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Mainstream music has its benefits. It’s more pleasing to listen to and taps into the right emotions to keep you listening. It’s like mass production for the ears. It is meant only to please the listeners and about the hit songs that make money. Mainstream is so manufactured and formulated that performance barriers are formed, causing a musician’s inability to perform music in its purest form. Music in its purest is meant to be felt, not heard. Indie music does just that. It’s the complete opposite of mainstream. It’s all about the musicians and their passion for music. You don’t listen to indie bands because of their one song that sounds good. You listen to these bands for the musicians themselves. There’s something sublime about a person when they skillfully show a range of emotions, baring their souls as often as possible and to as many people as possible. It’s a form of expression, of conveying an emotion or an experience that words alone have no way of expressing.
The past year I have been discovering real musicians from the local community. These are musicians who are “undiscovered”. They play real music that one can feel, not just hear.
For me, the first of these bands is Behind Sapphire. I was astonished to see 2 young men skillfully perform such soulful melodies. I was first mesmerized from the moment Grant sang, and as the months went by, that mesmerization was held strong by Matt’s increasingly complex guitar. So when Matt asked me to take pictures for Behind Sapphire, the word ‘no’ instantly evaporated from my vocabulary. If I’d try to search for it, it would have been as if the word never existed.
About a month later with shooting and post finished, we have the picture you see above. This is picture 1 from a series I took for them. I’m excited for the release of the rest of the photos because I’ve never been so satisfied with a picture. When something’s perfect, there’s a tingling of excitement that’s generated from your heart and spreads out through to your extremeties that you just want to share this excitement with everyone.
I’m excited for Behind Sapphire’s future. The release of their first full album is coming up soon so you have to check them out and buy their album!
To check out Behind Sapphire’s music and their shows, visit: http://www.myspace.com/behindsapphire
