YOYO Docs - Project 14 – Capturing Sensations Promoting the first single.
Our first official single ”Goin’ Out” was released on iTunes, amazon, Spotify and more in January and we just realized that we’d better start sending some emails to promote it. We started out with the few stations that we’ve had contact with before and some of them wanted us to send them the song over. We also sent the message to the producers that we keep posted on our progress. There was one reply that made us very excited, a radio guy in North Carolina said he’d like to promote the song and make an interview with us. The show was called “Unplugged and totally uncut”, so we immediately started thinking of what songs in our catalogue are acoustic. We had made a piano version of IRL during fall 2013 and decided to polish that one up a bit. We also wrote new songs and made some of them unplugged in order to have something to choose from if the radio guy would like more than the single released. Then we started to plan a joint session in the studio up north later this spring – it simply had to work out this year.
Don’t give up!
Time passes! We kept writing new songs for this year’s compilation and came up with a title that we liked: “Capturing Sensations”. The title can be interpreted to mean catching feelings or getting hold of fantastic stuff – we think both interpretations fits our work! One Yo spent a week in New York to do some promotion work with our business cards and some CD’s and have fun. It had been a while since we heard from the “unplugged” radio guy and so we had almost given up hope on that one. We sent him an email wondering if we could do the interview whilst visiting New York. To our surprise he got back to us directly and put us in touch with his producer to make the arrangements. Yo had a great time in New York visiting fun places and some radio stations that got a CD, placed business cards here and there, but something happened in connection with the interview and that opportunity slipped away. We couldn’t help but thinking that maybe they were just pulling our leg.
Going up the country
It was not until the end of March that we realized that the title of that radio show “unplugged” didn’t refer to the music played, but rather the spoken content and so there was no need for acoustic songs – we had a good laugh at that. Then we decided to have a last try to make that interview (even though they might just be laughing at us) and yes, they were still interested. We scheduled it to when we would be together in the studio recording in April. We filled our external hard drives with all the new songs and all the old ones as well. Now, for the first time since we started out a couple of years back, we were going to get real drums on our tracks. Hopefully that would make them even a little better than before. We started out with food and drink, visiting a guitar museum and then Yo’s dad took us to a music store to get the right size drumsticks and some rhythm instruments and make sure we would have everything we need. We discussed how to take this project further with him and decided that we would create a Facebook page and a new, more conventional website. The studio was the perfect playground for us and we recorded drums like madmen the first two days. We had a long conversation with the radio guy – it was fun and somewhat overwhelming. Afterwards we talked about this crazy project of ours and listened to unusual favorite songs like “The Worry Song” by Joe Walsh and discovered that we both had a soft spot for Dave Edmunds and then we fell asleep. The following days we focused on writing new songs together rather than recording drum tracks and we also took some time jamming.
Keep going!
We set up a Facebook page as planned (Yes, it’s connected to this page – search and find!) and a new website yoyoxno.com. We contacted the producers with the link to the interview to see if that might change things. Then we made a lyrics video for the published single “Goin’ Out” using footage from the Empire State Building in New York. One Yo’s brother was going to spend some weeks in the New York area and we elaborated the business card thing by publishing pictures of them on Facebook. In that way someone that checks our Facebook page can get a clue where to find the music. We just think that if we’re on this social media thing we have to do something fun with it - right? We also started posting links to our songs and made a bunch of pictures so that we have something to post every now and then.
Single #2
Summer was spent having good days, filming stuff for coming lyric videos and spreading the link of the YouTube lyrics video of “Goin’ Out”. We decided to release a second single and chose the song “Pride” that has been our web guy’s favorite since 2012 and IRL, since it was already on YouTube. Some radio stations requested our first single and liked our posts and we started to get a grip on this Facebook- thing. One station even put our first single in rotation during this summer! As usual we made several final mix versions of the songs to be published and tried to be keen on everything. We made the lyrics video for “Pride” with footage from a road trip from Memphis to somewhere in Michigan. We contacted everyone that had shown an interest in our work prior to the release and the unplugged radio guy wanted another interview. This time we’d be in separate parts of the country and so we had to learn how to three-way the call. We also got response from a producer, the guy we were supposed to meet in Paris the year before, and he wanted to have a Skype meeting about a promo deal. We were all excited but unfortunately this would cost us a lot of money and so we decided to continue on our own. We made the interview prior to the release of the new single and tried to build up for it on Facebook as well.
Don’t hurry – be happy!
One Yo went to UK and placed business cards there, the other Yo had a friend going to China that would place some cards there. The small, but lovely, group of people listening to our songs gave the new single thumbs up and smileys and more radio stations responded as well. We were mixing songs for our website and this years collection “Capturing Sensations” when we got the offer to release yet another single for free. We made the final mixes on “Kicks” and “Walking on Sunshine” and uploaded the new single. We set the release date to February next year, since we thought it to be too soon to let out another single this year. Then, out of the blue, when we finally thought we had a grip on publishing things on Facebook, getting the new website in order, we were challenged to write Christmas songs. We were in the middle of a fun thing making Yoyo stickers and promoting the second single and now we were supposed to write Xmas music as well. The sticker project was put aside, but we got some great contributions from a painter before that. The single was finished in a matter of weeks. A third interview with our favorite radio guy was scheduled and we had another wonderful conversation. Now, we had to reach out to all the others as well, and promote this through our new channels, and one Yo was scheduled for a trip to Barcelona. It all worked out pretty well after all. When you’re having fun and you are happy, things go fast – so, don’t hurry be happy.
Planning Christmas and next year.
The Christmas single got some airtime and we emailed a lot of stations, and we posted the link to iTunes on Facebook pages. This went on for some time and we got more offers to release stuff for free, with a deadline. We mixed and uploaded one more single, to be released in April, and chose “Little did I” from our first compilation “4groups R out” and “Leaving everything behind” from this years “Capturing Sensations”. We had sent a demo version of the first song to our favorite radio guy in April or May and he had used it as background in every interview, so we assumed it might be his favorite song. We are always keen on what songs of ours other people care for. (If you stumble on our business card and hear something that you like that we have not yet published - don’t hesitate to drop us a line.) We made lyric videos for the Christmas single and published the first one in November and posted the link on Facebook pages all over the world. We tried to fit in mixing more songs for an album to be released next summer (yes – another thing for free) and started writing this chapter of our chronicle. The album was reduced to another single that will be out in May 2015 if everything turns out as planned. We had been asked to provide something harder by the scouts on Spinnup (Universal), that have listened to all our releases and hence we chose the song “Good Game” from “Capturing Sensations” and “Two way street” from “What Goes Down Must Come Up” that we hope will do the trick. This will be all for now, we send our thanks to everyone out there supporting our music project and hope you will enjoy the music yet to come.