Smile Empty Soul’s Sean Danielsen

“We love to play music – that is what it is all about.”

Smile Empty Soul is heading back to Club LA in Destin on Sunday October 20th.  We had a chance to catch up with Sean Danielsen to talk about Smiles Empty Soul’s new album ‘Chemicals’ the future of World Fire Brigade, and more.

“The album came out early last week, and right from the day it came out – our first day of the tour was the day the record came out – there were people there that knew our new songs and were familiar with it.  There has been a lot of excitement over it.  A lot of real positive feedback and energy – so we couldn’t really ask for a better reaction.”

Smile Empty Soul has taken more of the business side of their music into their own hands with their new album ‘Chemicals’.  “What we did was, we formed our own label with a long time friend of ours who is now a business partner.  Then we got distribution for our label through some other good friends of ours at Pavement Entertainment.  Before we knew it, we made our record.  We set up a team – a publicly team, a radio team, a marketing team – and launched the record and the single.”

Sean shared that Smile Empty Soul has been privileged to have what is often a rarity in the music world; creative control. Starting Two Disciples Entertainment is about having more say on the business side of things.

“We have been fortunate enough that the last whole bunch of records we’ve made, we made on our own, the way that we want to make them.  We’ve had control over the creative aspects of making our records for quite sometime now.  With this process, it has been cool because we are actually taking control of the business side of it, making the decisions as far as where to put the money for promotion and where to focus and really attack.  We are coming up with the actual game plans and it feels good to be in control of all of that.”

“We’ve been through this process so many times. This is our 6th album, so we’ve been through the process enough times that we feel pretty strongly that we know how we should unveil our record – push our record.  We our doing it our way and we feel confident about it.  Hopefully it pays off.”

Smile Empty Soul isn’t Sean’s only project.  “I’ve been busy working on a lot of music.  It has been great – it has been fun.  Smile put out ‘3’s’ last year, in early 2012.  My side project, World Fire Brigade put out a record last year as well.  And early this year I put out a solo EP called ‘Enjoy the Process’ and then this new Smile record, ‘Chemicals.’ just came out.”

So has does Sean decide if a song is fitting for his solo project or as a Smile Empty Soul song?  “The ones that I actually ended up doing for my solo EP ‘Enjoy the Process; – they were pretty delicate little songs.  They are very low key.  It is a totally different energy and vibe than what Smile Empty Soul typically does.  I had those songs and just knew that they would best represented by just barely being delicately strummed on the guitar with maybe minimal accompaniment.  It was pretty obvious.  There were a couple of songs that I’ve had in the past for one thing or the other and I end up changing over – so the lines can blur.  I just kind of let the songs dictate.”

So what of World Fire Brigade?  “With that it is more of a ‘who knows’ kind of thing.  The other singer in the band is Brett from Fuel.  We made the record in between Fuel stuff and Smile Empty Soul stuff, and at this point and time I have been so busy with Smile and Fuel just made a new record that is coming out early next year.  We are both going to be so busy touring with our own bands that there really isn’t going to be time to even think about.  There is differently the possibility of future music there, because it is great to make music with those guys – with Brett and Eddie Wohl.  It will just take a little bit of time, a little down time for all of us, and we could end up doing something again.”

Right now Sean’s focus is primarily on Smile Empty Soul, who will be releasing a new video in support of ‘Chemicals’ in the coming days.  

“We are on the road here all the way to December 15th so we have a lot of tour dates, hitting up a lot of different regions of the country.  Don’t miss the shows when we come through your town – because we are going to be out.”

Official website: http://www.smileemptysoul.com/
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