Up-and-coming musicians know all about sacrificing for their
careers. And the guys in The Bradbury Press, who gave up their day
jobs in order to do their current tour, are no exception.
“We gain a lot of influence just from being on the
road,” said the most recent addition to the band, drummer
Greg Garcia. “One new song, “˜Dive,’ is about
taking a chance, which is what many of us are doing by going on
this tour. Many of us quit our jobs, and while that’s scary
since we’ll be broke when we get back from touring, we
don’t care as much because we’re doing something we
really want to do.”
The Bradbury Press will be playing at The Cooperage on April 11
and the Knitting Factory in Hollywood on April 12. The shows are
part of the band’s tour to promote its second album,
“The Front.”
“With this new album, we didn’t totally reinvent our
sound, but we feel that we definitely grew,” Garcia said.
“We feel that this new album just plain rocks more, and that
it’s more of a fair representation of what we’re really
like live than our last album was.”
Named after a print shop in Seattle that the band thought had a
cool logo and classical sounding name, The Bradbury Press formed in
1999 with Darren Golden handling vocals, Dave Brewer on lead guitar
and Travis Hartman on bass.
After the release of its debut album, “Hanscom,” in
2002, the band added Garcia on drums, giving way to the
band’s present lineup and the recording of “The
Front.”
Naturally, The Bradbury Press has its most active and loyal fans
in its hometown of Seattle. Lately, however, with the help of
touring and the Internet, The Bradbury Press’ fanbase has
begun to expand in rather eclectic ways.
The band benefits from sites like CDBaby, where people can
search for artists and styles they’re interested in and are
then referred to similar artists.
Additionally, The Bradbury Press has its own MySpace page, which
Garcia says has been a boon to its touring efforts.
“There are times that we’ll have shows in places
where we don’t feel we have a big presence, and there will be
something like 20 people there who heard of us from MySpace alone,
plus we’ve met a lot of the bands we’re playing with on
there,” Garcia said.
But it seems new fans aren’t just limited to random parts
of the United States.
“Recently, we got an e-mail from a kid from Brazil,”
Garcia said. “He told us a friend of his got a copy of our
album in the (United) States and that he really liked our music and
that his band had actually begun to cover our songs.”
In addition to building a fanbase, Garcia feels that both The
Bradbury Press and up-and-coming artists in general have a lot to
gain from adept use of the Internet.
“Things like file sharing can be bad for established
artists, but when you’re just getting started, they can be
very valuable in getting people to hear your music,” Garcia
said. “When you’re just trying to get noticed, as long
as people hear your music, you don’t care as much how
they’re going about doing so.”