Salt Lake City's popular magazine, "City Weekly", has a "Best of Utah" competition every year for fans to support their favorite local businesses. The winner gets featured in the magazine, a plaque, and some street cred in our electronic press kit! There's an entry for best band and we need your help TO VOTE Eighth Day to be the best band for 2017! This is the year that we've released our debut album, music video, and have played at some of the best venues in town!
How to vote?
It's simple, go here: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/BOU17, and select at least three local businesses, and on page 4, make sure you select Eighth Day as your favorite band!
Page 4
The field where you vote for us!
Who else can I vote for? I don't know 3 local businesses...
If you need help for knowing what other two local businesses to vote for, we recommend that for best music festival, that you select #utahMusicFest, and best visual artist, and that you vote for my uncle, John Hughes.
Before Nate left, we wanted to shoot a music video of one of the tracks from our newly released album. We let Nate choose the song, and we were surprised when he chose this one. He did so because he liked the positive message that it conveys. We also let him choose the spot where to film it. He chose Delle, Utah, a desert ghost town, with literally nothing but a gas station and an abandoned school bus. We ended up choosing Raji Barbir of TinyComet films to shoot our music video. We also hired my co-worker Mike to do some aerial drone footage. We are extremely pleased with the end result. The release turned out better than expected. We got over 8,000 FB views of the release weekend, and over 300 YouTube views. We've concentrated the majority of our efforts onto Facebook, trying to attract new fans. This music video has been the most effective avenue to gain new likes on our Facebook. This was a milestone achievement, and we'd like to thank everyone who was part of the process and who has supported us.
You can view the music video below on YouTube or Facebook (in 4k HD quality!):
We just recently released our debut LP album, "Into the Desert". It's available on iTunes, Amazon, Spotify, and Bandcamp to stream and purchase. While having it digititally distributed is the modern way to release an album, there's something satisfying about having an old-school printed album. It makes the project feel more tangible. I'm proud with how the artwork turned out. I used some of the photos that my co-worker Michael Romero took at our music video shoot, in the Tooele desert. The music video is going to be released August 23, and it is going to be epic!
Our song "Hassle" from our new album, will be featured on DJ Suzy's "IMP Indie Mania" show today! Tune in at 3pm MST. http://www.spreaker.com/user/impradio. After the show, it will be syndicated to a vast number of FM & Online Radio Stations! See you there!!
Our track "Breaking Free" was featured on http://EmergingIndieBands.com! Thanks to Tim for writing this article. Interesting
perspective for sure, we've never thought of our music as Nashville Country…
Check out their website and give them some love.
Releasing an album is one of the most rewarding milestones as a band. It's breathing life into the songs that you spent so much time carefully crafting. It's seeing the fruits of your labor after all that time and money spent tracking in the studio. It's a tangible piece of art that you can proudly share with the world. While artists get a personal sense of gratification, album release time is the time to promote and build hype.
This was our first professionally recorded album as a band. For us, we've been in the studio for almost 2.5 years, March 2015 - August 2017. We were distraught when we learned that Nate would be leaving before the album would be finished. It didn't seem fitting to not do something to celebrate this album's release, but we didn't want to train a new guitarist and wait for them to get up to speed. This album was long overdue. So we did a FB livestream.
I created a slideshow of pictures of all the events that we've had as a band, whether it was practice, gigs, or professional studio pictures. I synced the slideshow to each of the songs on the album. Our friend Victor Gamble interviewed us, and asked us songs about each song on the album.
It would have been cool to do all this live, but I don't have the experience, nor the equipment, so we pre-recorded this, edited the video, and streamed the final video. This way, I could spam all the groups I'm part of by sharing the video. The livestream seemed to go smoothly, but the rendered saved video looks like a bunch of jumbled puzzle pieces. So I reuploaded the video below. We were pretty happy with the stats, over 1700 views.
Thank you to everyone who watched! Thank you to Vic for interviewing us!
You can download the album and find out more on our website!
http://eighthDaySlc.com
It was March 2015, and we were doing really well as a band. We had just released our Starlit Horizons, EP and had been receiving good feedback from it. We were trying to play as many shows as we could to promote our original stuff. Our songs we wrote to be full, energetic, have anthem-like choruses, raging guitar solos, lots of crash cymbals, and harmonic guitars.
Allison's Scandalous Dress
We were invited to play BYU's Restaurant/Venue, "The Wall", part of their semi-annual Battle of the Bands. This was our first time playing in Provo, and we were stoked to be reaching a new audience!
We scoped the competition beforehand by looking at their social media to gauge our chances of winning. There were some good bands playing, and we were lucky to be sharing the stage with such talent.
I probably most-likely overestimated how good we were, at least at live performance. In theory, we had one of the larger followings, probably the best looking web presence (my opinion isn't biased by the fact that I do all of our media, I promise), and our songs had probably the most complexity as far as musicianship was concerned.
Us old geezers at the Wall with our stage banner!
We were pretty stoked, brought all our new stage banner, our fans, friends, and family and we were ready to rock! The first offsetting thing was that we were one of the last performers, and people
looked like they were ready for this event to be over. Everybody was sitting, and it was clear that they weren't going to engage in our high-energy music. Next was the sound guy, he insisted that
we didn't need a sound check. The guitars were so loud and overpowering. It was a small venue, and it wasn't enjoyable to listen to us. The sound guy didn't adjust any level on his mixing board during our whole set. It threw off our mojo every time we'd look out at the empty-eyed, reaction-less audience. (Besides my wife and sister who were jumping up and down by the stage.)
We got our score card back from the judges, and we placed dead last. Most of the comments were, that they couldn't hear us over the overbearing guitar.
Then we got this awesome press in some music blog of one of the concert goers.
It's true, Ryan the bassist at the time was in his early 30's. The rest of us were college-aged; in our early 20's. I just turned 24. I thought that was a weird comment coming from someone attending BYU. Men at BYU go on missions and then begin college at age 21. I'm 6'5", and that might make me look older.
Allison was wearing a modest dress that would be fitting to go to Church. She was moving around the stage, but it wasn't sexualized at all. (You can see how she moves around on the video below)
I hope this blogger's discomfort of women wasn't shared by the whole audience that night. Then there was this gem:
His verdict rage at the end seemed to be directed at us. It's no secret that folk/singer-song writer/indy music isn't my favorite. Even though that genre was extremely trendy at the time, especially in Provo. I grew up on Rush and Dream Theater. More is more. I'm not a fan of super simple guitar or piano riffs, lack of instrumentation, lack of drum fills (if there's even drums), lack of guitar solos, lack of energy and the obsession of trying to be "original", by dressing like a hipster and trying to sound like The Lumineers. *
Whatever the case, we felt like a lot of people were extremely judgmental and it gave us a bad first impression of Provo. (We don't want to discount all the awesome support we got to everyone who went down to that show!) But, we're over it now.
Honestly, the main reason that we don't play down there because we have plenty of opportunity here in Salt Lake City; and we all live in Salt Lake City. When we weren't having as many opportunities to gig, we were willing to make the long drive down to Provo for a 20 - 30 minute unpaid set. We are totally willing to play there again given the right opportunity. In fact, we did a livestream concert at Rock Canyon Studios last June, and it was a blast, you can check out some of those songs on our YouTube!
*My statements on the indy genre were over simplified and generalized. I do appreicate the talent that goes into it, and blah blah blah. If you're offended, get over it. ;) I'm just one guy, what do I know?
The long awaited, highly anticipated album will finally be launched into the world! And we want you to be part of the party! We'll be doing this podcast style, like a radio talk show. We'll all be at Aaron's place, and we'll be live streaming the recordings, talking about stuff, and answering your questions! It's going to be epic! We decided to release this album over a FB livestream! We came to this decision because Nate has left the state, and while we could train a new guitarist and release the album at a traditional concert, this album is long overdue and we cannot wait a day longer to release this! It's been in the works for 2.5 years! Tune in at 7pm, August 9th! Promo Video 1