A Good Fight, A New CD
The Set List
By Brian Washburn
One of Northwest Arkansas’s biggest rock bands is about to get even bigger. But this time they are about to blow up on a national level. With the help of an abundance of shows around the U.S. and a new album released last week, A Good Fight is all engines go and on full blast.
After the release of their debut album, “The City Could Be Ours By Morning,” the Fayetteville band — vocalist Eddie Love, guitarist Dustin Woods, bassist Jon Woods and drummer Sean Merriott — was on the verge of breaking out of the NWA bubble and hitting the big time. The band was featured in national music publications, and their music was played on MTV. Although “The City Could Be Ours By Morning” got heavy play around the area and featured modern-rock guitar riffs with Love’s distinct vocals, the band says their new album is going to be a step up.
“On ‘The City Could Be Ours By Morning,’ it was apparent to us that it wasn’t crisp, polished or as big as we wanted when we went back into the studio,” Dustin Woods said. “We really took our time with this record, involving many powerful moments of our lives that left us bare. This album is no five-dollar peep show. There was plenty of focus, passion and emotion that went into every second of it.”
The band has learned how to communicate better. As Woods describes it, they moved past the awkward moments of conversation they used to go through to get to a point.
Part of the band’s new focus came from a reminder to themselves to “have fun, strive for creative peak and still keep a resemblance to our sound,” Woods said.
“This album is really a carnival ride of influences and lyrical intent. We wrote a few songs that included local artists like Colin Hardaway, and Amyh Hart to bring out these different influences. It was just a natural progression to come close to the basics of why we all play in a band,” he said. “The best part of this album is trying to narrows each sound down to a certain band. Most critics love to do that.”
The band’s modern rock sound and Love’s vocals is what got the group noticed by the national media in the first place. Even though record companies seemed interested in the band for a while, the new album — tentatively self titled — is what the band is going to present to managers and labels.
“There are plenty of prospects out there that have been waiting on this new album to surface. We are still talking to those people and once these CDs get in our hands, the first ones out of the bunch are going straight out the door to them,” Woods said. “We are currently seeking management, booking and label support. Never really acting on these goals before, we will be pushing open as many doors as we can. It’s hard to get backing, especially when you are based in the fly-by states, but we will take it one day at a time like always, keeping our eyes and ears open to new possibilities.”
The new album features a mix of the same rock sound the band is known for, but as Woods says, it is bigger. Even though A Good Fight does slow it down on a few of the tracks, the harder, faster songs resemble old-school Green Day pop-punk with a strong mix of the current post-hardcore rock circulating on alternative radio stations. However, it’s Love’s vocals that catch the listeners’ attention and probably the attention and pocketbooks of record labels and band managers.
A Good Fight will be hitting the stage regionally with several big name acts. Though the album is the band’s number one priority, Wood said their first goal is to build a faithful audience.
“Without the fans that we have made so far, this new record wouldn’t have been possible. Each one of us wants to hit the road and live from stage to stage. There are several ways of doing that, and we are working out the best ways for us to do that now … . We are looking to fan this fire all the way to the coasts.”
Brian Washburn is the founder of DBW and is currently working on a way to revolutionize the music industry.
