Bonnaroo 2005
Signal Path released its last two albums for free, which has definitely helped put the band back on the map. Did you always plan to make those recordings available for free?
We released our first free album in 2003 or 2004. We called it The Nashville Sessions. It was an EP we had just put out for free on our website. But, we didn’t really know how to release the album and it certainly wasn’t something where we intentionally [said], “Well, we’re going to release this album for free and then we’re going to push this free album.” We didn’t have the money to press 1000 copies of it, so we gave it away. It wasn’t something that we really promoted. At that time, I think it circulated but it didn’t become this online phenomenon that free music is now.
For Single Path, releasing free music was a way of putting the music before the marketing in a way. We want to see how the music is received. And if we’re going to get out there and try to start playing shows and promote this, we want to see if people going to be responsive to it. We’re proud of the music, and we love what we’re doing but we’re testing it. We released Clash in July of 2009 and when that virally started to spread we were like, “Ok, so this makes a lot of sense.” For the first time in Signal Path’s history kids were coming to shows and yelling out and requesting songs and asking about the record. The record became its own entity and had its own identity that people identified with. With our previous releases, we sold them through our website and we sold them through our shows, but it was all show driven. Some of the songs on the album we would never play live, and if you asked us to, I don’t even know if we could play them exactly like they were on the album. So with these free releases it allowed us to put the music before marketing and let the people identify with the music and interpret it; it definitely has driven a buzz of the project, for sure. Releasing free music over these last two releases has pretty much been the lifeblood of the reemergence of Signal Path back into the scene.
Did you play any of the songs off Imaginary Lines during these mini-tours?
I think some of the tracks we had been travelling and playing. There’s a couple of tracks on the album, “Apcha” and “Cree,” which have been part of our live set for a while. But pretty much all of the rest of the songs are produced in the studio, basically starting in June.
The music industry has obviously changed in the past few years. Would you ever consider signing to a label at this point—especially a likeminded label like SCI Fidelity?
I think it all comes down to the people involved. This is something that we’ve created over the past ten years. So jumping on a label is something that definitely intrigues us, and I think that one of the main reasons to get on a label now isn’t so much the money that they’re giving you to record. It would be more for the marketing side of stuff. So it would really come down to the vision that the label has for the project. It’s more about personnel than it is about the label itself, for us. We want to feel like we’re in a partnership because we’re not having a problem releasing music ourselves. Having people involved with different ideas and a bigger vision that can help us with that.
As you said, I think the artist has taken control back of how to present their music in the last few years because you can create music at home and be your own producer.
Yeah, absolutely. But another thing that’s cool, we’ve had the benefit of a lot of downloads of our records. And we had an e-mail address for people that download our albums, so we were able to reach our fans for the first time, directly, in the history of the project. Back in the day, when we were touring, we relied on sign-up sheets at our merch table to compile e-mail addresses of fans. But now, we’re able to give away our music for free in exchange for an e-mail address, and all that is we ask you for permission to contact you in the future about music and Signal Path related stuff. In exchange, we’ll give you our music for free. That is something that bands have been very responsive to, and that relationship between us and our direct fan base is an incredible relationship that we’re just trying to figure out how to use in a mutually beneficial way that our fans are excited about; that we’re excited about. It’s a pretty incredible thing.
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