2021 recap.

Hey friends!

We hope you are doing super well & having a fantastic start to your 2021! We know we are, even though we are super jet-lagged. We thought we would give you all a summary of our 2020, so if you haven’t been able to follow along we’ll get you caught up!

We ended 2020 by watching The Lord of the Rings and Sam said something that really resonated super hard with this year:

“Sam: It’s all wrong
By rights we shouldn’t even be here.
But we are.
It’s like in the great stories Mr. Frodo.
The ones that really mattered.
Full of darkness and danger they were,
and sometimes you didn’t want to know the end.
Because how could the end be happy.
How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad happened.
But in the end, it’s only a passing thing, this shadow.
Even darkness must pass.
A new day will come.
And when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer.
Those were the stories that stayed with you.
That meant something.
Even if you were too small to understand why.
But I think, Mr. Frodo, I do understand.
I know now.
Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back only they didn’t.
Because they were holding on to something.

Frodo: What are we holding on to, Sam?

Sam: There’s some good in this world, Mr. Frodo. And it’s worth fighting for.”

2020 has been an incredible year, even though it is nothing like what we planned or expected.

We started the year in Sweden doing songwriting sessions & our plan was to tour the whole year. We booked 2 tours ourselves & the first one was during January & February. We played shows in nearly 20 cities & it really felt like our music career was moving!

During that time, Sweden’s Got Talent aired where we played our original song, Until I Found You. It was such an amazing opportunity & we got really great feedback from it. We were able to record the song in Nashville at a member of Journey’s studio in & released it in May.

We had also booked a Spring tour with an additional 45 shows. In fact, we had booked enough shows so that we could have been full time musicians. We were actually so busy with 7000apart that we were only home for 2 weeks in 2020 until all of that changed in March when the lockdown started.

We were forced to pivot our plans for the entire year & rethink what our focus was. March & April we essentially spent trying to figure out what direction we should go in since we couldn’t play shows or travel (we also played a lot of Zelda).

During the lockdown Amelie got her permanent Green Card approved & we filled out the application for Amelie to become a U.S. citizen. If all goes well, she’ll be a proper American this year!

We decided that we weren’t going to let 2020 knock us down completely. We had worked way too hard to give up, so we figured it was time to try new things & explore what options were out there. Jon colored his hair blue & we started live-streaming. We tested a lot of different sites, but ultimately fell in love with YouNow. The community on the website became our online family & now we are partners on their platform. It helped to fill that social need in our lives & gave us purpose playing music for others again.

Once things started opening up a little in May we were also able to start performing a few shows each month outside. This felt super strange, but also was so nice to do something familiar that we love.

In the beginning of Fall AGD Entertainment from Nashville reached out to us about possibly working together with their coaching & management program & also started working with a Wisconsin booking agency called ACA Entertainment. Both of these things happened in such a natural way & we are so thankful that they’ve been working out so well!

In October we ended up being able to travel to Sweden using our rebooked June tickets so we were able to see Amelie’s family. That was such an amazing time being able to see her family & to get to see more of the world while still isolating. Since things weren’t going too well in the US, we decided to stay longer than planned.

We spent the last 3 months of 2021 working on new music, working on ourselves, and trying to take a mental break from everything that had happened this year. In December we had the idea of writing a song in collaboration with Suicide Zero, which is the song we are most proud of so far. All the proceeds go to them & the song is talking about mental health, which is incredibly close to our hearts. It also was the first song we produced ourselves & got played on Swedish radio!

We have learned a lot this year including backflips (literally & metaphorically) & it might sound cliché, but we kind of found ourselves this year. We know who we want to be as both people & musicians, we know what inspires us & we know what’s really important.

Yes, 2020 has been incredibly challenging, but so is life. We’ve been through a lot of things since we first met each other in 2012, but we are stronger together. If anything, 2020 has just made us stronger & more persistent in our dreams & goals to make a difference through music. We now know we don’t need to try to be something we are not, we just have to be ourselves.

We hope that you have an amazing 2021 & we can’t wait to share with you the amazing things we have planned. We hope that the music we make means as much to you as it does to us & that 2021 will be an easier year for everyone.

Hugs,
Amelie & Jon - 7000apart