30 Sep The Brighter Shore
For a decade, basically my 20’s, almost all of my creative energy went into playing in a band called sleepyhead*. At the same time I also did a lot of photography and began to make films, but that work was all related to the band and the music scene I was a part of. We never made money as a band, and our drummer became a teacher so our touring was limited to school vacations and summer. Still, we worked hard during that decade; making 4 albums, a few EP’s, and a bunch of singles and playing out as much as possible. While I got immeasurable creative benefits from being in the band, our working relationship was never all that smooth and by the end of the decade I was so burnt out that I decided to leave the band during the recording of our last album, “The Brighter Shore”. At the time I was involved with another music project that was taking up more time and we were in pre-production on another feature. We finished that film but the other band imploded on me and at that point I went pretty much cold turkey on music. At the same time that I was transitioning from being a guy in a band to a person who mostly worked on films, I worked for about 9 months at an indie rock music website startup. I was only 30 but everyone else there was 20 and one of these guys took to calling me “oldie”. For the first time I felt old too.
That was 15 years ago, and at this time last year, I finally started to play music again with friends from high school. It’s been fun. Last night I ran to the store for some things and I decided to listen to “The Brighter Shore”. It’s just a great record that almost nobody heard. The music business was in transition at the time, and I had left the band so we never toured on the record. None of our records had done much business but we had mostly been well received, so it was a disappointment that no one seemed to even notice that it came out.* It’s a pretty different record than our other ones which had a lot to do with the fact that we hadn’t really played the songs live before recording them. We were a three piece band but on this record, the producer, Eric Masunaga, is like a fourth member because the production is very active.
My partners in the band, Chris and Rachael, are married with two kids, and they put out a new record last year– and they are gearing up to finish another one in 2030. I’m really proud of what we accomplished with “The Brighter Shore” and I hope you can take a few minutes to listen to these two songs that I made videos for last year.
miss america – sleepyhead from rumur on Vimeo.
Box for Blue- Sleepyhead from “The Brighter Shore” from rumur on Vimeo.
*case in point – this wikipedia link doesn’t even include “the brighter shore” as one of our albums
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