the point of this whole rich people thing is to explore awareness/self-awareness/consciousness. That’s it’s thats the whole thing. My life and vision is centered around spirituality. My basic concept of spirituality has nothing to do with organized religion or anything like it. It’s just simply about connection with myself and others.
Rich People’s whole thing has been built around an intention I wrote years before we were ever a band. “Nothing Original. Just personal arrangements of things seen and heard with the intention to provoke thought not people”.
”Nothing Original” is a good place to start because I wanted to remind myself right out of the gate that there was no point in trying to be unique or special or different because everything has always already been done and someone can always do it better than me. No matter what any of us defines as original in art or anything else it’s simply not true. We do however believe that the broader our base of influence the more likely we will be to achieve something that could be percieved as fresh and interesting, but we never get it twisted, there is “nothing original”.
”Just personal arrangements of things seen and heard” is pretty straight forward. If nothing we write is original then our aesthetic, imagery, and sound is just an eclectic arrangement of our life experience distilled into choice in media and choices in the way we organize and structure our music. The whole thing is intended to give a glance into the world thru our eyes. In this respect I’ve always been pleased with our ability to achieve this and we’re always really happy when people read between the lines and tell us what this all means to them and seeing how a lot of what people say lines up with what we intended to display.
Finally, “with the intention to provoke thought, not people” is also pretty simple but pretty loaded. I don’t believe in pushing my lifestyle or mentality on anyone, but I do believe that there are a lot of people out there influencing people and whether my mindset is “correct” or not I do believe that I’m a joyous person as a result of my beliefs and that I would love to be able to provoke someone into waking up to their full potential and recognizing the underlying same-ness in others. A professor I had at Camden County College use to say really controversial shit to make us think about stuff and when people got really upset with him he’d just say “hey I want to provoke thought, not people” and that always stuck with me. He and I share that we just want to show people another way that things could be viewed. Some fresh perspective on a stagnate topic.
Everybody has political opinions views and values and they’re all based on each individual’s experience in this world and relationship to themselves and other. Some people are blissfully unaware of all things beneath the surface level and some think they have everything figured out because we read some books and build up our “strong brains”. Bottom line to me is that we first acknowledge things on a knowledge/understanding level in our heads and then it can take a lot of time for those things to travel from that levels of acknowledgement on a mental level to the stage of internalization in our hearts or wherever you believe that is. We’ve been illustrating our personal journey from our heads to our hearts for three years now and it feels like we just broke even. We’ve written a new chapter that reflects this awakening and we will spend quiet time in a creative pool for the duration of April fine tuning the production to a place where we believe our vision can be properly articulated to you. The tools at our hands this time around are on a way new level and we couldn’t be more grateful to be able to sink into this project the way We are about to.
You’ve all told us how extensive our last EP felt and that was only really 5 songs with a whole lot of interludes. To show you this new chapter we doubled that and then some. We hope to give you a timeless piece that catches you quick and holds you for a long time so thats what we’re going to do. Thank you for always caring and if you want to help us get better financially prepared for this stuff please go over to our merch page and grab something from the last bit of our merch stock. You’ve already been ridiculously generous and we don’t take that shit for granted. Me, Ty, Blake, and Con have never made a dime off of this project and dump a lot of our personal time, money, and energy into it because we love doing it and we see it as part of our personal purpose in this life to entertain. Every dime we’ve gotten goes toward giving you a better experience next time so here we go. Special thanks to our friend Jenn Striker for helping us out financially with this recording too. Beautiful that anyone believes in anything enough to drive long distances to see 25 minutes of a band playing and then dig deep into personal finances to offer a monetary cushion for furthering that band. Thank you