BREAKING OUT
Silent Planet headlining tour after years of being a supporting act
Silent Planet’s hard work of serving as a supporting act on a number of tours has finally paid off.
The band has embarked on its first headlining tour, which it expects to be its “most fun” and “creative” tour to date.
“We were a bit nervous coming into it, because we’ve supported a lot of cool tours, but when you headline you kind of have this moment where you’re not sure if anyone actually cares about your band enough to go out to the show,” Silent Planet frontman Garrett Russell said. “It’s a little nervewracking, and by the grace of God there has been a lot of people at these shows having a good time and really active crowds and everyone is stoked about all the bands on the package. It’s been amazing so far.”
The band decided to create special shirts for each stop of its tour.
“Every city has their own shirt that’s exclusive to only that city, and once it’s sold out it’s gone forever,” Russell said. “So Albuquerque will have its own shirt that only people from Albuquerque can get, which has been a really fun thing to do.”
The band’s recent album, “Everything Was Sound,” comes from a very intimate place and takes on the topic of mental illness.
“Before I did this full time, I was a therapist and I got my master’s in clinical psychology,” Russell said. “Every song on ‘Everything Was Sound’ is based off of a mental illness that I’ve encountered either in friends’ lives or in the lives of people I did therapy with or in my own self or things I came across when I studied. … The album is very personal and very dark, because
it delves into that, but it also carries a common theme that as humans we can get through things together.”
The song “Panic Room” was inspired by a conversation Russell had with a man who had served in the military and was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. Another song, “Nervosa” is about a young lady who had anorexia that Russell used to do therapy work with.
“That song is very emotional, and every single day I had men and women alike come up to me and tell me how eating disorders had either been a huge obstacle in their life or had kind of torn their family apart,” he said of “Nervosa.” “I don’t think I ever really talked to anyone about eating disorders with anyone at a show... That never really had come up at any show until we started playing this song, and that just started to open that conversation up.”