Last year, the Akron indie folk band Bethesda initiated a Kickstarter campaign to fund the making of its new album Reunion. While it generated enough revenue to fund the making to the CD, it didn’t have enough money to put the album out on vinyl. But band members didn’t give up on issuing the disc on vinyl. They decided to save whatever money they made from gigs and put that toward the vinyl release.
“We saved our money from every gig between May and now,” says singer-guitarist Eric Ling. “Because we’re doing vinyl, we wanted to go all out and we put it on red vinyl. It’s a lot money and there are a lot of expenses along the way. When you see a band that’s put out their album on vinyl, you can tell that they care.”
Tomorrow at Musica in Akron, the band will play a “Vinyl Release” show on with The David Mayfield Parade and The Angie Haze Project. The show will put an exclamation mark on what has already been a fantastic year. The band played the Bunberry Music Festival in Cincinnati earlier this year and plans to return to Cincinnati to play the upcoming Midpoint Music Festival. It's also slated to play the College Music Journal conference next month.
“There’s no rest for us,” Ling says. “We’re thrilled to play music.”
At this point, the band is poised for a label deal of some sorts, though Ling says that the group isn’t necessarily going to take that route.
“We aren’t actively pursuing labels per se,” he says. “That’s lost some of the allure and they still take all the rights to your music. We’re just building a team of people around us who don’t take over all the rights of our music. We want to pay up front and not owe all of our future album sales to them. It gives us flexibility. If the right deal came along, we would take a long look at because it would give that instant credibility with that label’s fan base.”
