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We're Not Listening

Aim High - Fire Motion, pt. 4

It was a crazy couple of years from then on. After a while it evened out, but while Fire Motion was hard at work recording their first album, which came to be known as “Joy,” and released it in 2001, there was a tornado of excitement that surrounded the members and everybody around them.

Sure, people had blended country and punk before. They’d mixed rock n’ roll with some twangy tunes, and there had definitely been instances of success – just look at Lynyrd Skynyrd, .38 Special. That didn’t make Fire Motion any less of an enigma to Rai, and to the folks who were just then getting their ears hooked on their music.

When “Joy” was put on select shelves in mostly-local record shops, it was time for Fire Motion to do something that most of them had only dreamed of – tour. Justin had left the state a few times during a brief stint as a tour bus driver, but nobody had actually packed their bags and travelled the country for the sole purpose of playing music.

Rai hooked the band up with a great tour manager who was responsible for getting them where they needed to be, while Rai himself managed the band for the time being. And it was wonderful, roaming up the east coast and making friends who would remember them as “that redneck band with the big ginger guy,” swinging through the midwest and crawling down the west coast. It was a huge tour – in size, in scope, in importance. It was just them, along with whatever other band would be in the same venue that night, and really, isn’t that kind of simplicity all that matters?

Critics had things to say, and most of those things involved Justin’s gritty singing and the sometimes rough instrumentals that seemed to go along with his voice in all the wrong ways. The other things they had to say involved the brilliant songwriting, the intricate guitar work, and the way that every instrument worked with one another when they weren’t just making noise.

Justin had a few choice words for anybody who tried to compare him to Mariah Carey, and that was the end of the attention they’d give to naysayers. Fire Motion loved what they did, and they loved the music they created. After their first tour, they went right back at it again to craft another masterpiece, settling down in Gainesville again and putting pens to paper.

“Fear No Beer,” possibly the dumbest album title to ever surface (even Rai cringed when they presented it to him), was unleashed in the wee months of 2003, at a time when pop stars were reaching out to other genres and emo was starting to bubble out to the mainstream. It would’ve been easy for it to get lost among the waves, to get swept out to sea and for nobody to ever pay them any mind ever again.

Fire Motion made it a point to not go down without a fight, and well, they certainly didn’t go down, except in the history books.

They gave it their all on the next tour. They paired up with another band, a group of brothers and a sister who sang southern love songs, and set off around the country again. This time, their album branched out beyond Florida – music stores everywhere in the southeast were picking up their tunes and stocking them on their jumbled shelves. They made sure to build off of the parts that made them good on the first album, kicking up the guitars and making the lyrics even more poetic, and it paid off.

They even filmed two music videos for this album, two solid works of art that were a far cry from the performance video they shot for the song “Joy” off of their first album. One for “Radio Heart” and one for the album’s namesake, “Fear No Beer,” each with the same director who had a story in mind for each one. The former followed the story of a travelling cassette tape that kept falling into random hands and changing lives, and the latter showed a pool party scene and focused on the less-than-happy lives of the attendees.

Now, don’t get things mixed up here. Fire Motion was never one for theatrics. Every member of the band is a firm believer in making a strong foundation before frilling things up with aesthetics, and sometimes, things are just better off with bare bones. But they figured that a few low-budget music videos couldn’t hurt, and taking Rai’s advice for storytelling against their cowpunk backdrop, they went for it.

They made a few headlines in north and central Florida newspapers, and they even had a TV spot on a local news station, hopeful folks tuning in to hear about a band that actually had potential to get sort of famous.

There are people out there willing to throw stones at any band who dares to get media coverage, throwing the word “sellout” around so often that it’s lost its meaning.

Those people are known as “dickheads.”