Status: Updates every Sunday and Wednesday!

We're Not Listening

Wings - Violence Ladies, pt. 3

Annette Asbury wrote for an underground ‘zine for years before becoming a music journalist for more well-known magazines. She knew a thing or two about music before she even met her husband, and in some ways, she was better at knowing a good thing – she could listen from an objective point of view rather than just clouding a judgment with her own feelings, unlike her husband who tended to act on impulse. (Not to say his impulses weren’t any good.)

2004 went by and Violence Ladies spent their weekends playing gigs at parties and proving that girls rock just as much as guys do – and it was pretty common for them to get the crowd going more than their peers. Maybe it was the following they’d gained after crushing the competition at the talent show, but folks knew when they had a good thing.

That fall, in Winter and Brianna’s senior year and Hayden’s sophomore year, Brianna applied to go to Florida State University to study astrophysics. It was kind of a tentative thing. She didn’t really know if she was gonna go there, nobody really knew if she could end up juggling both a college education and a music career. (Spoiler alert: with the emergence of online classes, she did.)

Winter was willing to accept her best friend’s choice to continue her education, and she even considered applying to a few colleges in case the band didn’t work out. Brianna assured everybody that it was a backup plan…until she got accepted.

And, until they got an email from Annette Asbury, detailing how she’d stumbled upon their catchy-ass music and was desperate to know if they were willing to talk about a record deal.

They thought it was a joke at first. Who wouldn’t? It isn’t every day that a teen band gets an email from a punk legend’s legendary journalist wife, let alone one that seemed to be positive. Eventually, after flailing over it all and coming to the conclusion that Winter had the best way with words, they set out to make their guitarist write an email back.

“We’re thrilled that you like our music and it really is hard to not be starstruck right now. We’d love to talk more about this prospect,” their response went.

It went back and forth for about a week before some kind of meeting was arranged. Raimundo and Annette Asbury would be driving up to Brunswick and talking to the band in person in a coffee shop, and God knows Violence Ladies was sent into a tizzy. Their families were proud, even their annoying younger siblings. The girls themselves felt varying degrees of eagerness and anxiety.

The anxiety melted away with that meeting. Not Listening approached them with a record deal that promised them creative freedom as well as management and killer promotion – they even knew about Brianna’s kinda-sorta plan to eat up her own free time with higher education and said it was totally cool to focus on that just as much. They saw the talent and acted upon it before anybody else did, and really, it would’ve been a happy ending if anything ended. Rather, it was a beginning.

When Winter and Brianna graduated in 2005, they all jumped straight into everything – Brianna started a summer semester at FSU and moved into an apartment in Tallahassee with Winter and Samantha, Hayden enrolled in online summer school for a chance to skip a grade, and they started recording their debut album in the beginning of the summer.

They got shit done. That’s all there is to say about their first year on Not Listening Records. Even if their touring over the years had made Brianna have to take a few semesters off, everything was concrete, and everybody knew what they were doing. It was important to have a strong focus.