I like to think of music as the child of musicians. The sound you hear is completely and totally based on the parenting decisions the artists make. How much bass is offered or withheld, do you embellish this noise or that, and what messages should you be upfront about and what should you hold off on until they are older? There’s this complex mechanism of decisions and intuitions and like all artists, you got to respect the ones any artist makes. However, that doesn’t mean you have to agree with them.
You can find problems with this beat or lyric because it could throw off the entire character of the piece as a whole. Your personalities may not mesh, or when abandoning the metaphor, you just won’t like the music or artist. Not to say that it is not uncommon to hate some songs from artists you are already loyal to, but then you enter that realm of disappointment and corrections and that’s a whole different perspective to the metaphor we’ll get into another time.
For now, let’s talk about those times when the parents were perfect, created an angle of a child, there is nothing that you would change. And for me, those parents are SIR. A three-person band leaning over the cliff of popularity. They bring together soulful vocals with a lively beat, it is honestly like a warm blanket for your ear.
SIR’s music is not going to rock you to sleep or hype you up to the ceiling, you can listen to SIR when chilling with friends or dancing the night of questionable decisions away. You can take SIR’s music as something malleable. “One of our favorite things,” SIR shared, “is when a fan may take an entirely different meaning from a song. We want them to make it their own story and use it the way they want to.”
So how did SIR come to be? Sarah Angela, the lead singer, found herself in the Denver area after a series of concurrent touring where she met Kim O’Hara, the guitarist. After some persuasion and waiting for the perfect time, the two began to play together, intrigued by the sounds hey were producing and the potential from such. Luke Mehrens came last, he was more or less hunted for the drumming position. However, having all of the pieces doesn’t mean the puzzle just comes together, you need to find the best way they fit. And after a few transformations and changes, SIR found their image.
An image or sound that starts from “an idea,” SIR explained, “it could be one of Luke’s beats, or Kim’s guitar licks, or maybe SA already has a melody floating around in her head and then just starting to build the song together. We all feel so comfortable with each other, we try any idea that anyone has. We have found that we can’t force ourselves into a creative space, and that sometimes giving the writing time is exactly what it needs. In the end, we almost always agree on which direction we want a song to go.”
SIR, like many other artists, have been practicing their art form for years now, learning how to showcase their instrument while representing themselves, their sound. So when SIR releases new music, they have worked and thrown harmonies, beats, lyrics, and tones from one another until they reach the that harmony, that malleable sound we were discussing earlier. Which is why, that for me personally, November cannot come any sooner. SIR intends to not only be releasing their album at sometime in November (stay connected for the exact date) but will follow-up with a tour around the country.
After that, who knows where they’ll go or what they’ll make. As the potential for these musical parents are endless. “We have a lot of goals that we would like to hit,” SIR tells. “Playing the larger festivals (Coachella, Life is Beautiful, Hangout, Bonnoroo, etc.) and in Europe are some of our bigger ones. However, we’ve always wanted to stay true to ourselves and make the music we want to make. If we keep doing that we believe we’ll get to where we want to be.” But for now, “Touring the US and pushing our album is our immediate goal!”
Art in Your World 