glimmers talk new music, growth, touring and Twitch – exclusive interview

One of the most exciting emerging bands making a name for themselves in the alternative scene is Atlanta-based pop rock outfit glimmers – consisting of lead vocalist Maggie Schneider, lead guitarist Alex Downtain, rhythm guitarist Alex Norrell, bassist Ari Patwary, and drummer Jeremy Russell. The members began jamming together in 2019, originally beginning as the backing band for vocalist Schneider, who was a solo artist at the time. Continuing to play together, the band quickly grew into a family and officially formed glimmers in 2020. Since their formation, the band has released two EPs – 2020’s Cluttered Hearts and 2021’s World’s Apart, and has been steadily releasing new singles since 2022, the most recent of those being “Little Mistakes”.

Maggie and I actually used to work together over at the Spinning Thoughts podcast on idobi radio. During the time we worked together, I had no idea she made music, or that Maggie Schneider the solo artist was the same Maggie Schneider I worked with. I stumbled upon her music video for her song “Tinted Glasses” through an accidental YouTube click while on BlankTV’s channel and loved what I heard. I’d also seen a few covers from her pop-up in a pop-punk group we were a part of on Facebook. Once I realized that Maggie Schneider the artist was the same Maggie Schneider I use to work with, I felt like I just found out that Clark Kent was Superman and wondered how I never noticed given how obvious it was. Glasses really can fool you.

Embarrassing story aside, shortly after glimmer’s Southwest/West Coast run at the end of 2022, I got to sit down with Maggie for the first time since her days at Spinning Thoughts for an extensive conversation about the band’s formation, their new singles and their musical growth, and their expansion outside of music.

Can you tell me how you first got started in music and what made you want to pursue it?

I’ve always loved music. When I was four or five years old, I sang karaoke in my living room like every night. I loved piano and would play little jingles on my toy keyboard of different commercials and stuff. And my parents were always confused because they weren’t musical at all. My mom’s a writer and my dad’s a football coach, so they had like no musical background. So they were like, “Wow, this is different. You know, it’ll be interesting to see if she kind of holds onto this passion”. And so growing up, I did musical theater and I was very much a theater kid, was in a bunch of musicals.

I worked at a theater company here in Atlanta, and as I continued doing that, I fell in love with pop punk and My Chemical Romance and went to Warped Tour and just started experiencing those things and seeing so many people that I really look up to write these really moving songs that were inspirational to me. That was when I started begging my parents for guitar lessons and continued learning how to play piano on my own and just eventually chose to want to be in a band, rather than going the musical theater route.

Prior to glimmers, you were a solo artist. You released a solo EP called Tinted Glasses in 2017, which was produced by Rian Dawson of All Time Low. What made you transition from being a solo artist to being in a band?

That was something that honestly I never expected to happen. But it was just the right people at the right time. So I had been doing solo stuff for five or six years. Not really touring, but just in the local Atlanta scene. I loved it, but I always wanted to have people by my side to perform with, and to write with because it’s more fun and I feel like it’s more fulfilling when you’re sharing it with other people.

I had known all of my bandmates in different projects over the years and through that time,  I was trying to audition backing band members. I thought “Well, I’ll keep my same brand and I’ll keep the Maggie Schneider name, but maybe instead of playing acoustic I will move into playing in a full band”. And it was funny because our first show in the lineup that’s glimmers today was a Paramore cover set! We were invited to play a tribute night. There was a blink-182 band and a Green Day band, and they wanted a Paramore band, so they asked me to do it, but I didn’t wanna do that acoustically, it just didn’t feel right to me.  So I asked the guys, and you know, a couple of them were already in my backing band. A couple of them weren’t, but we got together and for two months we were practicing like an hour worth of Paramore songs.

We played that show and it just spelled so special and so fun that we decided, “Hey, let’s keep this going. This is a really cool lineup. We love each other. We have the same musical interests. Let’s just kind of see how it goes”. Through March 2020, when everything went to hell, we played a show on March 11th and then March 13th.

Glad to hear you got some shows in before everything went to hell!

I feel really fortunate that we did because we didn’t play shows from March 11th, 2020 to July 2021. During that time when shows weren’t happening, we were FaceTiming every day and just trying to keep each other sane through that process. And it got to the point where I thought, “You know what? This doesn’t feel like a solo project. It feels like a family. It feels like we’re doing this together. So why not rebrand it during this time off and make it into something that’s all of ours?” And that’s what we did.

Since then, you guys have toured quite a bit, including a run with Rarity and Telltale. Tell us about that.

It was so much fun. I wish that that tour was longer. It was about a week. So it was kind of a short run but it was so awesome. It really was. And you know, it was my first time meeting those guys. I had known members of Telltale in the past, but I hadn’t met Rarity before and I’ve been a fan of theirs for a while too.

You also went on a headlining Southwest/West Coast run as well. Can you tell us about that?

It was great! It was our first time touring that part of the country. Previously, we had only gotten as far west as Texas, so it was really cool to go all the way to California and see a lot of friends that we’ve known online for so long and just talk to listeners on the totally opposite side of the country. So it was super fun minus our vehicle issues.

Do you have any favorite tour memories from that tour?

I feel like collectively playing Emo Nite’s eighth-anniversary party was our favorite show of the run. It was super cool to have the opportunity to play at Emo Nite and just also have a great time amidst some of the scene’s biggest musicians. They had everyone from Demi Lovato to Avril Lavigne to Underoath.

I saw the picture with you and Avril!

Yeah, that was crazy! I decided to wear a dress from her clothing line because she has a clothing line with Killstar. And so I picked my outfit because I was like “Okay, I wanna look super cool for Emo Nite”. So, I ordered the outfit in advance and I was in the green room and she just stood by my right side. I didn’t wanna bother her at all, because she was with friends and I didn’t wanna be that person. But my dress had little chains on it, so one of the chains got stuck in her friend’s shirt. And they were super nice, they weren’t upset or anything.  But she was pulling it out, and then she looked at me and noticed that I was wearing her dress, which was just a crazy coincidence. It was like a movie scene.  She was super sweet, and she wanted to take a picture and it was awesome! So Emo Nite, because it was a very surreal moment for us.  Just being able to perform at The Avalon in Hollywood, which is a historic venue, I believe it’s also haunted.

Do you know if Avril stayed for your set that night?

So I met her after our set, so she probably didn’t see it. But the next day, she shared our picture and I was messaging her,  and she said she listened to the band, and that made my day.

You got a co-sign from Avril Lavigne! That’s a major accomplishment.

I can put on my tombstone that Avril Lavigne listened to glimmers!

Now that you’ve been out on the road a bit, have you guys found yourselves writing music more suited or more influenced by the live setting?

Yeah! I feel like that’s true. Because we always, when we think about adding songs to the set too, we always want to evoke a high-energy performance. I’m thinking “What do we need in the set? How do we continue keeping that energy going? What kind of different songs do we need to add in and round out the experience?” I think that also says a lot for me, because again, I’m a musical theater person, so I’m always looking at the bigger picture and the overarching theme of what we wanna say with everything we do. But I’m writing more, and it’s been a mixed bag of stuff. There’s sad girl hours stuff, and then there’s really poppy stuff that’s like more pop than other things we’ve put out. So it’s a mixed bag, but we’re gonna narrow it down.

Is there anything you guys have been listening to recently that’s influenced the newer music? When I was listening to World’s Apart, the song “Purple Tux” reminded me a lot of The Cab. I DJ, and it got me thinking ‘This would blend really well with “I’ll Run'”.

Yes! I love The Cab! I could go on a 30-minute rant about how much I love The Cab. They’re so underrated. The Band Camino is a big influence on us too. They’re so fresh and they too have that like pop rock vibe that’s really cool right now. I always take inspiration from Mayday Parade. That’s a big one for me. I just love the way that they write a piano ballads and so I always feel inspired by them. And then in terms of lyrics, I love Julia Michaels. She’s definitely more on the pop side, but I love her. I love Go Radio, Lady Gaga even. I take a lot of inspiration from a mixed bag, but sound-wise, The Band Camino, Vanessa Carlton, and The Rocket Summer too.

You released your debut EP Cluttered Hearts in October of 2020, and your sophomore EP World’s Apart was released almost two years ago at the time of this interview. It was one of my favorite releases of that year. What was the response like for the EP?

It was really, really special. And you know that EP has one of my favorite songs I’ve ever written, “Not Good at Goodbyes”. And so for us, we’re still getting really kind messages about that song. And when we were on tour with Rarity, there were a few nights when I just saw people sing that song and I didn’t know who they were. It’s really meaningful to me because that song came from such a personal place, and it feels good to see other people enjoying it and having it resonate with them. I love that EP too because we had a video for each song, and that was something we really wanted to do because we wanted to kind of keep the story of the EP and make it a visual for people as well.

That was actually my next question! I love how you guys made overarching videos for each song on the EP. What was the decision behind that?

Well, I came up with that idea before the pandemic even happened. I was trying to come up with the best way to release the songs. I wanted them to make the biggest impact. And so as a theater kid, I love when bands put out concept records or have a video for each song that kind of carries a storyline through. And so with these, that’s what we wanted to do. I worked with Deanna [Elise], who has done all of our music videos thus far, and we came up with a plot that made sense through the track listing. It was a lot of work and we filmed all of them during the pandemic, and I still can’t believe we did that. But, for me, I just wanted it to be like a teen rom-com type of feeling. Like a John Hughes kind of thing.

As someone who writes a lot of young adult stories, I loved it!

Thank you! I feel like that’s relatable and those are the stories that I love and they mean a lot to me. So especially with “Not Good at Goodbyes”, I wanted that video to feel like a John Hughes movie, and I think it definitely achieved that feeling.

Since the release of World’s Apart, you’ve released a few new singles. How would you describe the musical growth of the band since then?

I feel like we’re now starting to find our sound because we all love different types of music. It ranges from everything from like Lady Gaga for me, to Turnstile for Jeremy [Russell]. There are so many influences that we have. And so I think these next songs, we’re still experimenting with different things, but we’re trying to capture 2000s pop rock. There’s some synth in there, but it still has that rock band-driven feel those early 2000s songs had.

A bit of a Radio Disney vibe?

Yeah! And I love that stuff. I made a tweet the other day saying “Hey, can we have a Disney Channel Goes Punk album? Like, can we do that ?” Because I feel like that would be so much fun.

That would be awesome! Sound-wise, there’s a lot of crossover there. Especially with what Hilary Duff, Lindsay Lohan, and Demi Lovato were doing.

Exactly! And, even with some of the artists that I found inspiration from, some of the lyrics and arrangements in our next songs, are very Vanessa Carlton and Michelle Branch. Those female artists of that time were toeing the line between the singer/songwriter stuff and the kind of rock stuff.

Can you tell us about the first of those recent singles, “Scared to Lose”?

Scared To Lose was definitely in that Vanessa Carlton vein for us. We really feel like we’re very, very close to that direction musically, but that one is still very much in the hopeless romantic types of themes that I love to write about. It’s kind of about that Catch-22 of loving someone, being close to them, and wanting to tell them how you feel, but then also being afraid because you don’t wanna lose what you already have. That’s something I’ve been through in the past and that I feel like we all kind of learn from. We grow in confidence through every experience. Hopefully! Because I’ve had both. I feel like we have those moments where it may suck at the time, but maybe we’ve learned something from each other. That song is really special to us. I also love the kind of storytelling and writing motifs too. All in all, it’s very much Glimmers in a nutshell. Who we are now and who we’re trying to move to be.

Definitely been there before. I also hear the Vanessa Carlton influence in these recent songs. I feel like you guys could do a great cover of “Ordinary Day”.

Yeah! Oh, I love that song!

Another single you released in 2022 was “Dreaming”, can you tell us about that?

That one’s a favorite of mine. It’s definitely a different vibe than “Scared To Lose”. I feel like they’re both two sides of us and it’s been interesting to see the reactions to both. “Dreaming” is about appearances versus reality in relationships and that kind of battle between really wanting something to be better than it is in reality, and talking yourself into something being better for you than it actually is. It was inspired by a poem that I wrote in a class of mine. I went to an art school and one of my favorite classes was an Intro to Poetry class, and the lines in the chorus of “I see what I want to when I’m sleeping. I like us better when I’m dreaming.” came from a poem that I wrote. So I thought, “Why not turn it into a song?”

Another recent release was “Midas Touch”. Can you tell us about that?

Absolutely! It’s been so fun to play this one live. I wrote “Midas Touch” about two years ago with Nick Pena of lostbody. A lot of people heard his voice on “Not Good at Goodbyes”. We’ve co-written a lot of songs together and this is one of them. It’s about self-sabotage in relationships when things can get too good to be true. I feel like a lot of us can tend to overthink that or even burn bridges when we really don’t want to. But I think it’s just something that’s relatable. Even in friendships, not just romantic relationships. And so Nick and I wrote the song about that and it’s been one of the most fun songs to play live. We got to play it for the entire tour, and seeing people’s responses to it was really fun. This one had a lot of crowd engagement and interaction. So I’m really excited to see, how the song continues to make people react during the song.

That actually brings me to my next question, how has the response been to the new music? Both in the crowd and online?

I would say out of the singles we’ve put out recently, Midas Touch has made the biggest impact so far. We played all three songs in our set during the Southwest Tour and we’re really thankful we’ve had positive reactions to all of them. But I think that Midas Touch gets people hyped in a different way. It’s got this bouncy rhythm to it too, so maybe that plays into people wanting to move as they listen to it. But it’s super fun. I love playing it. It’s a little bit different than some of our other stuff, but I like it!

In terms of gaining fans and new listeners, did you guys land on anyone’s Spotify Wrapped lists?

Yes! I believe we had about 250 to 300 people that we were in their 10% of artists listened to or whatever the stat is. And that feels so good because means a lot to even have people at the shows come up to me and say like, “Your music has inspired me” or we had people come to the shows who drove from Denver to Albuquerque just to see us. So stuff like that, and Spotify Wrapped means so much because it just shows us that what we’re doing is hopefully making a positive impact on other people. It’s really humbling to see that every year those numbers get a little bit higher and maybe we’re inspiring more people, so it feels very good.

You guys also make metal versions of your songs, which is something really unique about you guys. I can’t think of another band that’s doing that right now.

I give all the props to Alex Downtain, our lead guitarist. He arranges and writes all of those himself. And that kind of goes back to our different musical influences because my guys love harder music too. So he thought “Why not?”. Take “Scared to Lose” or “Not Good at  Goodbyes” and make it a completely different song for the listeners who love pop-rock stuff, but also kind of like the heavier stuff too.

They almost become totally different songs and also give them a whole new feeling as well.

For sure! And it’s really fun for Alex too because it’s also fun for him and kind of funny when he makes the videos because he likes hardcore music. But he’s like the funniest person in the room, and with the music videos, he tries to like pick funny settings. He did one on a playground! So, he has a great time doing that, and I think that’s just a fun way to give listeners another peek into our personalities too. It’s also fun cause we all have our own influences. I love musical theater, so when I write songs and even do content on TikTok, I take a lot of inspiration from musical theater. And so Alex similarly loves heavy music and that’s kind of his outlet to show people.

You guys have also been very active on Twitch recently. You in particular have a talk show called Mugs with Mags every Sunday, Alex [Downtain] and Jermey [Russell] has done Rocket League streams. What made you guys want to expand there? Were you thinking “Hey, this might be a fun thing to do” or “This is a great way to interact with our fans outside our regular social media pages”?

It’s definitely a mix of both. We love hanging out together and we already play games anyway. So we thought “Why not”? We have so many friends and so many listeners who have told us in the past  “I play Mario Kart” “I play Rocket League! Let me know!” or “Add me on Xbox! Let’s play together!” And so we thought, why not do what we already love to do, but also bring people in on it so then they can join in on the fun?

In terms of Mugs with Mags, that’s something I did during the pandemic where every week on Instagram, I would go live and talk to a friend in music or just a creative friend in general. I wanted to bring that back because it was a fun way for me to catch up with people who I maybe haven’t seen in a while, or I just wanted to see what they had been up to. We just wanted to connect with people and show who we are outside of music. I’m also gonna bring on other kinds of creatives too. Videographers, producers, and people of that nature, because I’ve always been fascinated by art of every form. And I think it’s fun to get different perspectives on the show. So I’m definitely gonna continue doing that.

Is there anything else you have planned with your Twitch channel?

This is an exclusive! Like I told off the record, it’s more fun to have conversations and interviews with people that you know, because you just feel that rapport already. But, my mom and I are thinking about having a show where we drink wine, we spill the tea, and we talk about The Bachelor. And that’s very different! But my mom is very cool, she loves all pop punk and emo music. She got me into Green Day and all of those bands, and everyone loves her. They call her the Scene Mom here in Atlanta. I feel like that’ll add some fun, some comedy, and just good vibes. Just something different for the Twitch channel. We’ve also been talking as a band for a while about doing a Family Feud and a Mario Kart stream!

What does the future hold for glimmers?

We’re looking super busy! We’re going to be recording new music! We’re working with two of my favorite producers ever Zack [Odem] and Kenneth [Mount], they’re called ZK Productions. They’ve done a lot for Mayday Parade, Go Radio, Cartel, Against The Current, and so many of my favorite bands. They’re super genuine and just passionate about music, so I’m really excited to get in the studio with them. We have a couple more songs to put out, and videos as well. Just staying busy and just happy to continue creating.

For the recent singles that come out, are these a part of a larger release, or are these standalone singles?

These are part of a larger release, it’s part of an EP. I’m not ready to share the name of it just yet. It kind of all ties in. Funny enough, I’ve come up with the name pretty recently. I’ve been back and forth on what I want the collection of songs to be called because they’re all super different sounding. But the name definitely reflects that they all sound different, but they’re all parts of me and the experience that I’ve gone through growing up and learning my own self-worth. So that is the overall theme of it as a hint.

Where can the people find you and the band?

You can find us on all social media @glimmersband, so it’s super easy. Our music is on Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube, and anywhere you can find it. My social are @itsmaggiescheider. Schneider is hard to spell! My two big platforms are Instagram and TikTok. So follow me, send me a message. I love talking about music and other fun things in my DMs. Just happy to make new friends!

Thanks for sitting down and talking with me! Can’t wait for what glimmers has in store next!

Thank you so much for having me!

Keep up with glimmers on social media. You can also check out their video for “Little Mistakes” below:

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