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Sensitive Lead Vocalist: “There’s no polite or delicate way to say this, so I’ll just say it: I’m getting divorced.”

Wisecracking Guitar Player: “Really? Me, too...” (he wasn’t joking)

They say misery loves company. When Nine Fifty set up shop to build their own version of Frustrated, Incorporated in the fall of 2003, they were a typical independent (i.e. - unpopular) Chicago band working on their second album, Heads Up Face Down. The 13 songs about upheaval, transition, redemption and (of course) heartbreak were born from the personal chaos of one shattered marriage, sown by the sympathetic despair of another bruising divorce and finally brought to fruition amidst a number of internal and external band breaches. Fellow indie bands take note: your record should never take more than a year to finish! In the end, however, the music was more about the company than the misery.

2005 was particularly ‘challenging’: the band’s original bass player was dismissed, the group parted ways with their long-time manager and the bottom fell out from the record’s funding. A new bassist was hired, the entire catalog of songs was re-learned and a year-long series of live performances commenced to raise the thousands of dollars necessary to complete the album. One fondly remembered ’gig’: Home Depot + Round Lake Beach + Blizzard. Oh yes.

2006 brought the abrupt resignation of the new bass player (literally fleeing from the stage immediately following the group’s Abbey Pub performance) and the band hiring their third bassist in as many years. Following several additional months in the recording and rehearsal studios, the album was ultimately finished and the band was finally complete.

Writing, performing and recording the music together was never just a method to manage the madness, it was the only way to deal with it. Each track is a fragment of the picture documenting the anarchy which engulfed but never dissolved the band. The result is a record filled with classic American guitar rock, forged by a headstrong fire of sheer will and determination.

As a certain schmaltzy rock star would say, “Here’s one for friendship”.