Elbow room is a local Cleveland-based band that has been making some waves in the scene. They just released a new single to promote an EP coming out in the near future. I had the chance to sit down with Spencer and Ben, the writers, guitarists, and singers for the band, to discuss the latest single release; Sinking.
Jumping right in! Tell me about the new single being released. What’s it called first of all?
Ben: The song is called ‘Sinking.’ I care about it so much. Actually I was telling my drummer last night, we were on our way back from Columbus and we were talking about lyrics and the meaning of the songs. Obviously they know some, but I know the grand scope of all of it. I write most of the lyrics for the band at this point. It’s kind of the concept for the entire EP that we’re going for. The EP is going to be called ‘Constant Mistake.’ It has to do with continually falling over and over again. Specifically with relationships that you’re not supposed to be in, but whether it’s because you’re persistent or trying to make things work, kind of like those things where something somewhere is trying to tell you “this isn’t right.” And all these things in life and all of these events happen that shape negative consequences. You know, people start becoming distant from you, you start losing relationships you once had with other people, just bad stuff. ‘Sinking’ specifically is about falling, not to be cheesy, but falling deeper and deeper. Nothingness. Everyone is abandoning you except for the one person that you’re trying to remain loyal to but almost to a fault. That’s basically what the song encompasses. It’s going to be the lead track off of the EP. I think it does a very good job of summarizing the entire structure of the EP. That’s basically that. And every other song on the EP basically follows the same route.
Spencer: Yeah it’s like a thematic progression. It’s nothing too obvious but you’ll hear a lyric slipped in somewhere that you think probably could have belonged in a song earlier on the record. I know it’s just an EP and EP’s are always written so just sort of showcase what you have as a band, but we wanted to write it like it was a record. It means something from start to finish. We wanted all of the songs to connect to each other. Listening to the EP is cool, but listening in order from Track One through Five is something better. It’s cool; for me ‘Sinking’ is a song that lyrically was led by Ben. I remember one day we had a practice and I left early to go to work; by the end of the day Ben just had a couple ideas and him and our drummer Scott just ran with it. We then had the framework for what the lyrics are now in the song. I listened to it, I’ve been into poetry and writing people’s lyrics so I’m really interested in all of that, for 10 years at least. I heard it and it just paints such a good picture. You know what I mean? I didn’t see any need to change any of it. There were a couple times that Ben and myself sat down and I rearranged a couple of his lines, you flip some words, use synonyms here and there, maybe rewrite one or two lines, but for the most part he wrote everything.
In writing these songs, I’ve noticed as an artist and as someone that’s struggling with this, but when you write things, you’ll never know if it’s good or not until you put it out. When it comes to Ben though I know it’s good. I can hear it and I’m like “that’s amazing.” I’d love to hear it even if I wasn’t in the band. We were just all on the same thought process with this song. That’s what’s cool about it; from start to finish it paints a picture, as I said before. I don’t think it’s a bunch of random writing strung together, it’s a related, encompassing piece.
That’s amazing, well damn you guys are answering any question that I was going to ask haha. You talked about what the EP is about, but what was the inspiration behind the concept? It’s fairly heavy, not necessarily the song, but the subject matter. How did you decide on that direction?
Spencer: It’s just honest. I think on our first EP, we’re still really proud of where that got us, but I think there’s something about being in a band that’s never released music before that we felt there was a certain level of writing that we couldn’t really get to, you mainly just want people to check out the music. On this one we just got rid of that feeling and wrote songs that we’d listen to in the car. I wanted to write stuff from the bottom of my heart I actually liked. I didn’t want the reaction to be when you write like ‘oh people are going to love this.’ No, I wanted to be like ‘I love this part.’ As far as the subject and lyrics, I know all of us in the band, growing up music helped us out a lot. We just wanted to write something honest, that can help other people, instead of just….
Ben: Instead of just putting something catchy out there.
Spencer: Yeah exactly, we wanted it to mean something. We wanted it to mean a lot to all of us, and it does.
The new track is out now, do you have an estimated release date for the entire EP?
Spencer: I can’t give you a specific date, but I’d give a rough estimate of the end of this month, actually.
Ben: Yeah I’d say that’s a safe guess.
Spencer: I wouldn’t be surprised, however, if we had to push that to an early October release. It’s creeping up, definitely.
Ben: We’ve already done enough with the single haha. No honestly, we planned on having it out months ago, but had to push it back.
You mentioned to me at a show a while back that you sent it to someone to get mixed. Who did you collaborate with on the song?
Spencer: Yeah! That is actually done with; we had an interesting situation with that. It is what it is, things happen. The people we were working with, which we were really excited about, was a band we grew up listening to. It was super cool, and they did an amazing job for what they gave back to us, BUT we wanted the record out now… Like actually before now. It was supposed to be out in August. The single that’s out was supposed to be out in June… by the start of August we didn’t even have the finished single back. They overbooked a little. It’s cool though, it is what it is. I don’t have any hard feelings, I won’t go around telling people that they suck or anything like that. Maybe they just got into a tough situation, they were really busy. I won’t mention any names, but unfortunately we sent out a couple emails when we decided that we can’t work with them anymore. From that, though, a guy named Seth Henderson picked us up in about an hour after that. We sent him a long email about how stressed out we were, we had to drop out producer, is there any way they could help us out? Within an hour his wife, who runs the day to day operations, emailed us back and said “yep, we’d love to help you out.” Just like that they picked us up, so Seth Henderson did some of the Knuckle Puck records, as well as others. He’s very well respected. So yeah that’s who we went with.
Awesome! Thanks so much guys!
The new track called Sinking by Elbow Room can be found below:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v253Dp7RdGQ
