Indie Rock band Red Wanting Blue will be releasing their new album Light It Up on June 7th, via Blue Elan Records, and even though it’s coming from a band who have many years of experience recording and on the road, there are a number of “firsts” for the band this time around. Light It Up marks the first time that the band has totally self-produced an album, and their summer and autumn coming up mark the first time they’ve scheduled a tour with an intentional gap between the album release and touring to give fans time to get to know the music. It’s also the first time they recorded songs only a few at a time and took extra time with deliberation and shaping of the tracks as they moved towards a full album. For the band members, this meant more time at home honoring family commitments and more time to consider where they wanted the songs to go.
For these reasons, Light It Up may be the band’s most personal and nuanced album yet, even including intros and outros that link the songs together and take the audience on a specific journey. The themes and sounds that emerged from this approach were very much about emotional connection and high-energy celebration, as the album’s title suggests. That celebratory air speaks to the return of live music following the pandemic and also to a renewed focus on what matters most in the lives of the band members. I spoke with vocalist and guitarist Scott Terry about all these “firsts” and where Red Wanting Blue intends to go from here.
Hannah Means-Shannon: I get a general sense that a lot of the songs on this album are about getting down to brass tacks and finding out what you really want in life. It asks, “Where do you go from here?” And a lot of that feels pretty positive to me.
Scott Terry: I think so. I’m always trying to find a way to make myself mildly uncomfortable, I think. [Laughs] I feel like, as a writer, it’s a goal. My personal experiences have been that whenever I write something where I feel mildly uncomfortable about the subject matter or wonder, “Am I saying too much or being too personal?”, usually that means that people say, “That’s great! That’s how people are going to connect with it.”
Over the years, I’ve tried to write things down and put things out in that way. There’s a part of you that will timidly try to walk it back, but you have to fight the urge and let it lie. It doesn’t belong to me anymore; it can belong to everybody. And hopefully, your family members and people closest to you don’t get upset about it!
That’s come up in conversation with musicians a few times lately, the idea that family members and people who know you are going to hear this music. It’s a secondary phenomenon to think about.
It’s true! There are moments on this record like that. With the song “Light It Up”, I’ve been asked, “Were you dealing with writer’s block?” I’m a writer. Of course, I was dealing with writer’s block. Writers are constantly dealing with writer’s block. Every day, you say, “That doesn’t sound good. I don’t know what’s going on.” I dread even mentioning COVID or the pandemic. No one wants to talk about it, least of all me. But it did turn the industry on its head, and you were home wondering, “What am I doing?” I had never been home so long before and there were new routines that had to happen.
Personally, as a band of guys who were sitting down and writing music, there was definitely a point where we took a turn and the novelty of the world turning on its side had rubbed off. We wrote certain things topically and found inspiration in them. But we said, “If and when we get out of this thing, I don’t think we’ll want to sing about this moment.” It’s a tough call. Those songs can be potent, but later, in a live setting, it can take the air out of the room. It’s up to you, depending on what you want to do. There was a moment where, as a band, we’d heard a lot of isolationist acoustic albums, and I said, “I really want things to be bright and colorful and full of energy since we’re a live band, and I hope for that to resume.”
So, with a song like “Light It Up”, I was thinking, “It’s feeling dark right now, but I really want things to get colorful again.” Sometimes I forget that I even wrote lyrics addressing my drinking and making that part of the story of the song! I thought it would be a placeholder until I came up with something better. But then it was just part of the song. There it is, it’s out there, but it’s not the focus of the song.
I think people have become so much more open lately about just about everything in music that it’s not even surprising to hear in a song.
There’s also a song after that that’s called “Time’s For You,” where the song literally came out of my wife and I fighting. We were fighting because we had some dear friends in Los Angeles who were getting married and went to the trouble of saying, “We saw that there was a window on this weekend where Scott wasn’t playing and out west…” to pick their wedding date. What they didn’t see was that there was also a private show that was booked on that weekend.
That went into this big discussion of needing to be there for those people, especially since musicians, who are always playing on weekends, miss a lot of weddings and important things. In the last few years, a lot of people did a lot of recentering and reevaluating, and coming out of that, touring has changed.
Yes, it has. A lot of people are putting their foot down about pushing themselves so hard.
It’s changed for our band. We will no longer accept going out for long periods. I’m happy going out for two months of touring, but we will now break it into two week increments to give people a chance to go home and touch base and be with their families. We’ve been doing this for so many years that we know every neck of the woods. I disagree with anyone who says, “You can’t go to any corner of the United States and be back within roughly two weeks.”
You can go to the Southwest, hit some stops, and get home. Sometimes, you have to be a little creative, but you can hit any corner of the country, pretty much. We’ve gotten older, and we’ve got two guys in the band who have kids now, so that’s important. I love the idea of looking at a calendar and knowing that we’re going to be busy, but I also love knowing that we aren’t going to be skirting family responsibilities and personal obligations in the process. We’re trying to be adults and responsible citizens!
So many people who have been touring are saying, “I want to build a life and that’s been undermined.” I don’t mean that in a judgmental way, but they realize that they haven’t left anything for themselves.
It’s very true. I’ve had this discussion with my booking agent, who I’ve known for a long time, that in my younger days I always used this analogy, “Indie bands are like sharks. You have to keep them moving forward, because if you don’t, you die.” But with the pandemic, we had no choice, everyone had to stop. So you reevaluate. We were so busy at staying busy for so many years. It’s not about putting it on the calendar just to say that we’ve done it. Now we’re asking, “Is there a demand for us to be there?” That’s tough, too, to decide.
A lot of people are choosing certain hubs where they can play fewer dates but hope that the real fans will come to them. Are you thinking that way at all?
I am. We’re doing something different. There were a lot of “firsts” with this album that are the way that we are doing things now. The way that we made the record was very different. I’ve been playing music my whole life, and this is our 13th album, so I feel like it’s a little bit “ugh” to say, “Guess what, we produced it ourselves!” It doesn’t sound exciting. But truth be told, we’ve learned so much over the years. I was always the guy who said, “We need someone outside of the band to quarterback that record.”
So we’ve always had outside Producers. Our last record was more of a co-Produce with a friend in Nashville, and it gave us the confidence to Produce this ourselves. We also had the mixer lined up for it. We did the rest ourselves, and we did only a couple of songs at a time. That’s not something I’ve ever enjoyed in the past. I didn’t like the idea of doing something like that. It seemed like it would be tedious, and I preferred catching lightning in a bottle.
But a friend of mine said to me, “If there’s any advice I could give you, take your time. If you want to try something different, go in for a weekend or a couple of days at a time and then sit with them. It will undoubtedly change the way that you do the songs, and it will inform the next two songs that you make. You will able to sit and keep shaping them around, like stones in a tumbler.” Then you’re not stressing about the song that you’re not prepared for. So we did it that way and gave ourselves the time to do it. Taking that and having it work meant that our guys who have kids were able to be at home, too. It was a longer process, but it was helpful.
Some people want to be away from what’s familiar to record, but plenty of people also respond to being in a stress-free situation, like you’re describing.
When I was a kid, I thought, “I want to go far away and be locked in a cabin somewhere in an exotic place and that’s going to inspire me to make the record that I want to make.” The thought of finding inspiration where I live didn’t seem feasible back then. But as you get older, you realize it’s not necessarily about that. It’s about being comfortable. When you’re homelife is okay, and you’re really giving each song the love it deserves, you get a better record.
Another difference this time is that now, with touring, we used to say, “This is the date that the album comes out. We need to be touring here, and here, and here.” We were thinking that there was some kind of momentum that had to be caught. But the truth is, when you’re releasing a record and playing those songs in front of people who don’t know the songs yet, they are waiting for you to play something that they do know. It’s always been an awkward thing.
This time, we said, “Maybe we won’t do that.” Our goal this time was to have the album come out, and announce the tour dates for the rest of the year, but giving people some time in between those two things. This time I said, “I want the album to come out, but I think we’ll do the small things we need to do, but then come August, we’ll start firing away.” Now, we’ll be out in August, and we’ll be out in September. We’ll be hitting all over the map but in a more calculated way.
I think this all comes under the heading of “touring smarter” and it’s not heretical anymore to think that way. If people aren’t thinking that way, it’s surprising.
That’s so true.
