Crash Midnight ~ Rock Recording Artists Special Guest On 2/5/2024
Crash Midnight is finally announcing the much-anticipated release of "Strung Out On Sunset" - a song that’s brought down the house live in Las Vegas for the past two years, becoming an indelible staple of the band's set. Inspired by a hedonistic 48 hours singer, Shaun Soho, spent on the streets of Hollywood, "Strung Out On Sunset" paints a dark picture of life after the curtain falls. A raw introspective on the disillusionment grown from chasing ghosts, coming to the cold realization that the past is gone and the only way forward is to bury it all under your next step.
Talking about the story behind the song, Soho says, "The initial idea came from being stretched way too thin the morning after back-to-back nights partying in Hollywood and trying to get myself together as the sun was coming up. I remember finally going to get something to eat and being so literally strung out that I was just shaking and blinking in this hollow morning light as I was coming out of, I think ...Rock & Reilly's or something, maybe when they used to be open earlier? Anyhow it was one of those spots right up the street from The Whisky and kind of like while I was trying to steady myself there on the sidewalk, the idea for this thing came to me."
He goes on, "but it was really just a rough concept for a song title or direction, you know? What's more interesting to me now is how the song has developed and taken on a much more self-reflective meaning as the band's established itself out here in Las Vegas. Coming from Boston, there was a bit of lionizing what we thought was that mecca for Rock out there on the Sunset Strip - hearing all the old stories and feeling like that's where all the action was.
After moving out here and getting to see everything first hand, it's sad what that area has become. It's basically devolved into a tourist trap for 80's metal enthusiasts. The place is absolutely dead and there's just no coming back at this point. Something that was so cool from like the 60's, 70's, 80's - it's depressing to see how irrelevant it's become.
Then you combine that sort of sentiment with having now played with some of those acts from that era here in Vegas, and I mean some of them were really great and totally still have it - Tesla for example is awesome and they were great to us - but others that we opened for, it was like we knew what the venue was paying them, thousands of dollars, and we were the ones bringing all the fans. Really disenchanting, you know? Like some big names, and they can't draw anyone and we're out here at that time getting a tiny fraction of what they were getting paid in order for us to fill a room to make it look like they had a crowd.
That, to me, is what this song is about now - being strung along and sold on this mythos of some of these acts. These are guys you maybe looked up to when you were a kid and now seeing, not necessarily the bands themselves, but their management or booking agent try to feed you some bullshit about how amazing an opportunity it'll be to play a show with these guys while we do the heavy lifting on the draw. It's like, tell them to bring all the people if you're paying them that much. It honestly got exhausting being asked to try to make acts that haven't had a song on the radio in 3 or 4 decades look relevant by letting them headline in front of our crowd. So yeah, for me the song has become something of a vent on how over the propaganda of that scene we are - the bloom is thoroughly off the rose I guess you could say."