Artist of the Day | THE DEADNOTES
ARTIST OF THE DAY
15.09.2021
THE DEADNOTES
LOCATION
Freiburg, Germany
CURRENT MEMBERS
Darius Lohmüller (vocals, guitar)
Jakob Walheim (bass, vocals)
With the current pandemic, the state of the music and touring industry has dramatically changed. Where were you when everything was brought to a halt?
We were about 10 days into our album release tour for our record ‘Courage‘ that was released in early 2020. It was the day of our release show in our hometown Freiburg when everything fell apart. The days before were already starting to go down badly bit by bit but on this day it all crashed and in the morning, we had just jumped into the van, we received a call from the venue that it won’t go on as planned anymore and everything needs to be put on hold for an indefinite time.
The whole travel party was stranded at my mum‘s house and it felt so unreal and strange sitting in the beautiful garden with my best friends, the sun was shining, while the whole world out there was in absolute chaos.
How has that affected your plans for the coming year? Did you have a tour planned, upcoming album release?
We had to cut our album release tour short and then went from one postponement to another which meant that we nearly lost all our income last year as a band where live makes up about 80% of our income. We ended up spending a lot more time in the rehearsal room than originally planned and expected. We had more time to reflect on our own progress and songwriting, approach things differently and let go of old patterns that we felt we‘ve been stuck in for too long. So if there was one good thing for us during this time is that now we feel fresher than ever, super motivated, excited and confident about our upcoming releases. I can‘t wait to play them live and dive right into many exciting and new projects we have lined up with The Deadnotes.
What have you been doing to fill/make the most of your new-found free time at home? How are you supporting your mental health through all of this?
At the beginning it was very tough and I felt completely lost and burned out. It was like we were all thrown back to zero at exactly the same moment as our album release was about to peak after years and years of hard work we put into it‘. We lost our founding band member Yannic in late 2020 who decided to leave the band, but we somehow tried to keep our heads up with our new single ‚Easy Summer‘ (which is finally out) being our anchor and reminder of better times. Just like so many others we went from one huge bummer to another and at some point I just thought this is now becoming my new routine. It helped so much to have had the best people around me and especially my band mate Jakob who let me crash in his flat in Cologne for over 30 days last year while I was freaking out in my hometown. At some point things got so bleak that I just sat there and couldn‘t stop laughing because all this felt so unreal. It was so relieving to just sit there and let it all out and counter all the tragedy with humour.
As things are reopening & restrictions are lifting have you booked any new gigs? Tours? Etc? If your region is still under restriction, how are dealing with the Covid third wave?
We‘re really excited to play our first real shows in almost one and a half years again. We have loads of shows coming up this summer in Germany, Switzerland and Austria and really hope we can continue with our ‚Courage‘ Tour 2021 in December all over Europe. We can‘t wait!
Do you have a message for everyone at home reading this?
„Chin up, it‘s an easy summer!“ ;)
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