BASSIST Rachel Bolan has suggested about five singers have got to an advanced stage of the vetting process as they search for a replacement for Erik Gronwall.
The band has partnered with music retailer Sweetwater in launching a global search, with Bolan telling the No Treble podcast that the search was progressing slowly.
“What we do is we’ll get four or five people through these submissions, and, all right, send them the clean tracks, and they’ll sing on top of them and send them back, or put a video out or whatever they do,” said Bolan.
“And it’s, like, ‘Wow, they’re really good. They sound great. Let’s get a few of them together, get them into New Jersey.’ We’ll get in a room over the course of a week or whatever, and we will just see if it works, see if it works in a live situation.
“Having a studio and singing in a studio is great, but you know how it is. It’s, like, you could get it so perfect and it might not transfer live.”
Explaining why the band saw no urgency, he said: “We have the luxury of time, which is the best possible thing, because last time we got a new singer, we were in the middle of doing an album. The time before that, we had a tour booked.
“And when things don’t work out, they just don’t work out. Sometimes you see it coming from way down the road, and sometimes you get blindsided. So, the point we’re at now, we’re doing this campaign with Sweetwater, and we’ve had over…
“We’ve watched — there’s probably more; we gotta get caught up — but we’ve watched 300 submissions. There’s been about 20 outside of the Sweetwater campaign, a situation where friends in bands will be like, ‘We got a guy.’ Sometimes they’ll show us and it’s, like, ‘Is that what you really think of this band?'”
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