It's no secret that the past year has been a difficult and tragic one for everybody. The struggles that bands like ours have been dealing with are petty compared to the human tragedy unfolding all over the world, however they are challenges which we will be learning how to address for the foreseeable future, even as the world gets down to the business of trying to get back to normal. Or the new-normal, or however our new reality ends up.
In any case, it has been a challenging time for bands and musical artists in general, as for most of us there has been no ability to get in front of a live audience. One of the side effects of this for Signal Static was the departure of our former lead singer, Connor, who decided not to continue with the band in the absence of live shows to play.
On a macro scale, the temporary shut down of live venues in our city, and many others, has become the permanent closure of far too many venues which had previously been the bread and butter of local musicians. It has been very sad to see, and it is hard to see how our local music scene will recover from these losses anytime soon.
In December, we released our debut album, 'Start Transmission', which was the product of a lot of hard work and long nights earlier in the year, finishing the recording before the inevitable lockdowns put a halt to everything. Like most bands out there right now, we were unable to promote it or do many of the things that one might normally expect a band to do in support of a new album, so we've had to take a different approach.
With no shows to prepare, and no reason to perpetually practice the same songs over and over again, for the time being, we've had little else to do but be creative, or die, really. While we were able to still get together and make noise, the three of us have gotten down to the business of writing songs with a singularity of purpose that we've really never had before.
Despite everything, it has been a really exciting and refreshing experience, as well as one in which we have grown closer as friends, bandmates, and musicians. It has been an intensely creative time, the output of which has been really phenomenal. We have also had to learn a lot, and innovate a lot.
As the pandemic has progressed and local lockdown guidelines have become progressively more strict once again, we eventually had to put a hiatus on getting together to play music in person, which is a bummer, I'm not going to lie. The good news is that during the downtime we've had the opportunity to work together, remotely, to build upon some of the new songs that we were able to record during the summer and produce some really stellar sounding new demo tracks.
I'm very proud of the songs we've been writing, and of the people that I get to call my bandmates and collaborators. These are, I have to say, the best songs we've written to date, and I can't wait for you all to hear what we've been cooking up. It will have been well worth the wait.
That's all for now; thanks for reading!
--Ryan
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