Culture
‘V For Victory’: Nothing Like Some Old Fashioned Space Rock
By: Emily Votaw
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There’s something to be said for maintaining a reputation as a prolific anything – let alone for being a prolific rock ‘n’ roll band. Such is the case for Athens-based Supernobody, a group that has managed to churn out an album a year since their formation in 2013.
The group, consisting of beloved local musicians Mike Elliott, Johnny Wayne, Shannon Grogan, Matt Box and J. Hadley are fresh off the release of V for Victory, an album crafted with the help of former Hocking College student Emilio Duran.
From the album’s celestial multicolored artwork to lyrics chock full of references to the cosmos, V for Victory is many things and perhaps most succinctly described as “space rock.”
“When we started out, I actually came up with the band name ‘The Amazing Space Navigators’ and everyone was like ‘oh my gosh, no way, the next thing you know we’ll be dressed in space suits’ so it’s kind of ironic that we finally get to do a space album,” chief songwriter and front man Mike Elliott laughed. “We had a bit of cabin fever going on this winter, and the next thing I knew we were making space rock.”
So far as the recording of the album, Elliott said he and the rest of the band really just came into the studio and started playing around with the songs that Elliott had written. Duran then took the recordings and melded them into V for Victory.
“I think Emilio needed someone to record, and he was friends with the son of the drummer in our band, so he recorded the old people, and it was fun,” said Elliott.
So far as the space theme, Elliott isn’t too sure where that came from.
“I’m really always messing around with some song, but it was really weird that I started to write all of these songs about the Voyager spacecraft,” said Elliott. “But pretty soon I realized that these weren’t really original ideas at all. I heard Jeff Lynne from Electric Light Orchestra on National Public Radio after I had written these songs, and he was talking about a song that he had written about the Voyager, about how lonely it must be to be circling the Milky Way or traveling through interstellar space, alone.”
Alongside the creation of the album came the crafting of an accompanying film of the same name: V for Victory: the Fall and Rise of Connie Startraveler, a work that Elliot jokingly described as an “E.T. rip-off.”
In the movie the main character, Connie Startraveler, finds the golden record sent with the Voyager in 1977. Elliott explained that the plot of the movie revolves around Startraveler’s mission to reintroduce “humanity to humanity” with the golden record.
“As the winter dragged on we got more and more profound with it – or so we thought,” said Elliott. “And then we realized that it was just an E.T. rip-off, but we still had fun. We’re not filmmakers, but we learned that anybody can be a filmmaker.”
Elliot said that the band plans to have a very informal release for V for Victory: The Fall and Rise of Connie Startraveler sometime later this year.
So far as the band’s prolific record release rate, Elliott says that he doesn’t see that ending anytime soon.
“I’ve always loved writing songs, and I probably write 10 to 15 songs a year; before we formed this band, I just made my own albums. It’s nothing really different for me because I’m always writing songs. It might be a little startling for the band, though,” said Elliott. “It’s really cool how willing they are to keep up with the whole mess and sometimes it feels a little like I’ve gotten myself into some kind of weird competition. The guys in the band will joke about how we’re going for some kind of Guinness World Book record. But it isn’t a contest, I’m just happy that they’ll keep playing with me because I would much rather hear what they do with these songs than what I would do by myself.”
Later this month Supernobody will play with Adam Remnant on July 28 as a part of Remnant’s When I Was a Boy EP release show and then on July 30 at Casa Nueva. V for Victory is available on streaming on Spotify and on Soundcloud and for purchase on iTunes.
