Update time! Looong one.
Kenny here! We´ve been extremely quiet for a few months, for many reasons, some being a lack of energy to put into WATC because of the constant uphill struggles, including the crap we and you had/still have to endure from PledgeMusic and a few other people we tried working with in the past months and even years. Sometimes this piece of shit music industry it´s just too much, and as artist we are prone to be easily fooled and trusting as we want our art to be heard/seen. And for our own mental health and survival we need to step back some times and recharge and figure out WHY we are doing this and if we even still want to. – Which we do! 🙂
What we DON´T want is to be part of this stinking music industry and playing by their rules, doing everything by the “old” model of marketing and releasing etc. Because as most of you know, we don´t have a proper label backing us up, so it is EXTREMELY hard to reach out and be taken seriously by anyone in the music industry as obviously labels are everything when it comes to forming partnerships/cooperation/festivals/blablabla. which is extremely sad.
And trying to do what labels do has not worked for us in the past. For the release of “Ephemeral” we hired several PR agencies and spent over 8000 $ in promotion with them (and some ourselves) with little to no impact at all. You might understand how this will make us a bit tired in the end and question everything we do.
We did get several label offers for “Ephemeral”, but either the labels were very small as to not be able to do more than we ourselves can do, or the deals we got offered where not good enough (read BAD) to warrant signing away the rights for a long period of time, meaning we might have gotten stuck in a bad deal with no way out.
At this point we are not sure how to go our own way. We will try to figure it out though, there are some ideas from people I know that might be interesting soon. In the meantime I guess we´ll do it the “old” way 🙂
But looking back now I can absolutely see that we have been more successful than i previously thought, and I am immensly proud of all that we have done.
We love what we do, and we love writing and releasing songs, so we are quite happy at this point with taking a step back and focusing on that instead at the moment. We would love to get out there and perform more, but we are just not getting through to the powers that be and that decide which artists get a chance on festivals/support tours etc. And not for lack of trying, believe me.
This is the only reason we are not performing more, and always have been the reason.
In the short term we could do more headline touring (and we might absolutely if we get no support slots), but cost-wise it is not a good idea compared to joining a bigger band as support with all the promotion etc that means. On our own in the UK for example we might bring 50-100 people a night, which is just not cost effective. As support for a bigger band we could play for 500-1000 people for about the SAME COST per day, but with a whole lot more exposure, merch sales etc.
This is the only reason we are choosing to do headline touring even though it is very much too soon for us to do, as we have no options. And honestly I have no idea why we can´t get in on a tour as support, only guesses.
Sometimes it feels as though we are doing something wrong, something that I am missing, and I have spent the past 14 years trying to figure it out, driving myself crazy most of the time, leading to heavy depression and anxiety.
Which is also part of the quiet time we´ve had. I had to take a step back as I saw that my actions and obsessing was destroying me and my family once again. I was not fun to be around.
So I decided to not focus on WATC for a few weeks, start meditating and just try to do other things instead. This turned into months as I saw immediate progress.
I realiized i wanted to be happy. Something I haven´t been for many, many years, and almost never in connection to music. I also realized I might have been obsessing about my music career for all the wrong reasons, I was so tied up in it that I actually thought it was ALL I was. Without it, who was I? Nobody, I thought. It was my crusade. All my goals. My dreams. To be successful in music.
After lots of soul searching I am now in a much better place and know that I want music to be part of my life, but not BE my life. I would love to work with it, but not if it means a huge cost in mental health etc.. So at this point I believe I have a lot more sound feelings towards a potential music career, and I am glad I finally took the time to do a proper deep-dive in my mind. I can recommend meditating every day to anyone! 🙂
And I can say that these past months have overall been great, and I feel that I am a stronger, happier person, and now I am starting to get ready for the music again, albeit with a little different, more careful approach.
I also realize, now that I am and have been basically depression free for months, that maybe it´s not what we are doing wrong, but what we are doing right that needs to happen more. Whatever that is! 😀
Feel free to tell me if you have an idea! 😉
Another reason for the quietness is simply that I have been very busy working with many other artists in my studio, which of course leads to me not having the time to focus on WATC as much. I am also in the middle of this going back to school (from home) to re-educate myself as a computer programmer, music is not at the moment, and have never been paying our bills, so need to find myself a proper job in the long term. Better to realize it at 34 than at 54! 😉
BUT. Now we are starting to gear up again! And we never stopped writing songs, as usual, and the next album is maybe 60% finished in writing. The songs are all there, we have too many as usual, but we still need to polish them and write melodies for some. It´s probably going to be the best weirdest Alt. Metal/ Heavy Rock album of 2020. (Hopefully!)
In most of the new songs we are trying to leave our comfort zones and try new stuff while still maintaining our trademark sound, heavy and catchy! 🙂
AND, I finally have gotten around to editing our next music video for “Alone Against the World” that we actually shot back in February. So expect it to be released within a month or so! More news on that will follow when we have it!