Blessing A Curse Interview
Florida rock band Blessing A Curse has huge electronic influences and aren’t afraid to “rockify” pop anthems. The band’s music video for “Down The Rabbit Hole” proves their next release is going to be one for the record books. By the Barricade caught up with Joshy Singer to learn more about the band and their upcoming album. Check out the full interview transcripts below!
How did Blessing A Curse end up with this lineup?
Joshy Singer: I started out as the screamer for a Christian metal band called Author Creator in 2010. I met Ronnie (bass/vocals) in 2011 because he was a frontman as well and our old bands used to play shows together around town. I quit Author Creator that same year because I had already stopped believing in god for a while at the time, and I wanted to sing in a genre with what I believed would have a little more mainstream potential. Luckily I met Jorge (guitar) in 2011 through the internet and in 2012 I auditioned to be the singer/screamer for his post-hardcore band Past Inhale. Our lead guitarist quit on us without warning a week before our first show so that left us in a tight spot so I called the first person I could think of that played guitar, my old friend from high school Brandon Swanson (lead guitar). To our amazement, he learned all of our songs in less than one week and soon we began playing all around Orlando, eventually picking Ronnie up as our bass player later that year. We changed our name to Blessing A Curse in 2013 and after our drummer parted ways with us in 2014, we found Cam thanks to a mutual connection with Jorge!
Blessing A Curse recently got to hang out with Steel Panther. They’re known for some hilarious stage antics. Did you guys fall into some funny situations?
Joshy: Hahah, they were very nice guys and surprisingly laid back despite their on-stage personas. At one point in the show they had a bunch of girls come up and take their shirts off and their guitarist Satchel had messaged my wife Tay earlier that day on Twitter and was like, “You should come up on stage with us!” and when we met up with them in person he looked at me, laughed and said, “Dude, you’ve gotta get your wife to start hitting on me.” Satchel’s a funny guy, we also got to meet Michael Starr who’s one of my favorite vocalists. All around it was a fun experience!
Your video for “Down the Rabbit Hole” was recently released. Can you tell us how you came up with the name for this track & how the video production went?
Joshy: “Down The Rabbit Hole” is the first single off of our upcoming full-length album, which we should have finished by late September. While it probably won’t be the opening track on the record itself, we decided to release Rabbit Hole first because we feel it encompasses the new, more mature Blessing A Curse sound we’ve been developing after about a year-long hiatus. The lyrics in the beginning of the song are “Somewhere in Between it All I stumbled down the rabbit hole and fell out of an attic in the sky” which alludes to our first EP “Somewhere in Between it All.” The “attic in the sky” is the name I gave to my made up hiding place I would pretend to go to when I was little and my parents fought. I remember always being able to see the full moon so clearly from my room in the little house we lived in, and thinking it was really just a big hole in the sky and that if I could find a ladder tall enough, I would be able climb up there into the attic and get away from everything that could hurt me. So with that in mind the song itself is about being lured out of that comfort zone you once knew by someone you once trusted and then being abandoned or hurt by that person, but still managing to have a small speck of faith that you and the person who betrayed you can someday mend that broken bridge, despite how pissed off you are in the moment. We worked with Joe DeSantis of Megabyte Films for the music video, and I must say I highly recommend working with him if you’re in a band of any genre because he is easy to work with, pays attention to detail and really cares about his clients being satisfied with how their music videos or short films come out.
In both videos, “Coffin City” & “Down the Rabbit Hole” the band is seen wearing masks. Is there a significance behind the masks you chose?
Joshy: Yes, the animal masks are very intriguing to me because the woman who makes them lives in a castle in Latvia and makes them out of old newspapers and letters from hundreds of years ago that she found in the castle (I swear I’m not making this up hahaha). We all picked the masks we wanted and the yellow rabbit one stuck out to me because it was the only one that wasn’t a predator in nature. I got the idea for Coffin City to make it so that the weakest animal out of all of them (there was a lion, a silver fox, an orange fox, and a wolf in addition to the rabbit) was the one that murdered his comrades in order to escape the toxic environment he was trapped in. For Rabbit Hole, we gave the mask a name (Jackie Slicer) and had him kill innocent people in order to resurrect and recruit them as his new army, with the silver fox character being the only one from the first video to survive/carry over to the next one.
Blessing A Curse has played quite a bit of shows this year. Was there a venue that stood out from the others?
Joshy: Probably the show we played with I See Stars and Like Moths To Flames at the 904 Music Hall in Jacksonville. The crowd was so pumped and the venue had this really cool structure, it was literally like a giant hallway with no barrier between us and the crowd so it felt really up close and personal.
Blessing A Curse worked with The Color Morale’s Garret Rapp on the track “Powerless”. What prompted that?
Joshy: Ahh yes, Garret Rapp. What a genuinely great man. He’s someone I idolized growing up because every time I saw The Color Morale live, he would always the take time to talk to me after their set and answer any questions I had about anything from life on the road, to advice about dealing with personal insecurities and overcoming your inner demons. Powerless” was a song I wrote when my parents were getting a divorce, and Garret’s part at the end (“and I will make a difference, difference/hope’s a luxury I will afford”) are intentionally the opposite of the negative lyrics I sing in the chorus of the song (“you told us we would make a difference, difference/hope’s a luxury we can’t afford”). It still means the world to me that he sang on our song.
What have you all been listening to lately?
Joshy: I’ve been listening to the new Korn album, along with Childish Gambino, Dirty Loops, Kendrick Lamar, and I’m still wishing Frank Ocean would drop some new shit. Jorge has been jamming the new PVRIS album, Cam likes G-Eazy, Ronnie likes The Used, and Brandon’s still waiting for Limp Bizkit to come out with new stuff.
Joshy, you recently said that you’d like to do voice overs for cartoons. If you could voice over for any cartoon character who would it be and why?
Joshy: You pay attention to my tweets, I’m honored! Haha but yes that’s my second big passion besides music. I spent way too much of my childhood mimicking cartoon characters’ voices and I’m a huge fan of Soul Eater and Bleach because they’re violent as fuck but also funny and have endearing characters, so doing the voice of someone like Lord Death from Soul Eater would be cool. I’m just praying for the day Funimation lets me audition to dub a character’s voice for an anime before it comes to the states!
Do you have any pre show rituals to get pumped for your performance?
Joshy: We all just warm up our instruments, take a shot of Coldcock Whiskey, put on our Versace skinny jeans and then prick our fingers and jerk each other off inside a circle of fire (NO NOT REALLY I’M TOTALLY KIDDING). Then we get out there and do the dang thing!!
What can fans expect from Blessing A Curse this summer?
Joshy: We’ll be in the studio to record the rest of our debut album from August to September, after that we’ll see when our crack team of marketing executives and distribution specialists at the BAC corporate headquarters will let us release it and then probably start touring our asses off after that!
Is there anything else you would like to say to the readers of By the Barricade?
Joshy: We would like to say thank you so very much to our friends at By the Barricade and to our growing number of #BACcrew members, old and new, for their continued support. We also ask that you go like us on Facebook, follow us on Twitter and Instagram (@BlessingACurse), buy some sweet merch from to keep yourselves lookin fresh in the hot summer months, and listen to our brand new Taylor Swift cover of her song “Bad Blood (ft. Kendrick Lamar)” on YouTube to get yourselves pumped for our upcoming album! Have a safe blessing-a-summer, keep an eye out for studio updates on www.blessingacurse.net and we’ll be sure to party with you guys ‘n gals real soon.
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