With a joint effort to bring back the flavour of old school RnB, charismatic duo LikeTye have released their debut single ‘Be That Man’ to the world. Formerly separate solo artists known as Tyler Rivers and Ty Romé, their penchant for rnb-pop fusion and creating art brought them together as friends and as musical partners. We caught up with the pair to discuss their new single, their artistic vision, and how they’ve been navigating their journey in music.

How would you describe each other? As friends and as artists?

Tyler: Ty is a very caring friend - I know I can turn to him in any time of need. As an artist, I’ve seen him progress consistently since I’ve known him. He just keeps getting better and better with time. It helps that he’s super dedicated.
Ty: Tyler as a friend is very kind, caring and funny. He’s supportive of me. As an artist, very talented - best sound engineer in Perth too.

What’s your first musical memory? Do you remember the first song/record that made you realise music was something you wanted to explore?

Ty: Mine would be With You by Chris Brown.
Tyler: Maybe something cheesy like Love Is In The Air because my mum used to play music like that. Hero by Enrique Iglesias too.

If you had to describe the type of music to a stranger, how would you do it?

Tyler: Catchy RnB pop.
Ty: Yep. Specifically, melodically catchy Rnb-Pop if that counts.

Run me through the first time you guys worked together. Did you feel an instant connection and know that you were on the same wavelength immediately, or was it a gradual thing?

Tyler: We did connect pretty quickly. I don’t think we considered working as a duo at that point - that happened about a year later.
Ty: Yeah, it was definitely an instant connection. Tyler went to LA in March and we made the decision in December that year. After we worked on our first collaboration, we realised how much we liked working together and we wanted to do a joint EP. The joint EP just turned into us figuring out that working together made a lot of sense.
Tyler: I think we were both ready to give up on music by that point. We were both kind of like “fuck it, why don’t we continue but do it together?”

It’s a major shift going from grinding as a solo artist to a duo. How do you find it balancing working with someone you consider a friend? Are there any challenges you’ve encountered?
 
 Tyler: We found it very easy at first - it was all about having fun and creating in a nice environment. It’s when you start involving deadlines and other business components that things start to get more complicated. But I think we’ve balanced it by assigning roles to keep us accountable.
 Ty: It definitely got harder towards releases. But having roles means that there’s no uncertainty about what we’re doing. Our communication has gotten better too. If I can’t do something, I can tell Tyler that and it works vice versa.

What was the writing process like for Be That Man? Did you work backwards from a melody to figure out the lyrics or come up with the concept first?
 
 Ty: Tyler came up with the hook first. We went through a bunch of melodies before we decided on one. At the time, we felt quite creatively drained but we managed to find one that stuck.
 Tyler: Yeah, we recorded rough melodies on top of the song and then wrote to those melodies. The idea just kind of came from us randomly mumbling the idea of being a man and treating a girl better and it snowballed from there.

What part of the creative process do you find most fulfilling?

Tyler: I do enjoy being behind the production because it means you’re there at every step of the way in the creative process. But the most fulfilling bit is probably the final product. It can be tiring to create a couple of songs a week so it’s nice to hear it all come together.
Ty: I definitely enjoy creating the melodies the most. The most fulfilling part is knowing that what we’ve made has become a final product and it makes all the work worth it.

 Nowadays, RnB can be a lot more focused on toxic love or more depressing subject matter so its nice to hear something like Be That Man that’s just about wanting to hold someone down and care for them. Do you like being able to take that type of approach to your songwriting?

Tyler:  I feel like early Rnb and Rnb now is very, very different. You had artists like Usher that had songs about sadder stuff, about subject matter like cheating. But we also had artists like Mario and Neyo with more gentleman type songs. I like both but I definitely prefer writing sad songs.
 Ty: The ‘gentleman’ tracks are very old school and tell a story, and that’s something we enjoy doing. I prefer writing the happier stuff so it works out that Tyler prefers the opposite - it balances out. We have 70-80 songs in the vault so we want to provide some variety to cover our bases. We don’t want to have too much of the same thing. 

How has the pandemic affected what you’ve been creating?

 Tyler: If anything, it’s made us even more driven to create.
 Ty: It fuelled us more because we knew we had a longevity of time, so we had the means to keep being creative. Our manager would tell us when songs weren’t good enough so we’d keep working until we were happy. It meant we could get our creative juices flowing and stay in the zone.

What’s one album you can listen to on repeat?

 Ty: Probably the F.A.M.E. album by Chris Brown. I’ve been coming back to it a lot.
 Tyler:  I can listen to Justin Bieber’s My World album a lot.

Despite everything that’s gone on in 2020, what’s a lesson you’ve taken away from the year going into 2021?

Tyler: To take time to learn and grow for yourself.
 Ty: Learning to appreciate life. This year has shown us that anything can happen.

What’s something you want to have achieved as a duo in a year’s time? So you can manifest it right now.
 Tyler: Definitely a sold out show.
 Ty: I want us to be the biggest duo in the world. 

Finally, a controversial one but… who’s the real king of RnB?
Ty: Chris Brown for sure.
Tyler: Maybe Usher - he did branch out into other genres but he’s stuck to his core of RnB. I’d put Boyz II Men in there too.