Greetings & Salutations!
January…
February…
March…
So, just what in blazes is going on here?
I’ll get the TL;DR version out of the way up front: the plan is for Sons Of Nothing to be releasing one new single every month for the year of 2013. (And at least two singles for one of those months, thus “Baker’s Dozen”.) Most will be re-recordings of our older songs mixed with a handful of cover tunes, but it’s likely that new music will also be coming in before too long.
So, how and why did this plan come about?
Well, as has been documented elsewhere, the making of Green & Grey took a long time. A ridiculously, painfully long time. To be fair, the process was complicated by a number of sizeable events in our personal lives, and it’s not as if we had a hard, fast deadline to meet. But still, it was a frustrating experience – for us, and most likely, for some of you – and one that we don’t wish to repeat.
A lot has changed in that span of time, including the music business and our relationship to it. Although we’re past the learning curve of long-distance recording, the fact that we live so far apart has made playing live gigs a tough (and rare) proposition, and whatever momentum that the band managed to generate in the earlier years has atrophied, on a number of fronts. We’re getting older. Our audience is getting older. The chances of achieving even a scaled-down version of the dream we had when we started this are…well, not something I want to contemplate here, lest I end up turning the whole thing into a self-indulgent blues jam. Maybe later.
But here’s the thing: we still love making music, and we know there are folks who still want to hear the music we make. Maybe, if we’re lucky, there are even a few fans-in-waiting out there, just one listen away from jumping on board with us. So, it’s time to start turning weaknesses into strengths, and to begin fully embracing the technology and media landscape of the 21st century, which is a pool that we’ve been dancing around for a very long time without ever really jumping in with both feet.
Thus, this new venture into shorter-term projects.
We’re being careful not to bite off more than we can shred, keeping the commitment to one release per month, and keeping the focus on re-purposing songs that already exist. The plan is that by and large, the recording will be 100% new, even if the song is a familiar one, and some will be radically re-imagined. This latest release – “Thursdays,” with Marie’s lead vocal added but the rest of the original recording intact – is about as conservative as we’re going to play it. Most of the cover tunes will be songs that have been in our live set for a little while, so they’ll have our particular sonic stamp on them as well. And I’ve been wanting to go back and re-record some songs from our out-of-print first album since…well, practically since we released it. So there’s a lot of material from which to choose.
Matt and I are also back in writing mode. So, once this operation is humming right along, brand new original music is sure to follow, likely along the same delivery method. We’re still very much album-band guys, but we’re also excited about using this new situation to helps us feel more connected to each other, to the music, and to you guys. The hope is that this new spirit of continuous interaction will lead to other opportunities as we go along, including more video projects, more live shows, more everything.
As Art Blakey famously declared: “If you’re not appearing, you’re disappearing.”
We want to be the first thing. And we would be honored if you joined us.
More soon…
TB
