Toby Driver
SPB: How have your musical taste evolved over the years? Do you think your “high school self” would appreciate the music you make now?
Driver: I think my aesthetics are still similar to what they were when I was in high school, but I'm quite a bit more open-minded when it comes to the social implications of how personal identity is attached to musical preference (to put more simply, not caring how people judge what I enjoy listening to). That's an obvious result of just having become more comfortable with myself than I was when I was a teenager. I'd say that even to this day I'm still trying to figure out how to balance what seem like two opposing ethea (sophisticated music versus popular appeal) and figuring out how to turn that struggle into something that I actually enjoy for my own sake.
I think my high school self probably would have found that interesting, too. One major aesthetic difference though, is that my high-school-self was interested in extremity for extremity's sake -- e.g., the darkest music, the heaviest music, or even the most relaxing ambient music. I'm not actually very interested in extremity in music at this time, other than it being "extremely good."
