Eat Your Heart OutAmbitious young rock acts starting out and establishing themselves in the 2010s face a truly daunting task. Of course, there are the very early stages where all the internal stuff has to be done, finding a complete set of reliable members, choosing a name, writing enough quality songs to form a full live set, finding gigs, recording your stuff and much more. Then when you get to that stage, there is the big, wide, merciless music industry to attempt to crack into, trying to gain some attention for your act among the heaving glut of other acts trying to do the same, and so on and so forth. Actually making a halfway decent living from your art must seem a highly attractive but completely unattainable goal.
Two young acts, from opposite sides of the Pacific, who are in this position right now are Eat Your Heart Out from Newcastle and Movements from Orange County, California. Movements' frontman Patrick Miranda recently guest-spotted on Mind Games, the new EP from Eat Your Heart Out, contributing to the rousing song Conscience and its dramatic supporting video, and both he and Eat Your Heart Out frontwoman Caitlin Henry joined us recently to talk about the struggles facing young rock bands today, the creation of the song and video and many other things besides.
"For me personally, that is absolutely terrifying," Henry admits, "but at the same time, it's pretty much all I've ever wanted to do. It's really the only career goal I've ever had, so I don't know what it feels like to have something else, so it's always what I've set myself on the path to do. So I just sort of deal with the anxieties that come with it, cross my fingers and work as hard as I can and hope for the best.
"Maybe I'll never find out, but I don't know if I'll ever get to a point where you're just like 'yes, this is it, I've made it!', or if you always feel like you're just working and working towards it. Hopefully I get to find out one day."
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Miranda agrees, and adds his own slant on the topic, citing the well-documented woes of the music industry as yet another major hurdle for young bands to jump over. "There's always a degree of doubt that's in your mind," he says. "The music industry can be so unpredictable, and with how much album sales are on the downward slope and with streaming becoming a more popular way of listening to music, it's scary, it really is.
"There is always minimal possibility that you're going to be able to support yourself, and obviously that is the dream, but it's just one of the hardest things to accomplish. But honestly, I'm enjoying the ride and I wouldn't trade it for anything."
On the surface, it may seem like somewhat of a left of centre collaboration, with the two bands being literally half a planet away from each other and quite distinct in a stylistic sense. But one listen to Conscience and a viewing of its video and it all makes a world of sense. For the two young singers, making it happen was a very natural thing, with the bands sharing a record label being just the start.
"We obviously knew Pat through Fearless [Records] and we'd been talking about wanting to get him on a song," Henry explains. "We'd heard that he was interested, so we were like, 'We need to make this happen.' Initially we didn't know which song we wanted him to be a part of, but then we found this part in Conscience that we thought would be perfect, so we asked him, he said yes and we got him on it."
Miranda points to another mutual industry connection that helped make it happen. "Immediately when I heard Conscience I thought 'this is the song!'," he recalls. "It was actually really easy how it all worked out. Zach [Tuch], the guy who produced the new Eat Your Heart Out EP is a very close friend of ours, and helped work on our record as well, so it was really convenient. I got to be there during the mixing process, so it all worked out great."
