Photo credit: Mia Al-Taher
When Glass Mansions plays New Brookland Tavern this Saturday night, June 25th, it will be a homecoming of sorts for the former Columbia band, which packed up and moved to Austin Texas in January of 2021. Now a duo of founding members Blake Arambula and Jayna Doyle, Glass Mansions is on their first cross country tour since relocating, and they couldn’t be happier to be back on the road.
“The music scene here is all different genres, and they’re all really supportive of each other, but I’m still trying to find my New Brookland Tavern out here,” says singer Jayna Doyle, referring to the West Columbia venue that was their home base for many years. “There’s not really anywhere that’s going to replace that for us yet–that’s why we are excited to be back on tour and coming home to Columbia to play again.”
It has been a long road, metaphorically speaking, for Doyle and Arambula since their move in the middle of the pandemic.
“When Covid first happened we were in the middle of a tour, in the middle of Iowa, driving through corn fields and listening to AM radio as they were talking about this virus, and local cases in the US, it felt like something out of a zombie apocalypse movie,” Arambula recalls. “We were booked at SXSW that year for ten different showcases, a lot was going to be happening. We showed up in Austin and it was a ghost town, it was crazy to see that. Usually when we would come it would be buzzing and busy.”
In January 2021, the pair made the move to Austin official.
“It was surprisingly easier than we thought it would be,” Arambula says. “I work in live events, so when all that got canceled we had a window of time where we could do whatever we wanted, and that became moving to Austin.” Once there, the duo had to negotiate the local scene and find their way around a new town, however.
“As soon as we got there Blake started hosting an Emo Bingo night and since it was one of the only things going on mid-week around town, we got to meet a lot of people through that,” Doyle says. “We were able to become friends with people and then when covid became less of a danger and things opened up more, we already had these connections established.”
Austin, Texas has a reputation as a live music town, and both Doyle and Arambula agree that it has been living up to the hype for them.
“We feel a little spoiled,” Doyle says. “There’s often too much to do. We went to the Austin City Limits Festival, one of the biggest festival shows I’ve been to. We’ve been soaking it all in, and we have been fortunate to get to see a lot of bands we look up to, bands we are influenced by in our own music.”
Their own music, after all, is what they are in Austin for, and it’s what has brought them back to live performance and touring.
“We hit the ground running this year, and got some cool opportunities to open for other bands,” Doyle says. “It has been nonstop for us the past few months. There’s a pop scene here, a synth scene, there’s a space for our kind of music, too.”
That music is still the same bracing electro-pop alt-rock sound Columbia audiences know from previous releases, though the two-piece nature of the current lineup means they have been refining, and redefining, their sound.
The pair have been working on new music, and plan for its release soon.
“We are being more intentional, especially with the lyrics,” Doyle says. “In the past things have been kind of rushed, but now we have been doing some recording in Austin with Taylor Webb producing–it is a new thing for us to trust someone else we don’t know with our music. That’s exciting, and a little scary, and we are challenging ourselves and the process more.”
Arambula is just happy to be playing music in front of an audience, he says. “We were unsure before now about booking anything for the past year, but finally decided that the time was right. We needed to play, to get back on the road and revisit the places we have been, and see our friends and fans out there.”
Glass Mansions
New Brookland Tavern
Saturday, July 25th
Facbook Event