Following the release of his solo debut Love Sick Radio in 2016, Austin John Winkler fell out of love with music. At that point, it had been three years since he parted ways with the band he co-founded 12 years earlier, Hinder, while Winkler was in the middle of fighting personal demons, facing loss, and health issues.
“After ‘Love Sick Radio,’ I was really kind of in a bad place,” Winkler tells American Songwriter. “I wasn’t really in love with music anymore.”
From 2019 through 2020, Winkler also had to undergo dialysis for nine months due to liver and kidney failure caused by years of alcohol abuse and came out sober. Nearly a decade after venturing on his own with Love Sick Radio, Winkler released six singles between 2022 and 2023, including his first, “Super Jaded,” which he credits with helping him rekindle his affair with music.
“I was just in a terrible place, and that song kind of pulled me out of it,” says Winkler, who also revisited the 2006 Hinder hit “Lips of an Angel” with a sequel, “Lips of an Angel,” featuring Tennessee singer and songwriter Shaylen. The new, more country version explores the female perspective of the song and led Winkler to write “Walking Ded,” which became the title track of the EP under his new project, The Founder.
Videos by American Songwriter
While Love Sick Radio marked the beginning phase of sound, Winkler wanted to capture, as a solo artist, The Founder represents his truest musical form. The six tracks of Walking Ded chronicle some of his harshest years, from digging his way out of addiction, dealing with grief and regrets, and finding the will to survive, from the opening heavy riffs of “Paradise” to the title track, a song Winkler says embodies everything about the EP.
“It’s got a little bit of everything in there: rock riffs and great melodies—sex, drugs, booze, and love,” said Winkler of the track. “What else is there?”
“‘Walking Ded’ is an autobiographical journey of my introduction into substances in this life, and how they’ve kind of gotten me through tough times in my life,” shares Winkler. “That [‘Walking Ded’] was the first song I wrote, and it turned out so good that I was like ‘Well, I’m just gonna write another one.”
From there, Winkler wrote “B.T.S.D. (Call It What You Want),” a song documenting his repetitive self-destructive nature.
[RELATED: The Covert Phone Call that Inspired “Lips of an Angel” by Hinder]
“It’s about how I tend to self-destruct after three or five years,” he shares. “I’ll be comfortable, and I’ll be happy, and then, without even knowing it, all of a sudden, I’ll just blow up my life, and then I’ll have to start over. There’s something kind of beautiful in that, and at the same time, it’s also raw. I think that’s the hardest thing you can do as a writer, is portray who you are in that moment.”
Winkler continues, “It’s bold to admit that’s kind of how I’ve lived my life up until now. Whether it’s love or any relationship, I feel like I get to a certain point where I need to blow it up and start over.”
On “Sometimes,” Winkler revisits a toxic love—You ripped my heart right out and
put it back in black and blue—and adds more to the narrative on “Fake.” Walking Ded closes on a more heartbreaking ballad, “The Fall,” following a deep loss in Winker’s life, a relationship, he says he believed would always remain in his life.
“Something like that just hits you really hard, in the studio, when it was coming together,” shares Winkler. “It became 10 times more powerful as we got into the production, and it’s one of my favorite songs.”
Now, in a different space, along with touring to support Walking Ded, Winkler has already moved into recording more music as The Founder.
“I absolutely love what I’m doing,” he says. “As far as music as a whole, I have a big appreciation for it again. I kind of achieved everything I wanted at a very young age. Then it just wasn’t doing it for me anymore, being in Hinder. I felt like I was just writing the same record over and over again, and that’s what made me fall out of love.”
Even since his days in Hinder, writing has always come from a personal place for Winkler. “‘Lips of an Angel’ was about my life,” he says. “I wrote that song the next day, just as it happened.”
He adds, “That’s the hardest thing to do as an artist. You’re portraying a piece of art that is 100 percent who you are at the moment, and I think that’s the best art you can do. And that’s the most relatable art. My earlier stuff with extreme behavior that I wrote about when I was 22, that’s who I was at the time. And I feel like the Founder is exactly who I am at this time.”
Photos: Tim Katz
Leave a Reply
Only members can comment. Become a member. Already a member? Log in.