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When we last saw SafetySuit, the Nashville-based band was supporting 2008’s Life Left To Go and hit single “Stay,” whichshot to No. 1 onthevoter-
generated VH1 Top 20 Countdown. Spotlighted by VH1 as a band “You Oughta Know,” the grouptoured endlessly, playing over200
showsandsellingmore than 500,000 singles along the way.
They’re raising the stakes with THESE TIMES (Universal Republic), a scintillating hookfest of arena-ready rock
anthems,offeringunequivocalproofthatthe group has the goods to break wide open. Working with producers Howard Benson,Espionage (the New York-
b ...read more
When we last saw SafetySuit, the Nashville-based band was supporting 2008’s Life Left To Go and hit single “Stay,” whichshot to No. 1 onthevoter-
generated VH1 Top 20 Countdown. Spotlighted by VH1 as a band “You Oughta Know,” the grouptoured endlessly, playing over200
showsandsellingmore than 500,000 singles along the way.
They’re raising the stakes with THESE TIMES (Universal Republic), a scintillating hookfest of arena-ready rock
anthems,offeringunequivocalproofthatthe group has the goods to break wide open. Working with producers Howard Benson,Espionage (the New York-
basedNorwegianteam of EspenLindand Amund Bjørklund) and OneRepublic’s Ryan Tedder, thesefour skilled and remarkably self-assuredmusicians
havecooked up a strikinglymelodic,sharply drawn, viscerally immediatealbum filled with songs that stick in the head and heart.
For a young band, SafetySuit—singer/guitarist Doug Brown, drummer Tate Cunningham, bassist Jeremy Henshaw andguitarist DaveGarofolo—
hasaremarkable sense of songwriter savvy. “I do the writing,” Brown confirms, “but until we getDave, Jeremy and Tate’s headsaround
thesongs,they’rejust songs, they’re not SafetySuit songs. When they get hold ofthem, they become ours, and that’s what makes usspecial—thefour of
us, notjust oneguy.”
After cutting a half an album’s worth of material in Nashville last spring, the band had a shocking collective realization—neither
thesongnortheperformances, they concluded, met their lofty standards. “We’d been going nonstop for three years,and were burned out,”
saysBrown.“Wejust had toget away from it for a little bit, live life and gain some perspective. So weactually threw away the hard drivescontaining
thetracks we’d doneandstarted all over again.”
It didn’t take long for something fresh to manifest itself. Brown headed to New York to toss around ideas with the guys
fromEspionage,whowereridinghigh after co-writing and producing Train’s massive hit, “Hey Soul Sister.” “They played me areally
interestingchordprogression,” Doug recalls,“and Istarted spontaneously singing along with it, [sings] /Take me backto yesterday/I swear it on
yourlife.’They saw that I was in a zone, and theysaid,‘Go into this room and just be by yourselffor a while.’ A half hour later, I came out andsaid,‘What
if we came around at the end and went [sings],‘Wecan get aroundthis, get around this’?” They were like, ‘OK, let’s startrecording.’ Itwas really that
quick. If you catch an emotional momentinthewriting process, one sentence, one word, can fire off an entiresong in amatter of minutes. The best
songs practicallywrite themselves. It’s allabouttapping into a feeling and letting those emotions takeover.”
That song, “Get Around This,” set the bar sky-high for Brown and his bandmates, and in the following months
theychallengedthemselvestohitconsistently on the rarefied level Brown and Espionage had established. Brown went straight from New Yorkto Bahrain
toplay somemilitaryshowswith the band around the Fourth of July holiday last year, During that trip, totally out ofhis element, he wrote a slew
ofsongs,severalof which woundup on the album.
In September, he got together with a talented friend, OneRepublic’s Ryan Tedder, in the latter’s Colorado studio, whichyielded
thealbum’sleadsingle,“Let Go.” “I love that song,” says Doug, “because it’s such a departure for us. Ryan isobviously a very pop-mindedproducer, soI
said, ‘Let’shave funwith it; let’s do something that’s not the norm.’ It turned outgreat, and it kills live. It’s very interactive andpeople getit right away.”
A second get-together with Espionage resulted in “Things to Say,” while the band self-produced “Staring at It,” a fist-
pumperwithanincendiarychorus,and “Life in the Pain.” They cut five songs with Benson in L.A. this March: “Never Stop,” “OneTime,” “Believe,”
“Stranger(Say It)”andthe poignant“These Times,” which functions as the album’s thematic centerpiece.
“It was written out of a social need,” Brown says of this powerful, zeitgeist-capturing anthem. “As a band, we were talking alot aboutthesongs
ontherecord, and obviously, a lot of songs are gonna be about relationships, love and loss; that’s themost common emotionpeoplehave. But as
wewerelooking at the track, we felt like something was missing: what the pulseof the nation is right now. When westartedthinking and talking
aboutthat,‘These Times’ sprang out of that. The chorus goes,‘Sitting alone here in my bed/Waiting for an answerI don’tknow that I’ll get/I cannot
stand tolook inthe mirror I’m failing.’You just get tired of being on the short end of the stick; I think a lotofpeople feel that way. There’s a lot of people
outtherewhowould kill to just have a job so they can provide for their families. It’s tough,man—it’s tough for people, and that sucks.But we didn’t want
toleave itat that, so we wrote, ‘These times are hard/But they will pass,’ andthat’simportant to remindpeople of. We’ve made it out of bad times
before,andwe’ll make it out again.”
At the other extreme is the intensely personal “Never Stop,” an unguarded expression of romantic devotion. “The best
songsridethelinebetweenvulnerability and too much information, where you take it to the maximum amount of vulnerabilitybefore you start
weirdingpeopleout,”Brown asserts,punctuating the statement with a laugh. “I think ‘Never Stop’ does that,and I think any woman who’s withsomeone
theylove wants tohear him say,‘I’m never gonna get used to you.’”
Despite the fact that the band interacted with three producers, each possessing a particular approach, the album comesacross
asathoroughlyunifiedpiece of work. “What I loved about all of them is that they were all like, ‘Where do you want totake it and how can we helpyou
togetthere?’” Brownsays of Benson, Espionage and Tedder. “But you’ve gotta go into itknowing where you want it to go in the firstplace.”
This hard-hitting yet life-embracing album strikingly displays SafetySuit’s singular sound and style as well as the clarity of
theband’svision.Thatvisionwas sufficiently present on the first album and the hundreds of performances that followed it tobring them a
loyal,enthusiasticfanbase—one thatisabout to undergo exponential growth. SafetySuit is an extremelyconfident, distinctly American unit righton the
brink ofestablishing itself as abandthat matters.
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