You may have never heard of Middle Distance Runner, but you’ve probably heard the band’s music before. One of their latest releases, a track titled “The Sun and Earth,” was recently featured in an HBO Signature Films commercial and the Disney documentary, “Morning Light”.
“We write the songs, record them, and forget they still have the potential to turn around and get up a bunch of fans without doing anything,” says Stephen Kilroy, the lead singer of the five-member strong rock-pop outfit. “We just try to make them as available as possible. They’re not overly serious or anything. We just want to put them out there.”
Although Middle Distance Runner — which also includes drummer Erik Dean, guitarists Jay Smith and Allan Chappelear and Tony Acampora, bass player — has made their television debut, the credit the internet for granting them the bulk of their exposure. The band is signed up for many popular social networking sites, most notably Amiestreet.com and Myspace.com, both of which took the band from being virtually unknown to Bowery Ballroom favourites, according to Kilroy.
“Myspace was starting to pick up and Amiestreet was one of those things we signed up for. We quickly became one of the higher more played bands on that site,” says Kilroy. “Really cool site, because the first time someone buys your song its 1 cent and then 2 cents until it gets to 98 cents. Our first album sold quite a few.”
Now that the band has a more concrete following, the focus is on finding a record label who will release their new album. If not, the band plans on releasing it themselves, which they have done in the past. Their debut album, “Plane in Flames,” was self-released May 2006, and their self-titled EP October 2007.
Still, Kilroy hopes that record labels will get behind the band with their new album. “We have the album finished and recorded and everything. One song that’s already out there is ‘The Sun and Earth.’ It’s been re-recorded for this new album but it came out in an EP in 2007,” says Kilroy. “We had a lot of soul and more rootsy kind of music on this album as opposed to previous albums. It has a lot to do with religion, and how relationships are the same, and unequal and that causes all the friction in the world.”
The new album features the re-recorded version of “The Sun and Earth,” “The Wrong Hole,” which Kilroy describes as “our soul jam,” along with “Sundays are Hell,” inspired by “sexuality and guilt factors and things and how religion comes into that,” and “The Fury,” slated to be the album’s second single.
First single, “The Unbeliever,” was released in March. Middle Distance Runner are currently on a U.S. tour with Pretty & Nice, and hope to tour the West Coast in the fall.
Middle Distance Runner “The Unbeliever” from maxwell sorensen on Vimeo.
Content with their achievements so far, Kilroy says he’s ready to continue up the ladder. “Whatever comes after that is a mystery to me,” he concludes. “That’s up to people who hear the album, I guess, but I’m ready for anything.”