Night Visions

I feel like the bands that enter the business like it’s a business are the ones who have the biggest careers. Maroon 5, The Killers, OneRepublic and Imagine Dragons all seem to have a grand design from the start, producing debut albums that can’t fail. They study each other’s success, and I in turn study theirs. I’ve been singing the same two karaoke songs for years, “Radioactive” and “Demons”, and guess what – wherever I am, some drunk girl wants to duet with me. For those few moments, I am indistinguishable from a rockstar. Night Visions has a sing along sound that is huge without being intimidating. We can all clap along with our Moms to this awesome non offensive sound. If you are a band making songs that can move a crowd of any age or soundtrack a commercial for any car, you are going to make millions of dollars, no question about it.

As hard as it looks, it’s about ten times that. When Night Visions came out, I was taking on a single pitch at 120 feet. The cliff wall was completely vertical. This was the music that got me to the belay point, after a lot of trial and error. “And you tell me to hold on” states the lyrics to “Bleeding Out”, which I adopted for my various endeavors. The song motivated me on several levels, from the swift claps that sharpened my focus, coupled with the soothing, almost meditative way the melody flows, perfect for those moments where I needed to rest and think before my next move. The track itself is one of martyrdom, and proved to be very effective in the end, because to climb higher and higher, you have to be willing to put it all on the line. Now I’m doing multi-pitch climbing, 4 albums later.