AWOLNATION was never supposed to have this moment. When Aaron Bruno started the project, it served as an outlet for him to make music he liked. Then, a funny thing happened. He created a groundbreaking album that is celebrating its tenth anniversary today.
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Bruno joined RADIO.COM’s Megan Holiday for a RADIO.COM LIVE Check In and told the fascinating origin story of AWOLNATION as their debut album Megalithic Symphony celebrates its tenth anniversary on March 15.
Before going into the details, Bruno shared how his band’s beginnings can serve as a lesson of encouragement for everyone to keep pushing forward, especially in difficult times. “I definitely have been told and experienced a lot of failure, really mostly failure, and it wasn’t looking good at the time,” he said. “Because of that and some of the emotions I was feeling, I was able to pour that into my music. Like all of us, or anyone who’s watching this, music tends to be our therapy.”
“I just pressed forward with that mentality with zero expectations, sort of abandoned all hope of a ‘career’ in music and just wanted to create music that I love and I’m such a fan of music,” Bruno added. “I figured, ‘well if I can make music that I want to listen to and that makes me feel something, maybe my friends will think it doesn’t suck.’”
For Bruno, those expectations stemmed from experiences he had with past bands. “In previous bands, we thought we were going to be selling out Dodger Stadium five nights in a row and [had] all those sort of hilarious, unrealistic expectations,” he said.
“When those bands hadn’t worked out and we all broke up, I decided to go my own way and forge a path to be able to at least love what I was doing in hopes that I could play for my friends and family. Then it kind of took off, it’s not that simple obviously, but here we are ten years later talking about an album that still seems pretty relevant and I’m pretty proud of that.”
“I’ll never know why it resonated or how it all happened.”
That's how Bruno responded when Holiday asked him why he thought AWOLNATION’s hit single “Sail” resonated so well with people. With the benefit of time, Bruno has been able to reflect on the massively popular song.
“I’ll just say that it’s like all those stories you hear on Behind The Music (laughs), ‘oh it was the last song we wrote, we didn’t want to put on the record and that’s the one that took off.’” He said.
“For ‘Sail’ it was one of the earlier songs I wrote, but I just thought it was a song [where] I finally created that groove and beat I had always been searching for and also had the intensity vocally and some sort of sensitivity melodically at the same time. I guess that was a good example of having no rules and no boundaries, and no expectations and no one telling me what to do. It worked out and it still blows me away every day.”
“I would say the coolest thing about that song and the experience is that I don’t hate it,” he added with a laugh. “You know a lot of peoples hit songs become monotonous and annoying to play, but it’s always been a fairly easy song to sing and play. I still really like the song and that’s one of the bonuses of it.”
As part of the tenth anniversary celebrations of AWOLNATION’s debut album Megalithic Symphony, a special tenth anniversary deluxe album is now available. One of the exciting features of the reissue is the fact Bruno will be including previously unreleased material from that era.
“There’s a couple songs that I recorded around that time, whether it was before the album came out or I was on that journey that I liked a lot and still liked a lot, but didn’t seem to fit the actual album,” he says. One of the songs included is “Cannibals,” a track that he’s played live a handful of times throughout the years.
Given the opportunity to celebrate AWOLNATION’s debut and that period of time, Bruno felt it was appropriate to share the track. “If I weren’t to release the song today, I don’t know when I would,” he said.
Bruno also revealed AWOLNATION is cooking up not one, but two brand new albums. “Once I realized the touring cycle of Angel Miners & The Lightning Riders had been erased from time, I just thought ‘well we’re all suffering in different ways so I’m not going to feel bad about it. I’m just going to move forward and express myself and go through the emotions just like everybody else in my own way,’” he says.
“I took on two different projects,” Bruno added. “I have two albums that will come out. One will come out this year and another one will come out probably at the end of this year. One may be filled with cover songs and special guest features and the other one will be AWOLNATION’s fifth album. That should come out probably sometime before the end of the year, at least one song.”
What spurred this burst of creativity? Something Bruno has always fallen back on. “When the world feels like it’s on fire I always turn to music."
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