INTERVIEW: Earshot is coming to a town near you, and they’re bringing new songs
Image courtesy of Earshot / Provided by O’Donnell Media Group with permission.
Hard rockers Earshot — featuring Wil Martin on vocals and guitar, Aaron Fink on guitar, John Novak on bass, and Michael Sylvia on drums — is back in a big way. The guys are gearing up for an extensive fall tour with Thousand Years Wide and MCHNZ, which kicks off Sept. 28 in Costa Mesa, California. Audience members should expect many of the songs that Earshot has become famous for, tunes like “Get Away” and “Headstrong,” but they’ll also bring a few yet-unreleased tracks from a forthcoming album.
“We’ve been trying to work on a new album since 2019, and then, of course, the pandemic hit,” Martin said in a recent phone interview. “We all live in different places. I live in L.A. Aaron and John live in Pennsylvania. Mike, our drummer, lives in Florida, so we’re all kind of hamstrung from being able to get together and do that. So we were just finally able to do that last week, and we went out to Florida to our drummer Mike’s house that we turned into a studio that sits right on the bay on the coast of Florida, and worked on our studio tans. The stuff came out really great. It sounds really awesome. We’ve got a little more work to do on it yet, but we’ve got all the drums and all the bass guitar tracks and a lot of the vocals done. So we’re about halfway through it, and it sounds great.”
The goal is for Earshot to finish the recording process by November or December, and then the band will release the full-length album in early spring 2024. Martin is not an over-hyper (in fact, he hates any hype in the music industry), but he did say that this new album is the best one yet. “I think we are going to play probably two of the new songs during the set to get people’s feedback on it and see what people think,” Martin said about the set list plans for the new tour. “We’re just so excited with all of these songs, but these two songs in particular we’re really, really excited to play live.”
Over the years, Earshot has opened for many bands and musical acts, including Shinedown, Hoobastank and Stone Temple Pilots, among others, but it has been more than a decade since they’ve actively gone out and headlined a tour.
“I know that we’ve done a one-off show here and there, but we haven’t really done anything extensive for a good while,” he said. “This tour is sort of a reacquainting with our fans and our new fans that started following us. We have a ton of new fans that have been following us, a lot of younger fans that have discovered us. The purpose of this tour is to get reacquainted with our old fans, meet our new fans, reestablish ourselves with our promoter friends that we’ve worked with over the years that are super-excited to have us, also to knock the cobwebs out a little bit.”
Once those cobwebs are gone, there will be no stopping Earshot. Martin even said that in 2024, the plan is to tour behind the 20th anniversary of the band’s second album, appropriately titled Two.
“So there’s going to be a lot of things that we’re looking to do with this tour, a lot of multipurpose things that we’re looking to do,” the vocalist said. “Obviously we have a couple new members. We have Mike on drums. We have John on bass. We have Aaron that has partnered with me and come into the fold. A lot of his fans from his days in Breaking Benjamin will be excited to see him. All around, a lot of things are happening with this tour that we’re looking to do.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Click here for more information on Earshot, including their upcoming concert dates.
