Storms a-brewin'

Hi everyone! Peter here.

First off, we just want to say how amazing it has been to see so many new listeners here in Polaris Rose land.  We’ve been receiving frequent messages from people just discovering our weird blend of pop and rock and we are so touched by the kind words.  It has been everyone’s outreach that has made us realize just how much we’ve been neglecting our social media presence and we promise we’re back on it!

We’ve been so neglectful, in fact, it’s been years since our last blog post.  A lot has happened since then.  We recorded a record called ‘The Waves Within’ with our dear friend and incredible producer, John Spiker.  That whole awesome experience would be a post in and of itself, but we’ll have to save that for another time.  In short, we had an awesome time writing and recording that record.  

Once it was all done, we had high hopes with the reception it would get… so we floated it (still unreleased) to our connections here in Los Angeles… and received a deafening amount of disinterest.  So we sort of held onto the record for the better part of a year, unsure how we wanted to release it.  We finally just sort of released it on a whim, without promoting it at all.  Honestly, looking back, it was a missed opportunity.  But we were feeling pretty disheartened.  Now, over a year later, we realize we shouldn’t have been and that we just weren’t reaching the right audience.  C’est la vie.  You live and learn.

Following the completion of ‘The Waves Within’, we sort of put Polaris Rose on pause and focused on other projects.  Maddie really focused on her love for business and helping artists and created her company Shark Attack.  We had been putting out our Polaris Rose records under that name for years, but Maddie took it to a new level and began helping other artists release their material and helping with marketing.  At the same time, I focused on writing/producing music for sync, while rebooting my old prog rock project: Johnny Stranger.   In fact, Maddie has been an essential member of Johnny Stranger: playing bass live, recorded vocals on the album, and has been managing us. Kind of like Polaris Rose but harder/darker rock.

These experiences took away a bit of momentum from Polaris Rose for about a year… but funny enough, we started seeing the best results while we were on hiatus.  People started reaching out.  We started getting our music placed in various syncs.  Our fanbase grew, slowly and steadily.  It was always awesome to see and it encouraged us to make plans for our future.

Oh!  And we got engaged.  Woot woot!

In 2019, we started tracking our new record, “A Quiet Storm”.  We really took our time and allowed ourselves to stretch out creatively.  The album just needs vocals now.  ‘A Quiet Storm’ is a bit of a story and follows ‘The Waves Within’ in (we think) a cool way.  We decided to self-produce, largely just for the sake of experimenting at home.  And we are writing the following record (album #5) already, with a sonic plan to keep telling this story over the course of many albums.  Because life is a story and we go through phases.  We want to tell a story that’s authentic to our journey and that challenges us creatively.

So thank you for reading!  We’re writing this from our apartment where we are spending quarantine living our best lives, recording a ton of music, and collaborating with creatives (of a variety of sorts) to celebrate this beautiful life until that final, tangerine sunset.

Until next time…

‘All energy flows according to whims of the great Magnet.  What a fool I was to defy him.”  - Hunter S. Thompson