idea in a new light. Gus does this really cool thing where he hears my demo drums and instead of playing what I had, he makes it like 30x harder and just blasts the holy hell out of the drums. So he came up with that saucy drum intro, followed by the bass part that Avery changed a bit to make it more human. Then we layered the guitar riffs so Isaac is playing an octave up to make it sound very early Black Keys-y and then started building from there.
The bridge is actually my favorite part. In the demo it sounded very surfy and kinda gave you the sense of dancing on the beach during a beach boys concert. We leaned into that with the big guitar swells and went into half-time to give it a more “oh shit we are about to blast off” and then a little drum riff back to the last chorus. To really give it to the listener, I ripped my vocal cords in half screaming the last chorus and did a pretty classic Shady Oaks one-take chaotic guitar solo to top ‘er off. And that’s how the meat was smoked!
DD: The song deals with this theme of not coming home, of accepting one’s failings, giving into temptation. Can you tell me a little bit about the lyrics and what you hope listeners will get from them?
TG: Yeah it’s interesting to hear your take on the lyrics. I guess I never thought of it as failures or giving into temptation. I kinda made myself the character going through my buddy’s relationship. Mostly because I’ve been there before so maybe it was a bit of going back in time. But really at the time I was seeing this relationship fail in real time so what were we doing together to make this story? Staying out drinking, waking up with a hangover, pretending ibuprofen was going to fix everything, realizing you are too old for this shit but doing it again the next day anyways. Kind of leaning into the degen life with rising credit card limits but also really not giving a fuck because ROCK N ROLL YEEEWWW. When writing a rock-forward song like this, you really have to make sure you are playing the part. At least, that’s my justification for being a degenerate 60% of the time. I guess the whole theme is failure, but dealing with it by being awesome. My body hurts.
DD: The video’s amazing too. It has this sense of danger, of life and death to it. How’d you come up with the concept? Did it evolve as you worked on it or was it pretty much fully formed at the start?
TG: DUDE the video was SO FUN. I love it so much and it’s by far my favorite video we have done. I can take literally zero credit for anything to do with the video. It was all Jeff Riley from Noble Bison Productions and also my bff. He did our Dyin’ and early Home Video from 30 years ago with just himself and a camera. This time we had a bit more production which I can go into later.
Anyways, Jeff and I talk on the phone pretty often to stay in touch with our creative careers and what not. Just dude stuff. I sent Jeff the basement demo and was like “dude we are recording this track in a few weeks, can we plan a music video?”. He was pretty stoked to work on something creative since he is in the commercial realm most of the time and started coming up with the idea. I think initially he was like “we should break a bunch of shit in a chaotic barn party”. But that sounded… done before and a little expensive. So he scrapped it. Then came up with “okay hear me out, you die in a car wreck and come back as a zombie”. My first thought was “my mom is going to hate this shit but I am so down”. Zombie flicks are my favorite (shouts out to Juan of the Dead), so I was more than excited to do the thing.
Rambling nonsense to short, it evolved until the shoot. Day of was pretty much all planned out. Shady Oaks has always felt dangerous, so I think this video came naturally to us.
DD: Tell me about production. It’s more elaborate than videos you’ve done in the past. You have a flipped car, bloody make up, pyrotechnics, actors playing paramedics. How’d you bring this all together?
TG: DUDE it was electric. I knew it was going to be a bigger production from the uhhh.. budget I gave him. But never in my life did I think I would roll up to this parking lot in the middle of East Colorado to see like 10 cars and vans full of crew and equipment. It was shot at an abandoned nuclear testing facility where parts were being sold off to different businesses. One of the spaces was being converted into a film set. The first scene was nothing special but a parking lot and some amazing lighting and a sunset and also happened to be next to a junkyard. The junk guy actually brought a car over and had it flipped for us the day before. Which was so metal, there were still fluids leaking out from the car so we had to be careful so I didn’t explode with pyro’s. Tempered glass EVERYWHERE, so we had to clean that up for me to lay in. While that whole scene was being prepped, I got car-wrecked by the most lovely SFX artists, Emma Swanson and Brennan Hershock. I spent the most time with them out of anyone else that night, being bloodied up to “thrillered”. Every take, they would bring me another shot of fake blood that I had to spit out and dribble down my face while crawling out of the car and re-glue the fake glass. They made me feel like an actual actor that day, which helped with the part. Shout out to them.
The actors were my two best friends, Dalton Jensen and John Miller, who are actually in med school. They knew exactly how to work the gurney and perform CPR since they both just finished their ER rotations. It was perfect timing. Not only that but when we showed up to the hospital scene, it was the part where the labs for the abandoned nuclear testing were done. I think they had UFO in there because the space had those like old timey fallout computer monitors, flickering caged in lights, viewing rooms with thick ass windows, some sort of fume hood situation, and submarine style vault doors that would need a bomb to blow open. I don’t know what they were keeping in there but it felt dangerous.
The ending scene was scouted out days or weeks in advance but when we showed up at 3AM, we were met with a locked gate to the field. The tree we shot infront of was easily three hundred yards away and down a massive hill. We went back into the hospital building and started looking for another full band scene but nothing gave a good graveyard feel like that tree. So we hauled all the equipment, lights, drumset, amps, guitars, down the hill and to the tree and started shooting the final scene at 4AM. Since we arrived at 5pm for the sunset scene, we were running on fumes. It was FUCKING rough but so awesome at the same time. We really had to work with morale at that point since everyone was burned out. But we fucking finished and wrapped around 4:30. After an hour drive home and an hour-long shower to get the makeup and blood off, I went to bed around 7 AM that morning. Great experience and I would do it again tomorrow lol.
I just played the part, catered dinner for crew, and hired my friends. Jeff took care of the rest and the crew we had out there were 10/10 professionals. They all work in cinematography and what not, so it really took the production from music video to fucking cinema zombie magic.
DD: How’d you flip the car? What did you do with it after?
TG: I don’t actually know what happened to the car…. I left the scene in the wee hours of the morning and never looked back.
Where did you film the video?
TG: WATKINS COLORADO BABY. I couldn’t tell ya the name of the complex we were at. Just way out there!
DD: Did you direct it yourself or did you hire out?
TG: Jeffy Jeff Jeff directed it.
DD: If you directed it yourself, what was that like? If not, what was it like being directed?
TG: I loved being directed. I have some ideas every now and then but I don’t ever sit in the acting space so having a voice bossing me around is next level for me. Especially knowing the director personally for 6 years, he can be really honest with me which I need from him. Jeff is also excellent at directing people of all demeanors and is a great leader.
DD: Tell me more about the production team as a whole.
TG: Jeff Riley, Director. I mentioned Emma and Brennan as the SFX crew. We also had Jessica Mckeehan as our everything person. Comms, management, SFX makeup, Props, location owner. Really just a lovely person to work with and a fuckin boss. Tim Hull, master coordinator and co-owner of Noble Bison. We pal’d around a lot that night. Aidan Ruth for the BTS. To shout out everyone, Josh Vertucci, assistant director. Orion Madsen on the camera, dude put up a fight getting that first continuous shot with the camera strapped to him via exoskeleton. Andrew Yang was a master of cinematography. Darin Spitzer, art department and PA. Phil Abrams and Ian Surowic on the Grips. Ray Dellacroce, Gaffer. Clay Hendrix, Electric. AND THE BOYS, Avery Cox, Isaac Vance, and Augustus Hoff.
DD: Did you play live or to a recording?
TG: Funny, we didn’t have the song fully tracked or edited. The morning of the shoot, Jeff calls me and is like “hey man, I noticed the song is not time-edited.. So yeah. It either has to stay the way it is or that needs to be done like yesterday” So I called our producer, Taylor Hahn, and was like “hey man I hope you are not playing golf.. I need this done like now to get cues for the crew”. I went from like normal day of event stress to my hair falling out and wanting to cry. Luckily Taylor was not playing golf and is a fuckin mad man and lined up everything after he finished his lunch. It always worked out in the end. Having said that, the song wasn’t even mixed or had keys on it. So we played to a “on-time” raw version of the recorded song. I kinda got wrapped up in the video and forgot to actually finish the track lol.
DD: This feels like the beginning of a new era for Shady. You’ve changed the line up a bit, and it feels like you’re continuing themes you’ve dealt with in the past but in this cool new way. Anything you can tell me about that?
TG: This is definitely the beginning of the new Shady Era. AND I LOVE IT. We parted ways with Mean World and Hunter Bates. Not for any reason other than it wasn’t working out anymore. Jonah retired and moved back to the Midwest. So we kind of scrambled in the fall to find replacements with gigs and recordings booked in the new year. Avery filled in for us on a previous tour, and is my best friend, so that was a natural ask. His band just broke up and was looking to keep playing music so that didn’t take any convincing. Augustus Hoff… I met him at the bar he works at in Boulder. My wife and I were casually chatting with him about scuba diving and sharks n shit for a few hours while he was working. He was showing us a pic of him swimming with a Great White Shark when I saw drums in his camera roll and now he is in our band.
Yeah… we have some interesting new stuff coming out of our hands and mouths. Themes are the same but changing slightly. Never singing about anything… happy. Last time I checked, the world we live in is not rainbows and smiles. I think I got most of the angst out of my system as far as whining about my super fun divorce like 5 years ago. Now leaning into being a degenerate washed up frontman writing more “refined” bangers of all sorts. I’m going to loop in the next question to this stream of consciousness.
On new themes, we are tracking a new record in two weeks at Far n Away Studios in Boulder. We have some classic Shady blues bangers on the docket talking about themes of mediocrity, cockiness, and insanity. A new whiskey related country tune for the fans. I studied some jazz with my audio engineering mentor, John Remington, and led me to write two songs with more than 3 chords that are way more dynamic and “evolved”. Those are my favorite tunes at the moment to play. And one surprise that I hope we get to in the studio that will be just way out of our normal realm. I am really excited to get this new record done. I am super proud of our new sound, how quickly we found it, and how it has come together. Isaac was talking to me in December saying we are like a NBA team that just lost our vets after a ring but just drafted some young guns to rebuild our team with. So I like to think of this year as our rebuilding year. I love the new guys, the new vibe as a band, and finally playing new music for once. We got stuck there for a sec but we are BACK BABY.
Speaking of being back, we are pretty much focusing on our album for the rest of the year and playing one more show in my second home in Hopkins, Belize in November. Unless something sexy comes along, we are going to focus on new music. THEN WE WILL BE BACK FOR 2027. More Austin shows, break into Nashville and hopefully get on the bill for some bigger opening spots in Denver. It’s going to be sick.
We may be getting older but we still got some beer in the fridge.
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