The Story

The Redding Brothers began in the Pacific Northwest. Their first release sold out after a debut at a small festival in Everett, Washington on October 3rd, 2003 — the start of a five-year run that moved from fast, philosophical pop toward something deeper and more introspective, and ended halfway around the world.

What follows is the whole arc in one view: every release in order, the year the band wrote and released a new song every Saturday at midnight, and the songs we'd hand someone first.

The DIY years

From Washington the band relocated to a house in Scott Depot, West Virginia, and built the whole operation themselves — two demo albums and a full-length LP recorded, booked, and managed with no label and no agent. They landed in coffeehouses and bookstores — Taylor Books, Capitol Roaster's, Espresso Euphoria, the Huntington Mall Borders. Then began making their own room to play, organizing songwriters' nights and unconventional all-ages shows, turning cafe corners and mall atriums into venues that didn't otherwise exist.

The earliest footage that survives is one of those rooms — a coffeehouse, March 2005:

2006 · A concert in the Apple Store

By 2006 Micah had moved to Nashville and was working the floor at the Green Hills mall Apple Store. That spring the band played a small set at the Starbucks next door; a few co-workers wandered over. Afterward his manager pointed out something the iTunes era had quietly made possible: because the band's music was on iTunes, they qualified to play a concert inside the store.

So on May 13th, 2006, the Redding Brothers played the Apple Store — on the official store schedule, “as loud as we want,” the whole thing recorded for a podcast the band called “the Apple Show.” A retail counter turned into a stage because a song had made it into a catalog. It's a small, very-2006 story, and a good one.

The last album

The tour wasn't the ending. For three more years — 2008 to 2011 — the band worked on the most ambitious thing it ever attempted: The Origin of Consciousness, a concept-album capstone to a trilogy, telling the awakening of a self out of a crowd over one night in downtown Nashville. It was written, sequenced, storyboarded, and demoed — locked as “complete” in July 2011 — and never released. The story of the lost album →