1 Cincy band, 52 weeks, 52 songs
The time has come for Ringo Jones, Adam Flaig and Marc Sherlock to take a bow and take a breath. They’ve reached the finish line.
For 51 consecutive weeks, their band, Mad Anthony, has released a new song via the internet. And today, Mad Anthony’s project comes to an end with the exclusive Cincinnati.com premiere of song No. 52, “It Never Ends.”
“We were saving this one,” says Jones, singer and guitarist in the Cincinnati band, “because to us, it capped the whole thing. It was like overcoming the whole entire struggle. It told the story of the entire anthology.”
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Jones says he conceived the project when the band was kicking around ideas for its next move.
“I had talked about how the game is changing. We got to do something different, something challenging that no one’s ever tried to do. This is one of the crazy ideas that came out. We brushed it off at first, but then we came back, because it kind of speaks to what we believe in, which is not only giving content to your audience, but also the idea of, we got this network of friends that we want to show off and play with, so it was nice to bring other people on board, too,” he says.
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Like most songs in the yearlong anthology, “It Never Ends” features a performance from a guest musician. Patrick Rickelton of Nashville plays keyboards on the song.
“We survived as a band by relying on the kindness of strangers by letting us sleep on their couches and people setting up shows for us,” Jones says. “It was out of necessity we learned to build this community around us, or else we would be just another band that lasted three or four years, but because we had the fortune of meeting some of these people, they kept us going, and now we have an opportunity to bring them in to what we do.”
The songs are compiled at the band’s website (madanthology.com) and its Bandcamp page (madanthony.bandcamp.com). Mad Anthony plans to release their 22 favorites in a double-LP and on CD. That’s the physical legacy of the experiment. Jones says the lasting legacy will be the community that has grown around the band over the course of the last 52 weeks.
“We came into this project hoping that it would launch us into a new level. It did, but it wasn’t the way we expected. We thought that we were going to get more and more fans, and we did. We got more fans. We met more people. But the reality is we have a much deeper connection with the fans we do have, and that’s far more important to us than anything. People that were just casual fans are now our friends or now making music with us, so it took us in a different way than we thought it would,” he says.
Jones is relieved that it’s over, but that doesn’t mean Mad Anthony will be relinquishing its position as Cincinnati’s hardest-working rock outfit. Look for a brand-new interactive music video from the band on their website in a couple weeks.
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