Hey everyone, Eric here. Minor Stars kept a pretty low profile this last year, mostly for reasons out of our control, and I wanted to let all of our friends and fans know what’s been going on.
Last year started out great. We made plans to record our second album with Mitch Easter at his beautiful studio, The Fidelitorium. Big dreams, big songs, and big fat 2” tape on a big old Studer 24-track machine. We were invited to make our first Hopscotch appearance and played an amazing Saturday night bill including Oneida and Birds of Avalon. And looking back on some other shows, we supported one of Northern Ireland’s best bands at the Local 506—And So I Watch You From Afar—a small dream come true for our Northern Irish drummer who was used to seeing that band sell out much larger venues back home, including the 1800-seat Ulster Hall, famous for being where Led Zeppelin first performed “Stairway to Heaven” live. And there was the uber-rock show at Casbah with psych powerhouses Radio Moscow. Lots of guitar and lots of fuzz. Good times.
But back up to April 2012. Within a week of spending five days tracking some truly huge drum sounds at The Fidelitorium and getting a great start to Minor Stars Album 2, my mom fell ill and went into the hospital. Things became very bad and she died a month and a half later. I spent about two months in Connecticut—my family and I were fortunate to have been able to spend a lot of time with her in the ICU before she passed. It was the hardest and most intense two months of my life.
It wasn’t easy for me to get back to work on the album when I returned to NC. Emotionally, I couldn’t bring myself to care about it as much as I had before. I was completely drained. And on top of that, for the rest of 2012 I was working a ton—60+ hours/week—so I just didn’t have the time, focus, or energy. The few attempts we made to get back into the studio were met with either scheduling conflicts or technical problems, like when the pinch roller of the Studer tape machine broke, almost devouring our tape, halting the session for another couple of months while the part was repaired. So last year amounted to a pretty bad year for trying to get an album done.
But that’s all behind us now and so far 2013 has been really great! Because it’s been a year since those initial recording sessions, and since we’re incredibly happy and psyched to announce that we have a new bass player (whose identity will remain a secret for another week), we had the idea to totally scrap everything we had already recorded and start from scratch. A scary thought, but one that filled us with excitement and promise for what we could achieve this time around, with new confidence, energy, and urgency.
So last year’s studio tracks have now become our pre-production demos, which we’re using to flesh out parts and work out new ideas. We’ll be posting sneak-peaks of these demos over the next few months. Then we’ll have an official single released by Hopscotch this year and the full album out shortly thereafter. It’s gonna be a really different record than the first one and we’re unbelievably excited about it. Look for us on tour this fall!
Thank you so much for your support and we’ll see you very soon.
Minor Stars (Eric, Iain, MysteryMan)
