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ENTRY ONE:

Richlove is more than just a band - it’s a family. It’s a collection of friends - a coalition of artists - a like minded cooperative of musicians all striving towards the same goals. The idea was to create something special. To not just write a few songs and play a few shows - but to create a community with common interests; who genuinely care about one another - where people can make new friends and sing, laugh and cry together. To all of us, thats the purpose of music. To create community, not just amongst our band - but with everyone we meet.

We started the band in the summer of ’17. Chloe and Matt had been playing as a duo for the past few years and although they enjoyed their group, they knew there was strength in numbers.

They flew home to produce a short film for a competition and asked Adamm and Wes to help out. Matt had been making music with Adamm for a few years, collectively working on different projects together and knew that Wes and Ben were crazy talented musicians from seeing them play with He is We.

The idea of starting a band was floated out during the shoot and the rest was history.

We knew instantly that we had something special. Days after the shoot, we all met for lunch and decided that we wanted to do this band for real. And things moved fast for us. Days later, we wrote our first song, something in the water, had two photoshoots and multiple vision casting meetings.

The following months were spent flying back and forth from Nashville to Seattle, shooting videos, writing and figuring out who we wanted to be as a band.

But starting a band isn’t easy. Lots of our peers expected us to be making big leaps. Other peoples expectations weighed heavily on our decisions and measurement of success. But reflecting on the year and a half we have been in a band, we know we decided to do 2018 the right way - focus on building the foundations of our band.

2018 was full of some fruitful highs and some crazy lows. Candidly, there were times where we didn’t know what was next.

In the name of seeking vision, we faced multitudes of trials and tribulations. We shot so many videos that will never be used - spent hours recording songs that probably will never see the light of day - damaged relationships that we can only pray will be healed. We failed multitudes of times in our search for vision for this project. There were times we had waves of negativity in our outlook. We had spurts of fights, doubt, and fear. Some moments almost drove us to throw up our white flag.

But as the great C.S. Lewis wrote, “Failures, repeated failures, are finger posts on the road to achievement. One fails forward toward success.”

And for us, we find so much truth in those words. It’s so easy to focus on failure that we forget to look at how much we really grew.

The reality is, we accomplished so much as a band. Much of the beginning of 2018 was spent writing music. In March, we had a writers retreat with 20 different writers from the Pacific Northwest. We locked ourselves in a cabin out next to the ocean and wrote a multitude of choruses, melodies and fully completed songs. We spent the following months building upon what we created and honing in on what we wanted Richlove to sound like.

From April until July, we spent time preparing to make a big life change as a band - moving to Nashville. In those months, Adamm and Ben packed up all of there things and uprooted their lives to move to a city full of so much opportunity for Richlove.

Because of personal reasons, Wes needed to step away from the band. It was unexpected for us, but we know that focusing on yourself in times of need is important. We fortunately still get to play madden with him, talk fantasy football and call him our friend.

But in that, another huge blessing for Richlove came. Fortunately around the same time, one of Matt’s previous band members and friends Triston moved to Nashville. His hard working personality and talent at his instrument were such a perfect fit for us and we knew he would do great in the band. And like that, Triston joined the band.

July of 2018 we began building our own recording studio/practice space in Downtown Nashville. What started as a moldy shell of a forgotten creative space was transformed into the headquarters for our band. It really helps having a producer in our band and giving Adamm a space to record music, for Matt and Chloe to write and for the team to practice. It’s exactly what we needed.

Even this project came with it’s sets of challenges. But we overcame them and after putting in countless hours, we were able to finish construction by the end of the summer.

From there, we wrote more music, did multiple photoshoots, recorded a bunch of songs, shot a music video and practiced for months in preparation of our first show.

We played our first show in November of 2018 in Atlanta and it was a huge success. We made so many new friends and began our journey of creating new community in that market.

Although from the outside it might not seem like we have done much since the release of something in the water, the reality is almost any free hour we have had this past year has been devoted to building our band. To us, this is a full time job. We all have sacrificed something for this band - we uprooted our lives, poured countless dollars into the project and choose to live uncomfortable lives in order to take a chance at doing what we love for a living.

In 2019, we are starting something called Camp Richlove. The idea of this vlog is to give you an inside look at what it’s like to be a brand new band living in Nashville. Through this lens, we hope you can get to know us better and hope we can build community with you.

We also plan on releasing tons of new music, touring and so much more.

We look forward to building community with you. We love hearing from ya’ll, so please don’t ever hesitate to shoot us a message.