Hiatus?
I’m not really sure what to call this. If you’ve read the main website, then you know that we haven’t really done anything in a while and it doesn’t look like anything else will be happening any time soon. I’m not going to lie, I’m pretty disappointed with the way things have been going lately. There’s a lot of potential in this band, but scheduling problems, distance and lack of time is keeping us from becoming as good as we could be. to be honest it’s keeping us from doing much of anything. I hate that we’ve gotten to this point of stagnation, but as I’ve always said, I think things happen for a reason.
I’m not going to give any details or any definite plans for the future of Andy, Patrick, the band or me, but I’ll tell you that I foresee some changes happening. Something needs to change to make us push forward and get out of this cycle of practicing once every couple of weeks, maybe, and then playing one open mic night to about 10 people. The core of the problem is that we do not get the opportunity to play together as much as we would like. We’re all working this summer, and it seems that we can’t get things lined up enough so that we can all get together. In a perfect world, we would live in a house together, so band practice is as easy as getting up in the morning, strapping on a guitar and jamming for as long as we have, then going our separate ways for the day.
Practicing at least three times a week is necessary for a band to really develop a cohesiveness that creates great music and a great stage show. When we get together, we can play things well: things just gel and most of our stuff sounds great because we are comfortable and just playing for each other. But we are not comfortable enough with the songs to be able to go out and perform them on stage well, with great presence, emotion and make it look fun. That comes with lots of repetition and practice, which we don’t have.
I’m honestly not sure what will happen next, or honestly if anything will change. I do hope something does change though, because otherwise there won’t really be a band worth mentioning. It will be three guys who get together every once-in-a-while to jam and mess around. As fun as that is, it’s not our ultimate goal.
I think it’s time for a change in Blind Pilot. We need to take a completely different course, try something else, or even just start all over again. But the bottom line is that we are not going to be successful if we continue on this path. We’ve talked about and I’ve thought about adding a second guitarist/vocalist, or even just someone to play guitar. As much as we love the 3 man set up, it binds us musically and it keeps me behind a mic which doesn’t allow me to interact with the band and the audience as much as I would like. Another guitar would allow us to add more musicality to songs, rather than just having strummed chords through verses. Honestly, it’s hard for me to play much more than chords when I sing just because I haven’t been doing it very long, and an additional member would give us someone to play the parts that I would like to have in the song, but can’t play while singing. It would also allow us to incorporate more instruments into songs, such as keyboard, or synth (Andy just bought a new one…it’s pretty sweet…I can play “Jump” by Van Halen, and that makes me excited) to give them more variety and texture. This, more than anything is what we’re looking into to change what is happening and push forward with the band.
Hopefully in the next few weeks we’ll be able to pick this up and really start working towards becoming a solid, fun and exciting band. The opportunity and musical talent is there, it’s just a matter of putting it in the right place and working to make this thing happen. So like I said on the main site, I wouldn’t really expect to hear too much from us any time soon. This might be a period where we sit back down, find our sound, focus on song-writing and really work to make this band successful.
Thanks for the support we’ve been giving by you loyal people who would come see us when they could and helped us out with transportation, buying stickers and t-shirts and doing what you can to spread the music. Hopefully we’ll be back with something we can be truly proud of and that will provide for us a solid fan base. Until then, take it easy, have a great summer and keep supporting local music.
Peace,
Corey
