For the uninitiated, I’m Mark Fulinara, press contact for Villains and singer/bassist for Beta Lion. Our band’s debut release was released two weeks ago on March 15, 2014. You can download “Written in Sand” on iTunes now.

Whew…

So the Written In Sand EP has officially been out for two weeks now! The Ides of March came and went, and fortunately nobody got stabbed. The response to the EP has been surprisingly amazing (at least from all 3 people who have listened to it).

I say that it’s surprising not only because people seem to dig it, but because the songs themselves seem to have new life breathed into them. It’s like cleaning out our old room and finding a musical diary of our 20’s. We’re excited to incorporate the songs from the EP back into our live set.

Even the people who worked on it found new things to enjoy about Written In Sand once it came out. Although each person’s role were absolutely vital, nobody who worked on it ever had the final product in their hands until the release. The guys who recorded it hadn’t heard the mixes, the guy who did the mix never heard the sound effects, the guy who did the sound effects never heard it mastered, the guy who did the album artwork hates our band (just kidding, Shane)… and so on and so forth.

It’s been a liberating experience to finally release something that we can say is our best work. So much so, we’re contemplating going straight into recording our full-length album and not booking any shows this year. Maybe after 10+ years of playing live shows together and not recording, back to back releases offsets that a bit?

But I doubt we can resist playing a show by the time summer rolls around. We get really antsy when we don’t play, so we’ll see what itch we need to scratch first. We’ve been given an open invitation to play a beach house in Rosarito whenever we want, so let us know if guys would be interested in that sort of thing, and we’ll make it happen!

If I had to take away the two most important lessons I’ve learned from this experience so far, they’d be:

1. People want to help you, so don’t get in their way! A big personal hurdle I had to overcome was getting over the fear of asking for help. What I sometimes mistake in myself as being a control freak is actually insecurity (if you can believe that) about whether people believe in us.
2. It feels really good to accomplish things. I know that people release music all the time, and if you’re Robert Pollard, you somehow release ten lifetime’s worth of music every year. But I have to tell you, the moment I hit the button to finalize the distribution of the EP, I felt like I was struck by lightning like in Highlander:

You can download Written in Sand on iTunes.