This week our guest is singer/songwriter John Hampson from the band Nine Days.
More than fifteen years after their major label breakthrough The Madding Crowd was released, an album which spawned a massive Top 10 hit for the group with “Absolutely (Story Of A Girl),” the group is back in business with their latest album, Snapshots, which will be released on July 8.
Fans can pre-order the album via iTunes and get several advance tracks, including the “Sweet 16” version of “Absolutely (Story Of A Girl).”
During the interview, Hampson shared with us the story about how this new album came together.
“The band never broke up. We’ve known each other for a long, long time and you know, we went through a lot of different hoops,” he says. “Obviously, we had major label success and then we went through a very sort of cliche major label meltdown story where our label imploded and our follow-up record never really got released. It had been a long road going through all of that, even though it wasn’t a long time.”
“You know, it’s funny, you look back and it feels like it was this epic chunk of my life, but it really happened fairly quickly,” Hampson admits. “We all kind of just went on with our lives a little bit. We moved forward and some of us started families. Brian [Desveaux] moved to Nashville and we all just kind of found a sense of what we really wanted to do with our lives outside of Nine Days. Right around 2007, we put out an EP and that was really us kind of coming back together and not letting Nine Days go. Over the years that followed, we’d play shows, we recorded some stuff, we did a sort of ‘fan album,’ which we never really put out — we just kind of released it to fans and did a PledgeMusic campaign for it, which was a lot of fun. That was in 2012. Right after that, we hooked up with some management out of Nashville and it just kind of reinvigorated the whole band.”
“We were able to look at the band very differently than we had been able to, you know, it was kind of a mixed bag for a while,” he says. “You have this incredible high of success followed by this incredible, ‘how does this happen’ moment. Really, this album is the last two years of us feeling really good about making Nine Days a priority and it’s filling a space in all of our lives that felt really good.”
We talk about a lot of things during today’s conversation including the unique impact that their big single made on Hampson personally. It was a fun chat and there was a cool goosebumps moment in the midst of it all when the delivery truck showed up at Hampson’s house to deliver the first copies of the new album.
Nine Days will play some shows in support of the new record. Check out their website and follow them on Facebook and Twitter to stay up to date with everything they’ve got going on.
Visit the Lost Together site for an archive of all of the podcast episodes and subscribe via RSS or iTunes to get the podcast delivered directly to your computer or preferred mobile device. We’re on Facebook and Twitter and you can email us your thoughts and comments as well.
Enjoy today’s episode!
Lost Together with Matt Wardlaw, Episode 21: John Hampson (Nine Days)
Image Credit: Mad Ink PR
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