Hello there! Caz the drummer here. (Or simply 'Caz' as most people call me). This very first post on Our Street finds us near the end of 2009, quite busy trying to figure out how one goes about successfully (whatever that means) self-releasing an album without ending up selling all the copies to our mums because no one else knows we've even done one. Among other things.
We (Marina, Ali, Bryn and Caz) started playing together as Sparrow sometime in the early months of this year, when Marina and Ali decided to take some of the songs they had been writing together and see if they could make them work with a full band. Ali knew Bryn and I separately through various musician type projects in the past - playing in bands, recording albums, drinking tea etc. So he decided to bring us in for rhythm section duties. We were both up for it, and have exchanged many a rhythm section high 5 since.
We got an album's worth of material together pretty quickly and spent 2009 rehearsing said material, gigging it a little around Brighton and recording it so that we could show it off to our friends. Now we are faced with the challenge that all bands come to at this point, which is figuring out how to get the music out to more people so that they might want to come to our gigs and listen to our songs while jogging and things like that. I don't think any of us have any aspirations for the band that are much grander than simply to progress continually - which I think means playing more gigs, writing more songs and we hope gradually reaching a wider audience.
For now we've decided to do a very small release of our album ourselves in March 2010, and do a mixture of selling it at gigs and sending copies out for reviews etc. Right now that means we're spending a lot of time telling people about the release and sending demos out to anyone that might want to then tell more people about the release! We think that's a good start at least, and we'll keep you posted on how all that's going.
The March release also means we're working hard on artwork, tracklistings and other things on the creative side, while resisting using up too much rehearsal time on writing new songs for Album Number Two (which we hope will happen!). So hopefully there will be some more art and music based posts to come in the near future too.
That'll probably do for a quick introduction to the band and where we're at. Lots of post-Christmas/pre-NYE cheer to you. Caz xx
Ps, if you've stumbled upon this blog before stumbling upon our actual music then don't forget to check it out! You can hear a few tracks from the forthcoming album at www.myspace.com/sparrowbrighton.
