Falling Up

“I think a good goal, for me at least, is to have people understand that true, home-like feeling with us. It’s like safety,” says Falling Up’s vocalist Jessy Ribordy. “That we’re going to make music that’s real and honest, and people can feel safe with us. That’s what we’d like to achieve as a band.”

Providing a sense of safety through music isn’t an easy feat by any stretch of the imagination, but for Falling Up, the idea of presenting a promising, positive message with the intense, urgent backing music from this quartet is one of its primary tasks. And with the release of its sophomore BEC/Tooth & Nail full-length, Dawn Escapes, Falling Up hopes to deliver even more to its expansive fanbase.

Hailing from Albany, Oregon, Falling Up transformed into a full-time musical project after graduating high school in 2002. The act quickly made its first impression in the national music scene with its Aaron Sprinkle-produced debut, 2004’s Crashings, which went on to sell nearly 100,000 copies. Following the release, the band embarked on a steady stream of tour dates (with over six tours and 400 shows in a two-year span), relentlessly spreading their message to audiences across the nation.

Determined to forge ahead via its persistent, motivated work ethic, Dawn Escapes finds the band making some sizable changes to its sound and direction, most notably teaming up with famed producer Michael “Elvis” Baskette (Cold, Incubus, Chevelle) in an effort to extend the band’s reach to both Christian and mainstream audiences. “This was like Elvis’ first Christian band,” says Ribordy of the Dawn Escapes session. “He just did the new Chevelle and the new Cold record, and he’d worked with every artist under the sun, all these big people. And then he works with us, these little Christian boys from Oregon. We were like, ‘Wow, this is a big time guy and he’s going to rip on us,’ but we all got along really well. He was a really cool guy, just awesome, and he really clicked with us.”

Launching the creation of Dawn Escapes with a series of writing sessions in the spring of 2005, Falling Up took its material across to the Atlantic Ocean, where the band met up with Baskette, tracking in a studio on the Virginia coastline for a month. Both Falling Up and Baskette enlisted an open-minded approach toward the recording process of Dawn Escapes.

“That’s how this record was — if it sounds cool, then put it in,” says Ribordy of their simple, spontaneous philosophy. “With Elvis, it was like, ‘Let’s just make a song really good. And if it means doing something weird and crazy, then that’s what it means, but that’s what you have to take a chance for.’”

Musically, Dawn Escapes also differs from Crashings with the infusion of more piano-based elements, of which Ribordy performs both on stage and on the recording. Conceptually, Dawn Escapes adds another “puzzle piece” to the initial groundwork laid by Falling Up on Crashings. “The concept has been an idea of ours for a very long time,” says Ribordy. “It’s still not complete; we have ways to complete it with our other records. It’s kind of more of a story. We wanted our music to tell a story and so this new record is just another chapter. It definitely does cover more ground than our first one.”

Falling Up’s latest provides some additional clues to completing the band’s final story. “We’re slowly trying to filter the story out,” says Ribordy. “We want people to see for themselves and find out for themselves in all of the songs, all of the little different clues and symbols, and kind of build into the story, like, ‘Oh, now I get the picture. I understand why they said this in their first record and why they’re saying this now.’”

One of the first songs written for Dawn Escapes is also one of the most meaningful for Ribordy, a track called “Flights.” “That one means a lot to me and it meant a lot, even when we were recording too,” says Ribordy. “Basically, it kind of encompasses the record’s theme about disappearing, about becoming nothing, and that God is everything. We are so insignificant in this world. The reason why I’m saying that is because He is everything and He is everywhere we go. And where we are, and where our imperfections are, is where God increases the most, because we are nothing, and it’s all because of Christ and it’s all because of His grace. When God is around, our weaknesses really come out, but that’s the beauty of it, you know?”

“Contact” is a song with a message that Ribordy feels could be easily grasped by both mainstream and Christian radio. Regarding the song’s sparkling, expansive chorus, full of gorgeous vocal harmonies, Ribordy notes that musically “it’s different enough and separates itself from all the other songs on the record, because it’s all digital, that it really has a cool flavor when it gets to it, because it can reach any genre, but at the same time is way different than any other song on our record.”

With the dozen songs of Dawn Escapes, Falling Up hopes that its sincere messages and earnest outlook will be embraced by a wide array of audiences, largely through a persistent touring schedule, which has been set to maximum motivation from day one. “We’ve been motivated for a very long time, since we started, by people telling us that we couldn’t do things, that we’d get tired of doing things,” says Ribordy. “Our first tour that we went on, the bands that were with us – you know because we’d rock out like crazy every night – they were like, ‘Oh, you guys are going to get tired. In a couple months, you guys are going to start calming down and not rock out so much.’ But that just motivated us even more to rock out harder and to prove that we could do this, that we’re not afraid, we’re not going to fall into the line of like, ‘We’ll just become this band so we can make this much money and we can do this.’ We’re going to do it because it’s what we want to do.”