More often than not, when bands break up, they do so in a blaze of glory--or, at the very least, with one final show to milk out every last bit of interest that they can. But, as one Frenemy of DC9 noted in the comments yesterday, pretty much the whole summer has passed with no news of Bridges & Blinking Lights' fizzing out earlier this year. Why? Well, says guitarist Marc Montoya, it was mostly just because, after eight years together, "it was just time."
"We broke up in April," Montoya explains. "One of us wanted to do some other things, and everyone else decided that that was it. We didn't really pursue it any further. It seemed very natural. Nobody tried to stop it."
After a show at Lola's in Fort Worth as part of The Good Show's concert series, the band quietly said goodbye.
But what's weird about this breakup--just like so many other local disbandings in recent memory--is that it came almost immediately in the wake of the band's February-released sophomore album, Heroes, Guns and Snakes, a disc that highlighted the band's progressive drone behind frontman Jake Wilganowski's distinctive vocals.
"I don't think it was the reception of the record [that caused the breakup]," Montoya says. "It was a record we were really excited about and worked really hard on. It was kind of a let down when it came out--not because it got a bad reaction, but because it was such a release."
After the jump, some updates us on the former bandmates' current goings-on.
"Mostly, it seems like everyone is enjoying their free time," says Montoya, a studio photographer by day. He and some colleagues, he says, are about to move into a new photo studio, which may or may not also afford him some room to work on new music.
Wilganowski, a videographer by day, is meanwhile staying busy with his day job, and toying with the idea of releasing some new music material on his own in the future. Drummer Chris Considine, also seems likely to stay in music, having been asked to join a couple other bands already, although he's yet to have bitten on any of those offers. And bassist Michael Lile is staying busy working as a sound engineer on the TLC reality show, Hoarders.
"It is what it is," Montoya says of the band breakup, while insisting that he's really started to take to his new, far more domestic lifestyle. "I don't really regret any of it."
