Ferris Bueller once said “life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.” People also say that time flies when you’re having fun. For one of pop-rock’s hottest new bands, Sing It Loud, life could not be moving faster and w...
Ferris Bueller once said “life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.” People also say that time flies when you’re having fun. For one of pop-rock’s hottest new bands, Sing It Loud, life could not be moving faster and with the release of their sophomore album, Everything Collide, they are embracing both philosophies. Since the their conception in 2007, Sing It Loud have been blending lush pop vocals with anthemic guitar rock, crisscrossing the US on tour, falling in and out of love, winning fans over at each show and most importantly having fun along the way.
Sing it Loud, a five piece band from Minneapolis consisting of Pat Brown (lead vocals/guitar), Kieren Smith (guitar/backing vocals), Nate Flynn (bass), Ben Peterson (piano/keyboard) and Chris Lee (drums), formed in 2007 and were quickly noticed by Epitaph Records as a band with massive potential and a unique, budding sound. Epitaph signed the band in late 2007 and released their debut album, Come Around, which was produced by fellow Minnesotan and Motion City Soundtrack guitarist Josh Cain, in 2008. The next two years were spent cutting their teeth on the road in support of Come Around with bands like We The Kings, Forever the Sickest Kids, All Time Low, Cobra Starship and Motion City Soundtrack.
While the band gained invaluable experience on tour, they realized they hadn’t truly found their musical voice yet.
“We wanted to do something different,” explains guitarist Kieren. “We aren’t really a pop-punk band and we got classified as that on our first record. With the first album we were trying to be the band that everyone likes. We followed a lot of trends and let a lot of outside people affect certain decisions we made with our image, writing, and just how we were as a band.”
With that in mind the band embarked on a collective journey to find the music within, embracing their influences, the experience from the last several years and finding inspiration in life, love and their surroundings.
“Everyone has so many different aspects of their outlook on life and the way they act, who they are, and what they do — and it all just collides with each other,” Smith says. “All we have to do as people is learn how to deal with it and get along. We don’t need to go change the world.”
Over the course of 2009, Kieren wrote constantly on the road, demoing to a pro-tools rig on his laptop. Drawing on influences of famed producer Mutt Lange’s work with Def Leppard and his ability to treat each song individually, he approached writing in a whole new light.
“We are all big Def Leppard fans, not only of their music, but they way they approach things,” says Kieren. “They recorded "Hysteria" one song at a time and really focused on each track individually. That album ended up having seven hit singles on it, which even back then was next to impossible to do. We wanted an album with no filler and for each song to stand out and have its own identity.”
Following a grueling summer on Vans Warped Tour the band regrouped in their practice space to hash out the demos and continue writing. With a solid cache of songs, Sing It Loud recruited Jordan Schmidt (All Time Low, Quietdrive) to produce and mix and Mike Shipley (Def Leppard, Green Day) for additional mixes and spent the following two months hold up in the studio to record their follow-up to Come Around.
Having approached recording differently this time around, leaving any expectations and notion of a “scene” at the door, and writing music for themselves with only the fans in mind, Sing It Loud emerged from the studio in late 2009 with eleven of the best songs they’d ever written.
“I know many bands say this but we wanted to make an album that would stand out from all of the bands releasing albums in our genre and I truly feel like we went above and beyond that expectation,” says frontman Pat Brown. “We also wanted to create an album that you can listen to from front to back that is strong and dynamic all the way through, which I feel doesn't happen enough these days. I remember listening to bands like Taking Back Sunday, The Starting Line, Less Than Jake, Fall Out Boy, Motion City Soundtrack, bands I would listen to their albums over and over and over from track one until the end. That's what I think people will do with Everything Collide.”
Sing It Loud set out to find their individuality and their own voice in music and came up with Everything Collide. With eleven mega-anthemic pop-rock hits like “Sugar Sweet,” “Addicted to When You’re Gone” and “Light It Up,” combining the band’s memorable lyrics and alluring melodies with rock infused guitars, warm buzzing keys and bounding rhythm, Everything Collide is an album of change and maturity; a defining moment in the band’s young career.
Everything Collide is a literally a melding of sounds and styles, including the love song “Only One,” the surprisingly country-tinged hometown tribute “Here With You,” and the emotional “Shadows,” in which Smith took a turn at the mic for the first time. “It was pretty cool — we just wanted to try something different and it’s just another thing we did to make it a little bit more three dimensional,” says Smith.
“After touring for three years together and spending so much time on the road we have finally started to form our own identity,” adds Kieren. “We know who we are individually and collectively and we know what kind of music we want to make and what kind of message we want to send.”
Sing it Loud are five guys, not much different from you, who are doing what they love regardless of trends, scenes or expectations. And while things don’t seem to be slowing down for the band any time soon, the guys are just fine with that. As long as they’re having fun and have time to stop and look around once and a while.
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