Singled Out: Bad Mary's Light It Up

Keavin Wiggins | 04-26-2022

Single art

New York rockers Bad Mary just premiered the video for their brand new single "Light It Up" and to celebrate we asked Mike Staub to tell us about the track. Here is the story:

So, we've been writing original music for a while now, about 10 years. Our first album, Better Days released in 2013 and many of those songs have stuck with us and remain on our live sets. In 2019 one of those songs, Space Girl, inspired us to write a 33-minute Space Punk Rock Opera called The Return of Space Girl. It was a huge undertaking and while we LOVE that album, it was a lot of additional work that we wanted to avoid this time around. After the Pandemic shut us down for a bit, we started writing original music again but were unable to get together to flesh it out. We decided to get back into the swing of recording by putting together a Cover EP called Rock and Roll Classics: Vol. 6. While we had fun with that, we were itching to write new original music. We decided that we wanted to get a new EP out by the end of 2022 and have a few new, original singles release in the Spring before that.

I had written a few songs to bring to rehearsal but wasn't fully taken with any of them. On one Saturday afternoon, just a day before our Sunday rehearsal, I sat down with a guitar and plunked out a new song. I wrote some lyrics and pieced it all together and wrote a song essentially about Rock and Roll. It was a song that I was far simpler in terms of scope with what we had done in 2019 and I wanted to write a song that represented the music we love and our unending desire to get on stage and rock out. Live music is the bread and butter of what we do in Bad Mary, so it only makes sense that we have a song about playing live. It's also a song that's about our love for creating and performing music. That despite our age and the amount of time we've been at this, we've still got new music ready to rock and as the song suggests "we're just getting started and we're never going to stop".

We get together on Sundays and work on new music. We rehearse and record these songs all while streaming live to Twitch, so our audience there can chime in and get a taste of what it's like behind the scenes. Our guitar player David also brought in a new song at the same time, so we were able to spend our rehearsal time getting these new songs together. "Light It Up" was pretty solid out of the gate, though our singer Amanda used her superpower of lyrical editing and melody altering to take the song to a new level. We mixed ideas on how we could change up rhythms and different parts of the song to give it a little pre-production and we started running through it a bunch. We really wanted to capture that live energy in this one and the plan is to start playing it as our opening song for shows. It's a fast, loud, declaration of what we love about Rock and Roll so be sure to turn the headphones up... or the speakers... and be sure to roll the windows down.

Amanda put her amazing spin on the lyrics and vocals to really give the song some extra life. We got the vocals and backing vocals done pretty quickly! And the song was ready to go with the video.

We're really happy with our two upcoming singles and can't wait to work on more new music this year. Be sure to check out Light It Up on all platforms on 4/26/2022.

Hearing is believing. Now that you know the story behind the song, listen and watch for yourself below and learn more about the band here