A decade after its recording The Silent Years' long lost album, Spider Season, produced by Sam Farrar and Noah Passovoy (Maroon 5/Max Martin/Phantom Planet), will see the light of day, September 25, on Love Is EZ.
Listen to a first taste from the record, "The River," below!
"A decade or so ago, it was all falling apart," says The Silent Years frontman Josh Epstein (now renowned for his work in indie pop duo JR JR). "The universe was giving fairly clear signs that I should pack it in and abandon the idea of a career in music. Intentions be damned, you can only feel the sting of failure so many times before you let doubt creep in... and it had begun to take hold.
Providing some context, Epstein continues... "Back then, I was in a band called The Silent Years alongside some truly talented people. We had just finished pouring ourselves into the creation of what we felt would be our 'big breakout record', after years of battling in the trenches to gain a semi-respectable foothold in the indie world. I could fill a book with some of the darker stories from slugging it out on the road, but we finally felt like our luck might be improving. Unfortunately, things went the other direction.
That was 2010.This year, I listened to that record for the first time since.Thinking back on 'Spider Season' - I don't have a firm grasp on the details, but I try to piece it together from memories. I know that The Silent Years went to Los Angeles to record with Sam Farrar & Noah Passovoy. We all lived in a friend's guest bedroom for a month, alternating turns sleeping in the bed. It feels like a magical time, where we all lived and breathed the album. Working with Sam & Noah at Kingsize [studio] was like a dream. They were the first producers we worked with and they brought a different thing out of us.It was our first time "living" in Los Angeles (a city I now call home). I remember driving on Mulholland and stopping at the scenic viewpoints and trying to take it all in. I remember getting invited to a Labor Day party where Adam Levine played with a jazz group and when we all swam in a pool in a foggy state of amazement at where we were and how we'd managed to get there. I remember the collective shock we felt when Sam told us that the omnipresence of spider webs was due to it being "spider season" in LA.
From there, I mostly feel the soft ache much like one feels when one presses on a bruise and then lifts one's finger back off. The record label we were on was running out of money before we could release the album. There was the awful process of having our rights held hostage by the owner of the label. We had no one else to help. No other label. No agent to help book shows (we had booked all of our own tours for 6 years prior). There was the personal toll the situation had taken on everyone who had put their whole lives into touring relentlessly for years. The missed opportunities, the transience. This had been our lives and was all I had personally planned on.Around this time, I ended up heading over to another songwriter's place in Royal Oak, MI as a creative experiment. We tracked 3 songs in what seemed like only a few hours and then I went to California to make an album. In a bizarre turn of events, the songs Daniel Zott and I recorded on a whim quickly began to take on a life of their own. We decided to call the project Dale Earnhardt Jr Jr.In what turned out to be a very fortunate opportunity for me, The Silent Years certainly suffered. The first 3 years of JR JR were pretty relentless and I didn't have much time for anything else, let alone a project that felt like a car stuck in the mud. To this day, it's still a little bittersweet.Finally listening to 'Spider Season' again was emotionally overwhelming. To be honest, it's hard for me to even write this without tears falling and a choke in my throat.The people involved meant and still mean everything to me. We were so lucky to have so many talented people who went on to do amazing things helping us out on a shoestring budget. I'm still grateful to them all - and I still feel like I've let them all down.So, here it is. 10 years too late, yet still feeling like an especially beautiful thing made with incredible people. I hope you all can connect with it as such.
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