Artists are always looking for ways to connect with their fans, but what the pop trio Parachute did recently sets a new bar for fan outreach.
They recruited hundreds of fans of all ages, sexes, races and ethnicities from far-flung geographic regions that traversed the nation — from quiet Southern streams, sloping plains, bustling cityscapes, farmlands and front porches — to photograph themselves holding a sign with a single word. All told, they received 350 images — the number of words in the title of their new single “Without You” — which they compiled over two weeks into a video for the song. The video came out on Facebook last week.
“It was actually really fun to do,” Parachute keyboard and sax player Kit French said last week. “As you can see, some of those pictures are a lot different from each other and pretty fun to look at.”
French said they assigned their “volunteers” a word and then edited the words together to create the video. The trio themselves appear several times in the video, as do their wives and girlfriends.
“Without You” is off Parachute’s months-old fourth studio album “Wide Awake,” which French said is the band’s most complete work in its 10-year career.
“We are super, super proud of it,” said French, who formed Parachute with high school buddies Will Anderson, who sings lead vocals, and Johnny Stubblefield, the drummer. At one time they had two other members, but both left to pursue higher education and other endeavors.
Parachute brings its “Wide Awake” tour to The Rock on Tuesday, July 12, an encore of sorts to the band’s show last September at the inaugural My 92.9 Oro Valley Music Festival.
Parachute opened that daylong festival on the Golf Course at Vistoso, getting in one of the only full sets of the day before a late monsoon struck and whipped the festival grounds into a windy, sopping frenzy.
“It was definitely raining,” French recalled. “We had lucked out and were the only ones to finish a full set.”
The Rock is a small University of Arizona-area venue with a reputation for catching bands on the rise.
Parachute has arguably surpassed that point. Their first three studio albums made it to Billboard’s Top 40 album charts, with two of them cracking the Top 20. They’ve toured with big-name artists from Gavin DeGraw and Michelle Branch to Kelly Clarkson, who brought Parachute along on several U.S. dates and the European leg of her 2010 “All I Ever Wanted” tour.
French said that even though the Rock is smaller than venues it’s played on the tour, “We’re not scaling down on any of the production and stuff like that that we brought along for (the first leg of the tour).”
“We are bringing a small and exciting show and having a good time with it,” he said. Tuesday’s show starts at 7 p.m. and it’s all-ages.
