Albums : Switchfoot : Fading West
Albums : Switchfoot : Fading West
Listen To Switchfoot : Fading West
Who Is Switchfoot?
As they enter their 17th year as a band, Switchfoot has achieved a level of success that brothers Jon and Tim Foreman and their high-school friend Chad Butler never anticipated when forming the band in San Diego in 1996. The SoCal natives have sold 5.5 million copies worldwide of their eight studio albums (including their 2003 double-platinum breakthrough The Beautiful Letdown and 2009’s Grammy Award-winning Hello Hurricane), racked up a string of Alternative radio hit singles (“Meant to Live,” “Dare You To Move,” “Mess of Me,” “The Sound (John M. Perkins’ Blues),” “Dark Horses,” and “Afterlife”), performed sold-out world tours (visiting five continents in the past year alone), raised hundreds of thousands of dollars to aid homeless kids in their community through their own Bro-Am Foundation, and earned themselves a global fan base devoted to Switchfoot’s emotionally intelligent and uplifting brand of alternative rock.
So when it came time to write the songs that would make up their ninth studio album, the members of Switchfoot were looking for a challenge. “The point became, ‘What are we going to do to push ourselves,’” Jon recalls. “Could we take ourselves somewhere we’d never been before, yet achieve a feeling of comfort at the same time? How do we go to a new place that feels like home?”
Switchfoot found the answers on the road and in the waves. A year ago, while touring in support of their 2011 album Vice Verses, the long-time surfers set out in search of inspiration by visiting several of their favorite surf breaks around the world. “The idea was to surf, write songs, play music, and see what ideas came,” says Tim. The band traveled to Jeffreys Bay and Crayfish Factory in South Africa, Bronte Beach in Australia, Raglan in New Zealand, and Uluwatu in Bali, and chronicled their physical and emotional journey, as well as their unshakeable brotherly bond, in Fading West — a documentary film that features stunning locales, revealing interviews, jubilant live footage, and glimpses of Switchfoot at home and in their studio in San Diego. Like Rattle and Hum meets Endless Summer, the movie is part travelogue, part surf film, and part behind-the-scenes look at the making of the band’s upcoming new album, which will also be entitled Fading West.
Not surprisingly, the album, which finds Switchfoot returning to the melodic pop sensibility of their early years, was inspired by the sea, which Jon describes as a perfect metaphor for simultaneously experiencing comfort and danger. “You’re comfortable out there, but it’s the unknown,” he says. “You can paddle out in South Africa and it’s exactly like home and nothing like home all at once. That’s what I’m hoping our record feels like — trying to find peace in dangerous places.”
There’s a memorable scene in Fading West where the band members are paddling out at Uluwatu with their friend, surf champ Rob Machado. Jon says he had a major epiphany that day. “As I sat on my board in the Indian Ocean, I realized that these waves could eventually make it back to my home of San Diego thousands of miles away,” he says. “That rhythm and pulse was really grounding and inspiring on so many levels. It made me grasp the dichotomy between the pull of the road and the pull toward getting back home. It’s like we had to leave home to find home. For a long time, home was a place of failure because it meant that we didn’t have any shows,” Jon adds. “When you drop out of college in your early ’20s and all your friends are getting jobs and you’re the guy who lives with his parents, it’s way better to be on the road. Only recently did I feel like home was a place where I could feel comfortable and content.”
Switchfoot traces its roots to the beaches of San Diego when the Foremans and Butler connected as surfers (Jerome Fontamillas joined in September 2000 and Drew Shirley in 2005). Though they competed in national surf championships on weekends, their real bond came from a common love of music. They decided to form a band, chose the name Switchfoot (a surfing term), put themselves through months of sweaty rehearsals in their garage, and then hit the road. After just 20 gigs, Switchfoot signed with re:Think Records and released three albums, The Legend of Chin (1997), New Way To Be Human (1999), and the gold-certified Learning to Breathe (2000), before signing with Columbia Records, which released their fourth album, The Beautiful Letdown, on its Red/Ink subsidiary, upping the band to Columbia proper after the album sold more than a million copies. (It eventually sold 2.6 million.) The band released two more albums with Sony, 2005’s Nothing Is Sound, which debuted at No. 3 on the Billboard album chart, and 2006’s Oh! Gravity., which climbed to No. 1 on the iTunes Album chart, before going their separate ways with the company.
Itching for creative freedom, Switchfoot financed the building of its own studio where they recorded their seventh album, the hard-hitting Hello Hurricane, and its groove-oriented follow-up Vice Verses, both of which they released on their own lowercase people records via Atlantic Records. (Jon also released four solo EPs and a debut album with Fiction Family, his side project with Nickel Creek’s Sean Watkins.)
Along the way, Switchfoot have been steadfast in their commitment to giving back by supporting various humanitarian causes, such as DATA, the ONE Campaign, Habitat for Humanity, Invisible Children, and To Write Love on Her Arms. In 2005, the band held its first annual Bro-Am, a day-long event that includes a surf contest, live concert on the beach, charity auction, and after-party at local tavern Belly Up. Now in its ninth year, the Bro-Am has raised more than $715,000 to benefit local children's charities that aid at-risk, homeless, and street kids in San Diego. “We’ve got a really young fan base and some of the kids who come to our shows are homeless,” Tim says. “You’d never know it, but they are. I think we’ve always been drawn to the underdog, and I can’t think of a bigger underdog than a kid who’s fighting for his life at the age of 12.”
Switchfoot premiered Fading West on opening night of the 2013 Summer X-Games in August. (The band have been very active in the action sports world, having performed at numerous NFL and MLB post-game events, as well as at the US Open of Surfing in 2011.) They will spend the fall on a unique tour, with the film serving as the opening act to a more intimate, stripped down performance from the band. The film will be released digitally towards the end of 2013, with the new album seeing it’s release on January 14, 2014.
We weren’t chasing anything in particular when we started the band,” Jon says in the film. “We simply had these songs that we loved playing. It’s that joy that fueled us and it’s that joy that has kept us going and brought us to here.”
Fading West Review
In the eighteen years of being a band, now with nine studio albums, two live albums, a motion picture released, and even a Grammy win, Switchfoot has never stopped being the clan of down-to-earth Christian surfer dudes who knew how to take success and not let it break them. After the success of Hello Hurricane, Switchfoot slipped over into the realm of experimentation, releasing the ever-so dark and honest Vice Verses, garnering moderate success, but leaving the band at a crossroads of where to go next. In an effort to collectively refresh the adrenaline of the band, they sojourned across the globe and created Fading West, the record accompanying a surf/rock/tour documentary, which is their ninth album to date, and the youngest and most energetic one in their catalog.
With its prominent world-music influence, paired up with Swtchfoot’s signature rhythm section, this record reveals a strong return to the band’s lively and upbeat energy that we heard on The Beautiful Letdown and even at times on Hello Hurricane. Opener “Love Alone Is Worth The Fight” is essentially an anthem of the band’s Eighteen year-long journey: "We find what we're made of / Through the open door / Is it fear you're afraid of? / What are you waiting for? / Love alone is worth the fight." Musically, this song exemplifies the recurring indie-pop anthem sound, with its vocal “ohs”, driving guitars, and synth atop a strong and consistent rhythm section – this formula makes up the large majority of the album. Another stand-out track is “All Or Nothing At All” which boasts some of Jon Foreman’s strongest vocals on the record, as well as instrumentation that wouldn’t be out of place next to Arcade Fire or Grouplove. While the record has its danceable moments (“Let It Out”), as well as its heavier jams (“Say It Like You Mean It”), Fading West isn’t necessarily a dance nor a rock album; overall, all the individual tracks coalesce into exactly what the band told us to expect: a world-music surfing soundtrack that is undoubtedly Switchfoot (And with that said, it is important to note that Fading West makes most sense as an album in context with the film of the same name).
Additionally – and expectedly – these surf-pop anthems become a template for Jon Foreman’s spiritual and philosophical insights. The infectious chorus of “Saltwater Heart” sings: "When I’m on your shore again / I can feel the ocean / I can feel your open arms / Like pure emotion / I’m finally free again." In this vein, a common lyrical theme for Foreman is a continuation of Vice Verse’s “Restless”, water trying to find its way home to the ocean as a metaphor for mankind seeking to find its own ocean. Almost every song on the album has at least one line that clings to that metaphor, and as a result the songs bind together very well conceptually.
The downside to this album, however, is that in comparison with their previous work, there is a sense of unfulfillment in the music. What is missing is the riff-based rock songs that made the band famous - the album has no "Meant to Live" or "Mess of Me"; nor is there really a memorable bridge or a power-ballad that Switchfoot has done so well. There are no screams, no (noteworthy) guitar solos, no groundbreaking sounds. What Fading West lacks is dynamics - the music is consistently safe and uninspiring.
When looking objectively at the album as a whole, it is clear that Fading West is a step in a new direction for Switchfoot. Like any other album they have released post-Beautiful-Letdown, the band is honest with where they are at, and they invite the listener along for the ride - like it or not. It is obvious that the band has been doing a lot of surfing, as well as a lot of reflection of who they are as musicians, husbands, fathers, and as a band; the record is a product of their self-realizations and stands as a mission statement of the band thematically. Thus, Fading West is not a finish line, but a new beginning – and although the title Fading West may refer to something setting and coming to a close, never before have they seemed so replenished and revived.
Contact Switchfoot
Website | Twitter | Facebook | Google+ | YouTube
Contact Sputnikmusic
Website | Twitter | Facebook
Sources : Switchfoot Photo | Listen To Fading West | Switchfoot Biography | Fading West Review
Purchase : iTunes | Amazon | Walmart
Listen To Switchfoot : Fading West
Who Is Switchfoot?
As they enter their 17th year as a band, Switchfoot has achieved a level of success that brothers Jon and Tim Foreman and their high-school friend Chad Butler never anticipated when forming the band in San Diego in 1996. The SoCal natives have sold 5.5 million copies worldwide of their eight studio albums (including their 2003 double-platinum breakthrough The Beautiful Letdown and 2009’s Grammy Award-winning Hello Hurricane), racked up a string of Alternative radio hit singles (“Meant to Live,” “Dare You To Move,” “Mess of Me,” “The Sound (John M. Perkins’ Blues),” “Dark Horses,” and “Afterlife”), performed sold-out world tours (visiting five continents in the past year alone), raised hundreds of thousands of dollars to aid homeless kids in their community through their own Bro-Am Foundation, and earned themselves a global fan base devoted to Switchfoot’s emotionally intelligent and uplifting brand of alternative rock.
So when it came time to write the songs that would make up their ninth studio album, the members of Switchfoot were looking for a challenge. “The point became, ‘What are we going to do to push ourselves,’” Jon recalls. “Could we take ourselves somewhere we’d never been before, yet achieve a feeling of comfort at the same time? How do we go to a new place that feels like home?”
Switchfoot found the answers on the road and in the waves. A year ago, while touring in support of their 2011 album Vice Verses, the long-time surfers set out in search of inspiration by visiting several of their favorite surf breaks around the world. “The idea was to surf, write songs, play music, and see what ideas came,” says Tim. The band traveled to Jeffreys Bay and Crayfish Factory in South Africa, Bronte Beach in Australia, Raglan in New Zealand, and Uluwatu in Bali, and chronicled their physical and emotional journey, as well as their unshakeable brotherly bond, in Fading West — a documentary film that features stunning locales, revealing interviews, jubilant live footage, and glimpses of Switchfoot at home and in their studio in San Diego. Like Rattle and Hum meets Endless Summer, the movie is part travelogue, part surf film, and part behind-the-scenes look at the making of the band’s upcoming new album, which will also be entitled Fading West.
Not surprisingly, the album, which finds Switchfoot returning to the melodic pop sensibility of their early years, was inspired by the sea, which Jon describes as a perfect metaphor for simultaneously experiencing comfort and danger. “You’re comfortable out there, but it’s the unknown,” he says. “You can paddle out in South Africa and it’s exactly like home and nothing like home all at once. That’s what I’m hoping our record feels like — trying to find peace in dangerous places.”
There’s a memorable scene in Fading West where the band members are paddling out at Uluwatu with their friend, surf champ Rob Machado. Jon says he had a major epiphany that day. “As I sat on my board in the Indian Ocean, I realized that these waves could eventually make it back to my home of San Diego thousands of miles away,” he says. “That rhythm and pulse was really grounding and inspiring on so many levels. It made me grasp the dichotomy between the pull of the road and the pull toward getting back home. It’s like we had to leave home to find home. For a long time, home was a place of failure because it meant that we didn’t have any shows,” Jon adds. “When you drop out of college in your early ’20s and all your friends are getting jobs and you’re the guy who lives with his parents, it’s way better to be on the road. Only recently did I feel like home was a place where I could feel comfortable and content.”
Switchfoot traces its roots to the beaches of San Diego when the Foremans and Butler connected as surfers (Jerome Fontamillas joined in September 2000 and Drew Shirley in 2005). Though they competed in national surf championships on weekends, their real bond came from a common love of music. They decided to form a band, chose the name Switchfoot (a surfing term), put themselves through months of sweaty rehearsals in their garage, and then hit the road. After just 20 gigs, Switchfoot signed with re:Think Records and released three albums, The Legend of Chin (1997), New Way To Be Human (1999), and the gold-certified Learning to Breathe (2000), before signing with Columbia Records, which released their fourth album, The Beautiful Letdown, on its Red/Ink subsidiary, upping the band to Columbia proper after the album sold more than a million copies. (It eventually sold 2.6 million.) The band released two more albums with Sony, 2005’s Nothing Is Sound, which debuted at No. 3 on the Billboard album chart, and 2006’s Oh! Gravity., which climbed to No. 1 on the iTunes Album chart, before going their separate ways with the company.
Itching for creative freedom, Switchfoot financed the building of its own studio where they recorded their seventh album, the hard-hitting Hello Hurricane, and its groove-oriented follow-up Vice Verses, both of which they released on their own lowercase people records via Atlantic Records. (Jon also released four solo EPs and a debut album with Fiction Family, his side project with Nickel Creek’s Sean Watkins.)
Along the way, Switchfoot have been steadfast in their commitment to giving back by supporting various humanitarian causes, such as DATA, the ONE Campaign, Habitat for Humanity, Invisible Children, and To Write Love on Her Arms. In 2005, the band held its first annual Bro-Am, a day-long event that includes a surf contest, live concert on the beach, charity auction, and after-party at local tavern Belly Up. Now in its ninth year, the Bro-Am has raised more than $715,000 to benefit local children's charities that aid at-risk, homeless, and street kids in San Diego. “We’ve got a really young fan base and some of the kids who come to our shows are homeless,” Tim says. “You’d never know it, but they are. I think we’ve always been drawn to the underdog, and I can’t think of a bigger underdog than a kid who’s fighting for his life at the age of 12.”
Switchfoot premiered Fading West on opening night of the 2013 Summer X-Games in August. (The band have been very active in the action sports world, having performed at numerous NFL and MLB post-game events, as well as at the US Open of Surfing in 2011.) They will spend the fall on a unique tour, with the film serving as the opening act to a more intimate, stripped down performance from the band. The film will be released digitally towards the end of 2013, with the new album seeing it’s release on January 14, 2014.
We weren’t chasing anything in particular when we started the band,” Jon says in the film. “We simply had these songs that we loved playing. It’s that joy that fueled us and it’s that joy that has kept us going and brought us to here.”
Fading West Review
In the eighteen years of being a band, now with nine studio albums, two live albums, a motion picture released, and even a Grammy win, Switchfoot has never stopped being the clan of down-to-earth Christian surfer dudes who knew how to take success and not let it break them. After the success of Hello Hurricane, Switchfoot slipped over into the realm of experimentation, releasing the ever-so dark and honest Vice Verses, garnering moderate success, but leaving the band at a crossroads of where to go next. In an effort to collectively refresh the adrenaline of the band, they sojourned across the globe and created Fading West, the record accompanying a surf/rock/tour documentary, which is their ninth album to date, and the youngest and most energetic one in their catalog.
With its prominent world-music influence, paired up with Swtchfoot’s signature rhythm section, this record reveals a strong return to the band’s lively and upbeat energy that we heard on The Beautiful Letdown and even at times on Hello Hurricane. Opener “Love Alone Is Worth The Fight” is essentially an anthem of the band’s Eighteen year-long journey: "We find what we're made of / Through the open door / Is it fear you're afraid of? / What are you waiting for? / Love alone is worth the fight." Musically, this song exemplifies the recurring indie-pop anthem sound, with its vocal “ohs”, driving guitars, and synth atop a strong and consistent rhythm section – this formula makes up the large majority of the album. Another stand-out track is “All Or Nothing At All” which boasts some of Jon Foreman’s strongest vocals on the record, as well as instrumentation that wouldn’t be out of place next to Arcade Fire or Grouplove. While the record has its danceable moments (“Let It Out”), as well as its heavier jams (“Say It Like You Mean It”), Fading West isn’t necessarily a dance nor a rock album; overall, all the individual tracks coalesce into exactly what the band told us to expect: a world-music surfing soundtrack that is undoubtedly Switchfoot (And with that said, it is important to note that Fading West makes most sense as an album in context with the film of the same name).
Additionally – and expectedly – these surf-pop anthems become a template for Jon Foreman’s spiritual and philosophical insights. The infectious chorus of “Saltwater Heart” sings: "When I’m on your shore again / I can feel the ocean / I can feel your open arms / Like pure emotion / I’m finally free again." In this vein, a common lyrical theme for Foreman is a continuation of Vice Verse’s “Restless”, water trying to find its way home to the ocean as a metaphor for mankind seeking to find its own ocean. Almost every song on the album has at least one line that clings to that metaphor, and as a result the songs bind together very well conceptually.
The downside to this album, however, is that in comparison with their previous work, there is a sense of unfulfillment in the music. What is missing is the riff-based rock songs that made the band famous - the album has no "Meant to Live" or "Mess of Me"; nor is there really a memorable bridge or a power-ballad that Switchfoot has done so well. There are no screams, no (noteworthy) guitar solos, no groundbreaking sounds. What Fading West lacks is dynamics - the music is consistently safe and uninspiring.
When looking objectively at the album as a whole, it is clear that Fading West is a step in a new direction for Switchfoot. Like any other album they have released post-Beautiful-Letdown, the band is honest with where they are at, and they invite the listener along for the ride - like it or not. It is obvious that the band has been doing a lot of surfing, as well as a lot of reflection of who they are as musicians, husbands, fathers, and as a band; the record is a product of their self-realizations and stands as a mission statement of the band thematically. Thus, Fading West is not a finish line, but a new beginning – and although the title Fading West may refer to something setting and coming to a close, never before have they seemed so replenished and revived.
Contact Switchfoot
Website | Twitter | Facebook | Google+ | YouTube
Contact Sputnikmusic
Website | Twitter | Facebook
Sources : Switchfoot Photo | Listen To Fading West | Switchfoot Biography | Fading West Review
Purchase : iTunes | Amazon | Walmart
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