Nonpoint has made the best of their time in quarantine as they keep their fans enterained with new music and covers during their online "Quarantine Sessions," while also keeping a strong voice with their current single, "Remember Me."
Nonpoint vocalist Elias Soriano recently checked in with Rock Life to talk about the single and share what's next for the band.
Q: You've been staying busy making some new music and holding your online "Quarantine Sessions," but how have you been passing the time otherwise?
Elias Soriano: Family. I've been spending a lot of time with my wife and my daughter. This is a blessing in disguise for me. I get to have a extended periods of time with my family. It's been a very, very long time since I've had that much time with my girls. It always seems there is some sort of pulling away to do something. However, I am still working during this; it's not like I'm home just sitting around. We're definitely doing things, but there is definitely a lot more downtime right now.
Q: What do you have coming up for the rest of the year?
ES: We've got a couple of things. First, we're about to launch a new campaign this Friday. It's going to be a cover bracket campaign where fans can pick our next cover song. It's going to be like a NCAA-type of thing where we put 16 songs up against each other and survey our fans. We're going to poll them and figure out what our next cover should be. It's going to be pretty engaging. Our fans are always there asking what our next cover is going to be so we wanted to bring them in this time. I'm excited about them being able to root for their song to get to the end and maybe even seeing it live eventually.
That will be the next step after that: figuring out how to get it out there. We want to do a live show for the fans. We hope to have a couple of those before the end of the year and then wrap things up for Christmas.
Q: Did you have a lot of dates this spring and summer that had to be cancelled?
ES: Yeah, we had a whole plan. We were booked for Blue Ridge and Rebel Rock and a couple of other festival shows, but that obviously didn't work out. We're just trying to get some kind of unified and national response to this pandemic to kind of get this overall curve together because bands aren't going to be able to tour if this state is doing one thing and another is doing something else. I mean, New York is basically closing its borders off to the rest of the country to keep the infected people who haven't been socially distancing and wearing their masks out so it's really up in the air right now. Until some national plan happens, as a father of a daughter who has mild asthma and a wife who has arthritis and some pre-existing conditions that causes people's antibodies to be low, it's a concern and my number one priority. I need to keep them safe so until that happens, I ain't going nowhere!
Q: You've been one of the most active bands through all of this and you even hit those little niches like with your mask sales and tour shirts early on, was that something you thought about beforehand or did it just happen naturally?
ES: We had planned to kind of take a break this year anyways. After the Hellyeah tour in January, all of our socials went dark and we were going to take a long break, but after the pandemic hit and our fans were so used to following us with our campaigns and being engaged and laughing with us on our socials, that we felt we needed to be there.
When times got tough, people were calling for us and we kind of got on the phone and were just catching up and we'd all noticed the comments online and got our heads together with our creative director Francesca and said, hey, what do you think about us doing this? We got a concept together and came out with the "Alive and Kicking" initiative just to get people's focus and get their attention on the masks way back then. We knew how important it is and we had a lot of friends and family who work in homeland security and the health departments. What's happening medically is really hard to watch and we wanted to touch on that. When you have a forum like this, you've got to use it.
Q: And the "Remember Me" track is such a great tribute to those out there fighting this. Can you share how that came together?
ES: Well that was just the obvious next step for a few of us going from this acoustic to this song. It gave a little bit of a face to some of the rhetoric that we were kind of trying to put out on our socials, which is being courteous and aware that what you do will effect people ten folds if you are somewhere is asymptomatic or is someone who is complacent to the black lives movement or someone who turns a blind eye to child trafficking or immigration policy or whatever.
There is a lot going on that you really need to put your attention towards and there are so many people who are fighting on the front line of all of these issues and normally they go unnamed and unthanked and a lot of them being our fans. So Francesca hit us up and had this concept for a video where having some of your front line essential workers join in on the actual video of the song since we can't all get together and do one and we thought the idea was great.
We sent out a email and a thousand emails later, we had to tell people to stop sending them and 233 Nonpoint fans were represented in the video.
Q: Were you happy with the great response?
ES: Absolutely! It did exactly what we'd hoped and wanted it do, which was get the word out and get the thanks out and just share the sentiment that we're mindful of what they do and appreciative of what they do. It's really the least that we can do honestly.
Q: And what is it about Nonpoint that has you kept you guys going for so long?
ES: Just our fans and the message that we're really just trying to help people through tough times. Music is really here for that reason. People want to connect with something that pulls them away from some of their problems or champions them through a struggle or something that feels bigger than them. Music helps calm your thoughts and help focus your feelings a little bit. Knowing that you have that kind of impact on people keeps you going.
Q: Is there still a goal touring-wise?
ES: I definitely want to do some shows in Japan and possibly China, though I'm not sure about that now since it seems to be such a difficult one to go in and out of for the foreseeable future. Outside of that, we've basically hit it all, oh, except Alaska! We definitely would like to hit that too.
Q: Any words for the fans?
ES: Just be patient! Everything will come in good time and we're not going anywhere. Just keep the importance of what we're going through as the top priority as tough as it may seem. We will get through this!
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