Cherry King describes how their indie band went from scraping together startup capital to earning radio royalties, then faced rising production costs after working with producers Johnny K and David Bendith. A band member's newborn son prompted them to pause touring and reconsider whether to sign with a label.
Cherry King. Yeah. So where was the money coming from at that point? It was basically from the— what we did to raise funds, you know, we basically raised some money. Yeah, we raised that money to kind of give the band some runway. And then we started to be able to— now we were starting to see money come in, right? Because when radio picked up, we'd start seeing the, you know, checks essentially. We were starting to see royalties, which we never really under, you know, never saw before that. So it became, you know, um, and that, that's when, you know, that then took us to other producers, right? Then we got to work with, you know, Johnny K. We got to work with David Bendith. We got to, you know, like, that was a cool kind of next experience when we got to create these songs. But again, that costs money. So everything was more and more expensive, and, you know, at some point, you know, the money starts to to dwindle versus the opportunity. And without a traditional label, you're still on your own. And that's when it was kind of like, hey, do we start shopping for a label? You know what I mean? And at that point in time, things happened within the band. And kind of at the tail end of that, I think Jack was born, like literally at the tail end of that, John's, you know, his first son. And that's when it was like, hey, we have, now we're men, right? We're becoming fathers, we're becoming husbands, we're becoming, so it was like, okay, we may need to reevaluate what we're doing here temporarily. And what do we do next? And that kind of, for all of us, put us in a position to keep releasing music, but we took some time off from the road and tried to figure out exactly what we wanted to do next.
