By snoadmin
The Long Island, N.Y., music scene looked more like a clip, from a soap opera in mid-2003. After a shouting match on tour with band mate Adam Lazzara, John Nolan abandoned his role as the second singer and guitarist of upcoming rock band Taking Back Sunday and took bassist Shaun Cooper with him.
Not ready to call it quits, the remaining members of Taking Back Sunday convinced Breaking Pangea front man Fred Mascherino to leave his outfit and join theirs. That was the end of the alt rock band Breaking Pangea.
It’s the refugees of these happenings that make up Long Island-based indie band Straylight Run, a piano pop band that would soon challenge Taking Back Sunday on the MTV2 charts.
“[Straylight Run] started when Shaun and I left Taking Back Sunday and started working on some recordings together,” Nolan said. “We ran into Will Noon [drummer of the recently disbanded Breaking Pangea] at a show. He was looking for something to do, so we started playing with him. We talked to my sister Michelle Nolan about joining the band and she did. A couple months later we were on our first tour.”
Nolan and Cooper were still under contractual obligations with Victory Records, so they set out to make a debut album for the popular Chicago-based indie label. “Straylight Run” was released, in October of 2004, to an overwhelming response.
It sold more than 11,000 copies in its first week and made the Billboard Top 100 Chart. It landed the band opening slots for national touring acts like Rooney, Something Corporate and Dashboard Confessional. The music video for “Existentialism On Prom Night” became a staple on television stations, MTV2 and FUSE, but something still didn’t feel quite right.
“We didn’t like the overall sound,” Nolan said. “It was more the mixing than the recording. We were very happy with the songs, but we felt [the mixing] took it into such an overly polished and sterile sounding direction.”
So they went back into the studio to record a follow up EP. This time, they co-produced the album with long-time friends, Mike Sapone and Bryan Russell, and they had a better idea of what they wanted to sound like.
“We tried to keep things sounding really natural and real,” Nolan said. “Like with the drum sounds, a lot of times people these days will use drum sounds that they replace over the drummer’s hits. It doesn’t sound like a real person playing the drums anymore. We did the drums with just three or four microphones around them.”
“We also let the vocals be a little more raw,” Nolan added. “We went more for trying to get a good take, as far as the feel of it and the overall mood of it, rather than have it precisely clean and perfect. We wanted the record to sound good, but we wanted it to sound like us. I don’t think a lot of people these days sound like what they really sound like when you hear them on a record.”
“Prepare To Be Wrong” was released in October of 2005 and captured the natural essence of the band. Straylight Run continued to tour the country with acts like Motion City Soundtrack, Hellogoodbye and The Spill Canvas, but when things started to calm, the future of the band was up in the air.
The EP ended the contractual obligations with Victory Records. Deciding its music didn’t really fit into the Victory key demographic, the band decided to leave the label and start putting its next record together alone.
Deciding to produce it themselves, the band members went to work on writing, recording and mixing the 15 songs it had to choose from, for the tentatively titled “The Miracle That Never Came.”
“Overall, the record is kind of a good blend of what we liked about the first record and what we liked about the EP,” Nolan said. “It’s weird because overall it’s in some ways more upbeat than everything we’ve done before, but it’s upbeat in a different kind of way. It’s not really in a punk rock kind of way, which I like a lot more.”
Now that the songs are all recorded, the main concern for the band is to decide whether to release the album themselves or to sign to a major label.
“We are really looking for someone who will be able to back us and hopefully get our name out to a wider variety of people,” Nolan said. “But hopefully someone who will be able to do that with us and work with us and do things in a way that we feel comfortable with. We’re not looking for someone who will just step in and take charge of our whole operation.”
So check out Straylight Run and you won’t be disappointed.
