New Band: Dear Ellinore

After a couple years off since The Bryan Daisley Band, I'm finally back and ready to perform original rock again. Introducing Dear Ellinore, 

I'm excited, but to get to this point I had to learn some important -and sometimes painful- lessons along the way: 

Lesson 1: Use a band name.

Using my real name for a band was very uncomfortable, at least for me, to the point where I eventually delisted all my songs on streaming services since they won't allow you to change your artist name after publishing. This time the band has its own name and the two of us are separate things. We'll publish songs again when they're ready.

Lesson 2:  Keep it simple. 

With only three musicians, one of whom who is an old friend, there's much less to manage. Scheduling is easy, communication is easy, decisions are easy. Burnout is real when managing a band!

Lesson 3: Keep it focused. 

Dear Ellinore was created to be a one-set band that shares bills with other bands. It's an outlet for performing my past, present and future original works with songs on rotation. That's it! 

Lesson 4: Have fun.

What this means for me is playing great music that I'm proud of, having fun with bandmates and with friends/family at shows and enjoying the moment. It also means declining to do a lot of stuff that bands are supposed to do.

But this still won't be easy...

Dear Ellinore features Jaymes Dunlap on bass and harmony vocals, Jack Parker on drums, and me on guitar and lead vocal. If you know me and Jack, you know how unusual this is. Jack on...drums??? I'm a solo guitarist?? During all my years making music with Jack, he's been the lead guitar and I've been rhythm and occasional soloist. Most of my rock songs were written specifically for Jack to take a solo, and not all the songs and breaks play to my strengths in that regard. In some cases we'll update arrangements and in other cases I'll just need to stretch! This is going to push me to improve in a big way.

The other big challenge is it's just three pieces with only one harmony vocal. I wrote my rock songs for two guitars for two and sometimes three harmony vocalists, so we're having to rethink some parts. It makes each musician quite vulnerable. 

If the band goes well I'll write future songs for it--and those will be designed for a three-piece arrangement and should work better for that reason. But first...let's just see if this works. 

Now check out the band page!  

You can also find the band on instagram.