INTERVIEW: AGE of the BEAR on his Ocean of Isolation
**This article originally appeared in our September 2025 print issue**
Photo provided by artist
“This whole record is just a bunch of little instances of momentum. The hardest thing was trying to keep it cohesive over the course of six years and find new ways to breathe life into [the songs].”
It’s an amusing, paradoxical phenomenon that when you pair two introverts together in conversation, they can end up talking to one another for hours. The social discomfort they both possess somehow cancels out, and the ease with which both parties begin spilling their guts is like opening the floodgates of a dam.
Such was the case when connecting with Anthony Cubbage, the man behind the moniker AGE of the BEAR. Sharing a number of mutual friends in this orbit of local music, I was aware of his kindness and talent. What I was not expecting was connecting in a way that had me eager to get together over coffee or a beer in the not-so-distant future. Was this the beginning of a beautiful friendship? It couldn’t be; I generally have the hardest time making friends, but the phrase ‘kindred spirits’ kept echoing through my mind throughout our conversation.
What began as a chat about his gorgeous new album, Oceans, was quickly quashed in favor of a heart-to-heart about isolation and acceptance, two instantly recognizable themes that served as the impetus to this ten-song, sophomore album.
“I was lost in my own isolation, and I was trying to write myself out of my own habits of isolating myself,” Cubbage admits. “I had been coming out of working with a band that I felt was pushing me in a direction where I was just writing for them and the audience and not really myself. So the whole main goal of the project has always been writing songs that are as true and authentic as I could get.”
Oceans is full of both authenticity and wisdom. The arrangements themselves are powerful enough that you don’t need to process a single lyric to pick up on it. Each song is dressed in a backdrop of meticulous ambience with guitar swells, warm pads and acoustic flourishes coming together in wonderful harmony. Think Bon Iver meets Donovan Woods; it’s crisp like a September breeze, hitting all the right parts of your skin and bones. The whole thing sounds simply effortless, despite that being the furthest thing from the truth—Oceans took Cubbage over six years to complete. He even showed me a chart that mapped out the full timeline for proof.
“I wish I could have finished it within a week,” he admits. “I think that was very damaging to my brain and hard on my ego. I needed to find a way to close the chapter on these songs, because I loved a lot of the ideas in them. This whole record is just a bunch of little instances of momentum. The hardest thing was trying to keep it cohesive over the course of six years and find new ways to breathe life into [the songs].”
To fully realize his vision, he convinced himself to enlist help from outside sources. While normally tackling every step of the process in such isolation, Cubbage recognized his limits and outsourced accordingly, all while learning new skills along the way.
“The first time I tried mixing drums, I reached out to [my friend] Christian to help and we hopped on Anydesk, which is the system that helps you basically hack into your friend's computer,” he laughs. “We mixed the drums together on my computer over the phone.
“Any time I reached a roadblock it meant I had to learn a whole new set of skills, and then that in itself stopped a lot of the momentum. Having friends be a part of this was a big part of getting the momentum back.”
As an artist in modern times, finding those bursts of momentum is not always easy. On the one hand, there are distractions aplenty, constantly demanding our attention and pulling our focus away from the more right-brained activities that fill our cups. On the other hand, artists are typically sensitive people, something that is abundantly clear to anyone who has met Cubbage… or me, for that matter. Put more simply: we often have a hard time getting out of our own heads.
So naturally, our conversation veered into mental health and the role art can play in perpetuating that. Writing songs about loneliness is one thing. At its core, it’s cathartic, but reliving that loneliness every time you listen to or perform those songs means getting caught in a cycle of isolation. It’s not difficult to imagine the negative impacts this could have on both one’s psyche and their art.
“You have to wonder: is it going to help you make art more authentically? Or is it going to take you away from the drive which helped you create authentic art in the first place?”
The brief “Is It Worth Singing?” asks this question outright mid-album, with lyrics like “Is it worth singing if I don’t care to be heard? / Is it worth speaking if no one listens to the words?” sung passionately through a vocoder, acapella style. It’s one of those stop-dead-in-your-tracks moments and it barely lasts a minute. He recalls writing the song at his lowest point in the process, wondering whether he should even be writing anything at all. Ultimately, the answers came around by remembering who the music was supposed to be for in the first place.
“There's something about the delusion of feeling important and wanting to write something that is going to change a perspective for somebody,” Cubbage opines. “Because if you're overly accepting of the fact that you know no one will care, then the music will reflect that. It’s a weird catch-22 because you want to make music you believe in, and not get upset when nobody cares. But also to make good music, you have to believe that somebody will care. Obviously the first person to care should be yourself.”
For Cubbage, Oceans is the culmination of a six-year-long chapter that he spent asking questions and searching for answers in ambient soundscapes. It’s an album that begs to be listened to in a quiet place, away from the grind of everyday life. And most importantly, it’s the outpouring of a gentle soul who’s just happy to not be swimming against the current… for now.
Oceans is available now on all streaming platforms and via the artist’s bandcamp at ageofthebear.bandcamp.com
