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Spirit Award gears up to release its sophomore album, Muted Crowd

The 10-track record will discuss world themes, from cults to corporations

Dan Ray September 18, 2018
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Spirit Award gears up to release its sophomore album, Muted Crowd September 18, 2018

Raised by a single mother in the suburbs of Detroit, Dan discovered an early passion for singing, songwriting, and the arts as a whole. She got her BA in English and music at the University of Michigan, where she reported for the school’s paper, The Michigan Daily. She worked as a Senior News Reporter on the government beat, transitioned to arts writing, and eventually became the managing editor of the social media department. She moved to Seattle in 2017. After losing her job during the COVID-19 pandemic and discouraged about the lack of press surrounding Seattle’s music scene, Dan made the decision to turn Dan’s Tunes, a fully fledged music journalism website focused on showcasing the Seattle area’s musicians, into its own startup. There’s so much music happening in the city that spawned Pearl Jam, Nirvana, and Jimi Hendrix — among others — and Dan’s Tunes is determined to find and expose those outstanding acts. The goal is to have satellites in every major US city, uplifting diverse and compelling voices and helping music communities thrive. In 2020, Dan was featured in the Seattle Times’s year-end music critic poll. Other than her musical endeavors (singing, playing ukulele, and auditioning for American Idol four times before the age of 24) Ray is passionate about food and education around the American food system, and she’s also a large proponent of eliminating the stigma around mental health. Ray loves cats, especially her own, who is named Macaulay Culkin (but she’s a lady).

Spirit Award’s Chris Moore onstage at Capitol Hill Block Party 2018. // Photo by Dan Ray

If you’re looking to join a cult, you’re going to want to buy Spirit Award’s new album, Muted Crowd, out October 19th on Union Zero. According to the band — frontman Daniel Lyon, bassist Chris Moore, and drummer Terence Ankeny — Muted Crowd will come with instructions on how to join their “organization,” which will bring participants “enlightenment and peace.”

While we’re (pretty) sure they’re joking about actually providing instructions on how to join their faction, Muted Crowd is an album with temptuous worldly themes, from cults to the allure and hardships of the music business.

“The themes of this record are a little different [than our last record]. To me, this record is a little more hopeful,” said Lyon. “There’s a lot of themes of stuff we fight against or that we oppose —  just trying to bring out conversations like that. The thing we’ve been feeling a lot in the past year is that it’s been hard as artists in Seattle to just keep going. With rent increasing like crazy — that’s one thing — but then you think about that you’ve got to pay for a rehearsal space, your gear gets stolen, or anything like that. There’s always stuff.”

The band’s first record, 2017’s Neverending, was surrounded and influenced by each member’s personal struggles, such as the passing of Moore’s father, and it’s apparent in the listening: the rock tracks have an aura of darkness around them. While, according to the band, Muted Crowd still has dark themes — like those cults! — the overall sound is lighter and more focused on seeing the world through the band’s lens, as opposed to understanding their personal struggles.

Another difference between the two records is that they wrote their debut tracks together, while their sophomore album pieces together songs from all three musicians.

“I think we were hesitant because we’ve always written together, but it was kind of a thing where, if we want this to get done, maybe we should all do some demos and then come together,” said Lyon. “Some of the demos it was like, oh that’s great. Terence’s demo that he has, I wouldn’t change a thing about it.”

Oh, and the song Ankeny wrote?

”The song that I wrote most of the parts for, I just suggested to Dan I kind of wanted it to be about this Japanese cult called Aum Shinrikyo,” said Ankeny. “He wrote all the lyrics, but that was something that wasn’t about anything we were a part of.”

Ironically, despite their disparate writing style and multiplicitous themes, all three band members described Muted Crowd as a more cohesive, more fun listening experience. They credited that mostly to their larger budget, better plan, and ability to use just one engineer, as opposed to the four they used to produce Neverending, but it’s also due to them growing together as bandmates.

“It’s definitely a totally different vibe than Neverending,” said Moore. “I feel like that just comes from us getting better as songwriters and then also learning how to work with each other and be [more] productive. We’re just growing as musicians and writers.”

And it’s that kind of connection that Spirit Award is trying to convey with their sophomore release.

“I think there’s a lot of introspection about cults and organized religions or just organizations in general,” said Lyon. “That was a thought that was always crossing my mind and is somewhat tying together a lot of the songs — just how you have organizations or companies that start really small and there’s really good intent, and a lot of times it just grows into something that can be terrible and is so disconnected with people and caring about people and it just kind of loses itself.”

So, whether Spirit Award is actually forming a cult or not, the band has one goal with its music: to bring people together with love and support. Call me crazy, but that’s a cult I may not mind joining.

For a taste of the cult action, check out the group’s music video for the lead single from Muted Crowd, “Supreme Truth.”

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Raised by a single mother in the suburbs of Detroit, Dan discovered an early passion for singing, songwriting, and the arts as a whole. She got her BA in English and music at the University of Michigan, where she reported for the school’s paper, The Michigan Daily. She worked as a Senior News Reporter on the government beat, transitioned to arts writing, and eventually became the managing editor of the social media department. She moved to Seattle in 2017. After losing her job during the COVID-19 pandemic and discouraged about the lack of press surrounding Seattle’s music scene, Dan made the decision to turn Dan’s Tunes, a fully fledged music journalism website focused on showcasing the Seattle area’s musicians, into its own startup. There’s so much music happening in the city that spawned Pearl Jam, Nirvana, and Jimi Hendrix — among others — and Dan’s Tunes is determined to find and expose those outstanding acts. The goal is to have satellites in every major US city, uplifting diverse and compelling voices and helping music communities thrive. In 2020, Dan was featured in the Seattle Times’s year-end music critic poll. Other than her musical endeavors (singing, playing ukulele, and auditioning for American Idol four times before the age of 24) Ray is passionate about food and education around the American food system, and she’s also a large proponent of eliminating the stigma around mental health. Ray loves cats, especially her own, who is named Macaulay Culkin (but she’s a lady).