It's been a curious thing to watch the reaction to Trovaire's first single "To Leave The Sea". When we wrote this piece of music, there was no band and no intention for Trovaire to be anything other than a creative exercise between old friends, resulting in some music for our new friends at the Stonefruit bar and restaurant to add to their playlist.
I wrote previously about the nature of nostalgia as a personal creative cue, and how this inspired what would become Trovaire, but even that was intended to top out as an album pressed to vinyl as a personal project. And yet here we are, with a release schedule for the singles, and the first of them having gone live last week.
What we didn't expect was that our previous adventures as musicians and producers would front-run the single release, and the community to pick up on that angle, and effectively drag us into the digital era. Which is to say, "To Leave The Sea" has been getting a lot more attention from a lot of interesting places in ways I didn't expect.
One fun little quirk of this modern era comes via an unexpected source. While Spotify might be the juggernaut it seems that Apple Music's artist features are incredibly useful. Particular due to the manner in which it tracks radio plays around the world, which we discovered after noticing the statistics for Shazam (which Apple acquired in 2018) being in the many hundreds after a few days.
Thinking this was a glitch, we dug into the data and saw that there were indeed organic spikes occurring around radio play in Turkey and Greece and France and Spain and... on it goes. There does seem to be something not fully clear in a general level of Shazams recorded, which I'm going to think of as "system noise" as part of some process I don't have visibility into, but there's no doubt that the outlier peaks are associated with radio plays. In nearly all cases we were able to track down the radio station, and even the DJ who played it, and have met some great people in the process.
It's not a stretch to say that this is another good example of a fundamental truth when it comes to anything that we put out into the world (wether that's a book about algorithms or an album full of trip-hop and jazz-inspired Samplephonica)... people want authenticity, connect via storytelling, and will make the effort to celebrate these things. While our days jumping around stages are long gone, and the real joy of this project was writing the album with Dennis (and working with great Australian legends like Tony Espie), it's a nice feeling to see not only a warm reception to the music so far, but to hear the stories of the people championing it for us, especially when those stories come from places far from our homes and cultural contexts.
- "To Leave The Sea" is available on all streaming services now, including Bandcamp, Spotify, and YouTube.
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