Life & Work with Tate Keller Aka Mourning Modern of San Diego

Today we’d like to introduce you to Tate Keller Aka Mourning Modern.

Hi Tate, thanks for sharing your story with us. To start, maybe you can tell our readers some of your backstory.
First off, thank you for taking the time to interview me – it’s my first interview as a musician, so I’m honored. I’ve been working on this recording project / band / whatever-you-want-to-call-it “Mourning Modern” for a few years now. I have two albums that I’m really proud of, and they’re all fully self-produced here in my Ocean Beach apartment in San Diego – but the whole story of how I started getting into music goes way back to when I grew up on Long Island in New York.

Music has been central to me for pretty much my whole life, largely thanks to my family. My mom and sister were dancers, and my mom had classical music playing in the house constantly, and my dad loved rock and blues and introduced me to that world of music. I started out as a violinist when I was really young, I think 1st grade. I remember I had this children’s book ‘Zin Zin Zin a Violin’ and that made me want to learn the violin. Eventually I switched to guitar as I got more interested in modern music. With the guitar I was more into creating than just learning other material, so I started writing riffs and chord progressions early on in my guitar journey.

In middle and high school, I saved up money from allowance, summer jobs, and gifts to buy basic recording gear – much of which I still use today. I’ve actually been working with the same two-track audio interface that I got around 15 years ago. During high school and early college, I recorded pretty much anything I wrote, and I taught myself how to mix off of that. It was all trial and error, which in retrospect was probably a good amount of wasted time and frustration when I could have just looked things up. But I also think it was valuable to see that no matter how frustrated I was, I would still want to record music. Like, no matter what was going on in my life or in the world, I was always thinking about recording and mixing music. I released almost everything I recorded, regardless of quality, and it’s all still out there on Bandcamp (tatekeller.bandcamp.com). It’s a little embarrassing, but I also love this idea of capturing artistic growth over time. I was using a moniker “The Mourning Moderns” that I came up with purely because I thought it sounded cool. In my head, I was thinking it sounded similar to the band “The Modern Lovers”, but more goth. And it also made me laugh that the name kind of made no sense. I’ve since cleaned it to just “Mourning Modern”, which actually makes grammatical sense and has some meaning, so I like that too.

After years of tinkering around, building up some songs and lyrics I felt proud of, and getting over my fear of singing in front of people, I started releasing what I consider my real “canon” of music, under the name “Mourning Modern”. After relocating from Long Island to San Diego during the pandemic, I released my first album, ‘Dallas Lights, Austin Nights’. That was 2021, and I followed that up with ‘Shipwreck’ in 2023. Since then, I’ve been playing open mics, meeting other musicians, and becoming more involved in the local San Diego community. I recently released a set of singles, two of which feature close friends – “Mauve,” which includes one of my oldest friends from New York, Vinny Rotella, and “Swear,” which features my good friend John Light on drums. I’ve got more on the way, some with another good friend, and fellow San Diego musician, Wes Gonzalez (aka Beige Radio — p.s. all these photos were taken by him, he’s a great photographer too!). That collaboration is what I’m excited to continue exploring as “Mourning Modern” moves forward with my next set of music.

I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
Everything has its ups and downs. For one, I mentioned the frustration I ran into when learning how to produce music. There were so many times when I would spend hours and hours mixing music, only to listen back to what I worked on, and say “it’s time to give up on this dream”. But I’m glad I haven’t. I’m proud of what I’ve put out, and I still look forward to releasing more. I don’t see myself ever stopping. It’s a hobby and it’s my love.

Otherwise, sometimes I feel like I’m living a double life. I studied bioinformatics in college and went to grad school for it. There were times when it felt like I needed to choose one route or the other: music or science. I love what I studied in school just as much as I love music; I have this whole other passion for biology and technology. It’s nerd stuff, but it’s so cool. Like, it’s a miracle that we are all conscious, living beings. It’s all chemistry and physics, but it’s all so symbolic and spiritual to me too. And just about everyone has some story about how technology has saved or improved their life. What other possibilities are out there for making life more livable with technology? Thats so interesting to me. But when I was really deep in my studies, I had to balance studying with playing music. Music production is something I can get lost in for hours and hours, but obviously you don’t have hours and hours on your hands when you’re a student. So yeah, that just put more and more pressure on me to stop playing music in favor of all these other interests in my life. But I’ve found a way to balance my two passions that works for me. And I don’t see that stopping any time soon.

Theres also this more philosophical challenge between my two passions. Believe it or not, when it comes to bioinformatics, I’m super interested in Artificial Intelligence. I say “believe it or not” because AI is somewhat frowned upon in the music community. And honestly, to a certain extent, I think it should be. Although, I think about drum machines – without them, I wouldn’t have 95% of the songs I’ve written and released. Yet, drum machines are a form of generative AI. Maybe not the same as these modern GPT models, but they are generated beats that mimic human invented rhythm. Not only are drum machines hugely valuable for solo musicians looking to get a start, but we as a society deem them to be artistically important too. Just look at all the music that exploded in the 80s when they first started getting popular. There’s a way to use AI, technology, anything like that, in an artistic and creative way; and then theres a way to do it in a lazy way. It’s the lazy stuff that people hate – the lifeless and soulless stuff. And sometimes, it’s better to work artistically with restraint, not with the endless power of technology. I think about the end of ‘To Pimp a Butterfly’, that whole interview that Kendrick Lamar stitches together with a real Tupac Shakur interview. That has genuinely made me cry more than once, especially the end when the interview cuts off and you hear Kendrick calling out to Tupac. There’s something special about hearing an artist “talk” to their inspiration, and then so heartbreaking about realizing it’s all a dream. Tupac is dead, Kendrick is alone as an artist for his generation, who can’t actually get direct guidance from his idol. And there’s so many more layers than that. Now, imagine Kendrick did all that, but it was an AI generated Tupac voice. I mean, maybe a great artist like Kendrick could figure out a way to make that interesting, but at least within the context of what he was doing on “To Pimp a Butterfly”, that just would fall so flat and be disingenuous. So yeah, unless you’re finding a way to get real heady with it, I think AI should be used sparingly in art. And even drum machines, when I listen back to my own work, I’m always listening as a critic. I’m thinking “whats lacking? what do I need to work on?” And drums are what I’m lacking! Real drums! Having real drums has been a challenge up until this point, I haven’t had many opportunities to play with a real drummer nor have I had the space to record drums. So I’m excited to be working with friends who are drummers on my next set of work. As for AI, I generally agree with what Tyler the Creator has said about it, let’s use that to cure cancer.

Thanks – so what else should our readers know about your work and what you’re currently focused on?
I mostly write alternative rock music – some of my favorite musicians are The Smashing Pumpkins, Mount Eerie, Wilco, Vampire Weekend, Car Seat Headrest… I could go on, but it’s kind of a mesh of all those sorts of sounds. I love shoegaze and goth, so some of that comes out in my music too. Classic rock and blues too. My Spotify wrapped age was something obscenely high last year. I think it was because I was listening to a lot of Muddy Waters.

I wrote my first album, ‘Dallas Lights, Austin Nights’ while moving across the country, shortly after graduating from school (between 2019 and 2021). It sort of captures that transition period of my life. Making sense of my life up until then, and feeling a bit lost as I step into my next phase of life. And it’s also a long-distance relationship album. My fiancé (then girlfriend) had moved out here to San Diego, and I was back in New York. We had met in Cleveland, and there was a time when she was living in Texas. We were living in all these different places all across the country, and it was difficult to navigate this transitional period together as we ended up in different locations. Not to mention, a global pandemic was happening, and that didn’t exactly make traveling to see each other easy. So I wrote these songs, like “There”, simply about how badly I wanted to be there with her.

For my second album, ‘shipwreck’, I focused on how I started to feel homesick after moving out here. Case in point: a song like “(i’m on top, but I can hardly wait til I get) home again (this empty feeling stays inside my head)”. It’s a 30 second long song, and the lyrics are the same as the title. I also tried to get more experimental with the album structure on ‘shipwreck’. I positioned the songs sort of like a mirror – the first half and the second half have repeated moments. And I ended the album on a sort of pleasant note with the song “here”, about how happy I am to just be here in San Diego now. It’s also a direct response to my song “There”.

For my next set of music, I’m trying to work on something really big. I feel much more settled here in San Diego, and I have a great community of friends and musicians that I know. I want to celebrate all of that. I don’t want to say exactly what the next project will be yet, but already I’ve released some of it – three new songs, ‘Hex’, ‘Mauve’, and ‘Swear’. I’m really proud of these songs, I think they may be my three best songs yet. And I’m just getting started with those.

What sort of changes are you expecting over the next 5-10 years?
I already mentioned my challenges philosophically with AI, and I think a lot of artists are going to be facing this challenge too. What’s “okay” and what isn’t? What’s lazy, and what’s art? We’re only going to see more and more of this.

I also think there could be a bit of a dynamic shift with how we consume music. If lazy AI music floods the streaming system, then people will start looking elsewhere for human generated art. That’s a real opportunity for indie musicians. I’m generally an optimistic person about the world, so I’m excited for an opportunity like that to come around. And meanwhile, there is really great human art coming out today. It feels like we are in the midst of a rock comeback. Bands like Geese, Wednesday, Squid, etc. I love all these bands, Squid released one of my all time favorite albums last year, ‘Cowards’. I remember growing up in high school and not really connecting with popular music at the time. I would look to the 90s for my favorite albums, and listen to 90s albums on repeat and fall in love. As an adult, I’ve expanded my horizons so I now realize I missed out on some great popular music from when I was younger – but its still so exciting now to be listening to a rock album from 2025 that I am deeply in love with. That’s special.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://tatekeller.bandcamp.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mourningmodern/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@mourningmodern

Image Credits
Wes Gonzalez aka Beige Radio