Meet Anthony Winters, Philly's Best-Kept Pop Secret
- SoundCheck Team
- 17 hours ago
- 6 min read
Article Contributed by Rebecca McDevitt
Photos Contributed by LJ Portnoy & Rebecca McDevitt
There's something refreshingly unguarded about Anthony Winters. He doesn't perform with the confidence he doesn't have, or hedge his answers. He isn't afraid to tell you that Justin Bieber is one of his biggest inspirations. He means it, and he'll tell you twice if he has to.
The Delaware County, Pennsylvania-raised singer-songwriter sat down with SoundCheck to talk about his debut EP, his stage name origin story, and what Stranger Things has to do with his music.
One thing became clear pretty quickly: Anthony Winters leads with instinct and backs it up with craft.
"Stranger Things Made Me Do It"
His debut EP, What We Can't Change, almost had a different name. The original title was Choosing What We Can't Change, until a friend heard it and suggested it might flow better without the first word. "I sat with it, and I was like, you know what, it still means the same thing," Anthony says. "It just immediately stuck."
The concept behind it runs deeper than the title. "We're never going to be able to change the things that we've done or the things that have happened to us," he explains. "But you can grow from them and use them as fuel for whatever you're doing. It's really about who you can become after all of that."
Fittingly, the EP itself became something different than what it was supposed to be. These five songs were originally early stages of a larger album Anthony is still working on, but as the writing progressed and the sound started shifting, he realized they belonged together on their own.
"When I listened to all the demos, these songs are like stories," he says. "They're one small little family that I want to keep in the same body of work. I didn't want to put them in an album when you listen to it and then all of a sudden you think, this is great, but then another song sounds nothing like it."
The last piece to fall into place was "Stuck in the Middle," one of the most recently-written songs on the record, which arrived almost by accident when a friend sent over a demo that just happened to fit. The rest, he says, came in pairs. "’Rocks at Your Window’ and ‘MID JULY’ were back to-back. We wrote ‘Rocks at Your Window’, then went back in the studio and wrote ‘MID JULY’. They're kind of like brother and sister songs. And then, ‘End of the World’ came, and I was like, OK, these all have to go together in some way, shape, or form."
Ask him which one's his favorite and he laughs. "That's like asking a parent which child is their favorite." But press him and he'll give you an honest answer. "’Rocks at Your Window’ is probably it. That was the one that really opened the door to everything. ‘MID JULY’ is a crowd favorite. Everybody likes ‘MID JULY’. But the one that's really started growing on me was “Set Me On Fire.” I feel that one hasn't got enough love yet on my end at least. The more I listen to it, that one kind of just hits me a little differently."
The Song Paints The Picture
When Anthony walked into the studio with producer, Victor to write "Rocks at Your Window," the entire creative brief was essentially: Stranger Things. "All I said was like I want something like Stranger Things. Something like Stranger Things vibes. Just something like 80s or synth-heavy. And that's what came out of it." The goal was to capture something specific: summer nights, fireworks, the carnival. "I want it to feel like summer and fireworks or like the carnival or just having that summer night."
That visual, almost cinematic approach is central to how Anthony writes. He describes himself as a visual writer at heart, someone who hears music and immediately starts translating it into images, into scenes. "I feel like I'm a visual writer at heart and when I listen to music, I put it to images or scenes in a movie." He keeps a running note on his phone full of one-liners and loose ideas, but most of the writing happens in the room, in real-time. "I want the song or like the sounds to kind of trigger an emotion and that's when I start to write. The song kind of paints the picture for me. And I'm just searching for it at that point."
It's a process that, he admits, isn't so different from what a photographer is doing on the other side of the stage. "When you hear the first ten seconds of a song with no lyrics at all, you'd be like, oh my god, I remember at the roller rink or whatever when I was listening to that song. And it could paint this whole picture for you. I think photography works the same way. You can look at a photo and feel something the photographer didn't even consciously put there."
Antonio Who?
One thing that didn't just happen was the name. Anthony Winters is not the name on his birth certificate. That name is Anthony Sciarrino, or more accurately, Antonino Sciarrino, a detail he mentions with a grin and notes he's never shared in an interview before. "I've actually never said that in an interview before. You heard it here first." His father is from Sicily, which explains the very Italian real name. The stage name, though, is its own story.
Before Anthony Winters, there was A.N.T., a name that worked until it really didn't. "Searching up A.N.T. was like impossible. Ant Farm would come up, like ants, like insects." He'd had a cover rack up over three million streams on Spotify, but the traffic was going to the producer, not to him. "I started to notice everybody who found the song was going to Ty, who produced the song, and they weren't really finding me through it." So he started the search for something new, opening a running note in his phone where friends could drop ideas whenever. It took over a year.
The answer ended up being closer to home than he expected. Winters is his mother's maiden name. "I wanted to still be me and feel like it's real. I didn't want to just be like, I don't know, stop sign or whatever." A friend who had gone through her own name change gave him the advice that finally got him there: "You're not going to feel like it's you until you feel like it's you. You just have to kind of force yourself to be like, no, this is who I am now."
The MilkBoy Bathroom Heard It First
The moment he made it official was at local venue, Milk Boy. He ran offstage, changed his Instagram handle in the bathroom, and came back out as Anthony Winters. Nobody in the crowd knew it was coming. "I changed my Instagram handle in the bathroom of MilkBoy. I ran off the stage and I went, Anthony Winters. That was the last A.N.T. show that I'm doing."
For Now, That's Enough
With a debut EP behind him and an album still taking shape, Anthony Winters is somewhere in that particular stretch of an artist's early career where everything feels like it's just starting to click. He's not chasing a sound so much as following one, letting the music tell him where it needs to go and trusting himself enough to keep up.
He seems genuinely at ease with all of it. With the uncertainty, the in-between, the songs that haven't gotten their moment yet. "You never know what's really going to hit and what's not. I've heard Ed Sheeran talk about how he hated “Shape of You.” He didn't even want to put that song out. And it was the biggest song ever. So, you never know what's really going to hit. I just want to write because I love it, not because I'm chasing something."
For now, that seems like more than enough of a plan.
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