ON SALE NOW!
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Songbyrd Presents
Happy Abandon with Bleach Bones and Path
Friday December 15, 2017
D: 7:00 // S: 8:00 PM
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Happy Abandon trade in high drama. From soaring songs to string-laden production, the aforementioned light and fog that accent the mood and set the scenery for their live shows, to the way Vance, Ellis and Waits talk about their music – with determined passion, vivid detail and engrossing vigor – they bring with them a sense that much more is at stake than just writing and playing songs. There is something deeper at play here, something far more important.
Forming in early 2015, the members of Happy Abandon were hardly strangers. Operating in the same circles that are the cogs of any small, tightly knit scene, Vance, Ellis and Waits had known each other for years before as students at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Within a few weeks of first playing together, they worked their way onto bills at local shows and by year’s end Happy Abandon was hitting the road, touring through nearly every state east of Texas and Canada. It was at SXSW that the band initially hooked up with North Carolina music denizen and future label head Stephen Judge, playing multiple slots at his annual SXSW party. From there a relationship was born that would eventually lead to Judge’s offering Happy Abandon a recording contract via his freshly rebranded label Schoolkids Records.
The band continued to write, to tour and to fine-tune their performances when, in late 2016, they suffered the unexpected loss of three dear friends in three separate incidences.
In dealing with these heartbreaking premature deaths, in concert with the trials and travails of everyday life, the songs began to pour out en masse, with subjects ranging from personal loss to abandonment to homelessness – which singer Peter Vance suffered for a stint – to heartbreak to the indomitable power of will.
It was through this lens that the band began to see this new set of songs on a grander perspective and began to realize that the wider concept behind their music was the idea that a person needs to feel life, to experience it in every facet, to feel as many emotions as possible, to completely immerse themselves in whatever emotion they may be experiencing and how, in an effort to protect ourselves, we all tend to hide behind masks, or more appropriately, some kind of facepaint.
