Tuesday, November 29, 2011

Media of the Week - Miracles

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I’ve spent the past nine months cleaning up my music collection.

I’m still not quite finished.

It’s amazing to me some of the stuff you find nestled away; the hidden gems and great tunes you either forgot you had, or had never knew were there in the first place.

Recently I discovered a band that only had one single.

Happy Endings – Miracle.

Who was this group? I wondered. I checked my collection and found nothing else in my music arsenal. I decided to turn to the World Wide Web for answers.

In the interest of time I won’t take you through the entire process, suffice it to say that it took some digging…quite a bit, actually, to find out who these guys were and what happened to them; however, I wanted to know more. How could a group with such a great song just vanish? Were they simply a one hit wonder? Perhaps something like the Oneders in that Tom Hanks movie from a dozen or so years ago?

Well, there’s no need for you to wonder either…

In a nutshell: Happy Endings was a Springfield-based group that performed for a total of about nine years. They toured, shared bills with such bands like The All-American Rejects and Sum 41, had a bit of a following around 2005-ish, had the workings for a record deal, and then they suddenly vanished.

Odd.

I did a little more digging and discovered that the band had changed their name around 2006 to The Whitest Light after some type of dispute with their record label. At this point they decided to rework the songs on their planned album, Losing Generation, and possibly release an EP of acoustic tracks. The name change was to help them get a fresh start and not have any type of negativity following them.

And so...they changed it.

It was shortly thereafter that they did end up releasing a five song EP, but it seems that they didn’t go much further than that.

The Whitest Noise seems to have died.

I searched a little more and found stagnant MySpace and Facebook pages. And then I found a message from the band, dated back to October 2008:

The 4 of us have decided to put an end to the band you know as happyendings/The Whitest Light—it is bittersweet for all of us- but the time has come-

The music industry has been good to us at times- yet more inherently bad- we have had ups and downs- the ups were sky high and the downs were way down in the pit- 
we have all grown through these times in our lives, music, and relationships. Us as a band have come to an agreement that there is no light at the end of the tunnel for our band - the music industry is not based on commitment, quality of music, and hard work anymore- and through this we have chosen to stop sacrificing our time and families and relationships to peruse a once awesome endeavor called happyendings.

Wow.

So, just why did I share all of this with you today?

To tell you the truth, I’m not sure.

I guess I wanted you to be aware that behind this song there used to be a band, a band that tried to make it but that was swallowed up after 9 or so years in the industry.

Their song, “Miracle,” however, does live on even now after the group is finished. And this one, my friends is a gem, it’s keeper. This song is amazingly awesome and one I’m glad I found in my cleaning…I guess you could say, the simple fact that I found it was nothing short of a miracle.


*If you’d like to get the original of “Miracle” by Happy Endings, you may do so here. If you’d like to listen to any songs off of their EP as The Whitest Light (including an acoustic version of “Miracle,”) you can find those here and download them as well.

You’re welcome.

5 comments:

Unknown said...

I never heard of them.
Thanks for expanding my horizons tonight! : )

Laura said...

I'd never heard of them before now (so thanks! :)), but as to the general sentiment of their last message, it is exactly why I haven't listened to radio in years.

Jamie said...

GREAT stuff! Thank you for sharing!

Karen M. Peterson said...

I've never heard of them and never heard of this song, but I love it!

Thanks for sharing the story about what happened to them. I don't often think about what becomes of bands that don't make it. Really interesting.

Anonymous said...

Stumbled on this post. Pretty cool. The drummer has a new band that is just starting out. It's called Little Rosco. Please consider checking it out. They are making a record right now - although this one is being made in a basement and not a major label studio.

http://www.facebook.com/Littlerosco

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