Tuesday, September 24, 2013

Featured Artist - Blue Eyed Sun


After stumbling across Rocco's Song on YouTube, I had to find out more about Blue Eyed Sun. 

Blue Eyed Sun is a band of three musicians; Casey, Brennan, and Kenneth, who met deep in the woods of Northern Michigan and came together to create the music they love.  In late 2012 and into 2013, they recorded their debut album Tidal Sound at Halohorn Studios in Traverse City. It was then mixed at Blackbird Studios in Nashville by two time Grammy winning engineer, David Hall (Gavin Degraw, Frank Sinatra, Etta James, Fall Out Boy), and Mastered by Benny Quinn (Lady Antebellum, Marshall Tucker Band).  The three boys come from different cities and backgrounds, but they met at Interlochen Arts Academy (one of the top high schools for music performance in the world) outside Traverse City, Michigan in 2012.



Heather Renee:  How did you come up with your band name?

Blue Eyed Sun:  Our band name is a play on the Bob Dylan lyric in Hard Rain’s A Gonna Fall.  In the verse, the song      says “where have you gone my blue eyed son?”.  Bob Dylan is probably my biggest musical influence.  You can hear it in the folkier tracks on the record like Fidelity Melody and Johnny Boy and Tidal Sound.  We also like three, three syllables, three words and then throughout the ages the Sun has had importance to so many societies and literally spawned entire religions so we knew we wanted to use that word and we liked the word eye (after all it’s the window to the soul) and Blue is logical because its by far the most popular color for anything plus it has musical overtones.

Heather Renee:  Who do you compare your sound to?  

Blue Eyed Sun:  I’d say we sound like Fleet Foxes mixed with Maroon Five, if you can imagine that. 

Heather ReneeWhat is your genre?  

Blue Eyed Sun: Folk Rock / Singer Songwriter.

Heather Renee:  If you could open for any band, who would it be and why?  

Blue Eyed SunDead or Alive, it would be the Beatles of course.  Living, it would be Bob Dylan.

Heather ReneeHow long have you been doing music? 

Blue Eyed Sun:  Brennan, I’ve been playing music live since I was ten.  I really love live performance and connecting with an audience.  Its my favorite part of all of it. 

Heather ReneeDoes it run in the family or are the band members anomalies?  



Blue Eyed Sun:  Some of both.  My dad is in a classic rock cover band that plays corporate events, private parties and casino gigs.  We grew up singing in church being from Arkansas. Kenneth’s mom was a singer and his dad was a musician he taught himself piano and guitar in 7th grade. 

Heather ReneeWhat is Blue Eyed Sun's measure of success.  Define "Making it in the music industry" for the band.  

Blue Eyed SunI think we’ve had a nice start toward success.  We have an album that we’re proud of and we’ve had a small successful tour this past summer, lots of bands will never experience that.  Making it for us would be, being successful enough to eat and pay the rent and do what we love.  If we could pay our living expenses and write and perform our own material for our living, that would be success.

Heather ReneeDo you feel that the music industry today is better or worse for musicians trying to make it?  

Blue Eyed SunNeither.  Its just going through more growing pains.  Its better in that more people have access to our music, but its worse that we work so hard and pay for our recordings only to have them streamed for free.

Heather ReneeWhat are the short term 1-2 year goals for the band?  

Blue Eyed SunGet more training and education.  We are all on a bit of a hiatus now at college and post grad programs.

Heather ReneeWhere do you see the band in 10 years?  Headlining the pyramid at Glastonbury or playing a set of exclusively progressive rock on the moon.  Who knows that’s part of the fun of this is the mystery…

Heather ReneeWhat is the craziest thing the band has experienced either at a show or in the studio? 

Blue Eyed SunGetting to record in Nashville.  I got to play a 1975 Epiphone Casino that was hand made for George Harrison (Epiphone made 12 of them for George) and given to one of our producer friends, Rob Feaster, in the same room at Quad Studios where Neil Young recorded Heart of Gold in the early 1970s.  Now that’s crazy…crazy fun.

Heather ReneeWhat is the most challenging part about your goal to "make it in the music industry."  

Blue Eyed SunEasy one here…being taken seriously in spite of our age.  We don’t write bubble gum pop.  Our lyrics and melodies are thoughtful and complex but simple enough for anyone to enjoy and find meaning.

Heather Renee: If you could get three wishes to help your band, what would they be?  

Blue Eyed SunFind great management who believed in us and wants to partner with us, get signed to a major label, and start booking Scandinavia and Europe.  

...Or that someone wise and knowledgable would appear out of nowhere and become our mentor/producer, and help us produce some great recordings as well as give us insightful advice. That someone would give us magical instruments that would fill us with inspiration every time we picked them up and allow us to write some crazy catchy songs, and that 4 years down the road we'd find out that they aren't actually magical and the magic was inside of us the whole time.

Heather ReneeWhat advice would you give to other musicians pursuing this dream?  

Blue Eyed Sun: Use the internet to your advantage. That's where the music industry exists now, find a creative way to engage people. And also, don't forget the importance of revising songs. You can take a crappy song, spend several days woodshedding it and polishing it and turn it into something good. You can do the same with good songs and make them great songs.

Keep creating art, always.  Don’t be afraid of hard work (practice, practice, practice).  My dad always reminds me of this phrase.. "Overnight success takes about 15 years."

Heather Renee:  Where can we buy your ablum?

Blue Eyed Sun:   Our album, Tidal Sound is available for sale on iTunes.

Heather Renee:  Where can we find out more about you?