Welcome to our World

My name is Ian, and I’m the singer, songwriter and central member of Double Eyelid.

Welcome to our world.

For almost as long as I can remember, I’ve been a musician. Until my early 20s, this focus on music was fairly single-minded. I played in bands throughout high school and into my studies at the music department of Queen’s University (in Kingston, Canada), where I met Double Eyelid producer and sometimes guitarist Karl Mohr and our keyboard virtuoso Benjamin Mueller-Heaslip. Over time, I began to branch out into other modes of expression like theatre and visual art. This ultimately led me to work on integrating the 3 to tell stories, resulting in videos like this:

I formed Double Eyelid in 2009 after years of working as a support player for other artists – as a bassist, guitarist and even as a drummer. It wasn’t like that cliche of ‘wanting my turn in the limelight’ – far from it, it actually took me years to get comfortable onstage as a singer. It was because I had a vision that I wanted to fully commit to, in a way that you only really can when you’re the one driving the project.

Over the years Double Eyelid has gradually found an audience that supports our weird brand of goth-tinged electro-rock. We’ve gotten support from DJs and reviewers around the world who hailed our first release as a ‘dark classic’ and a ‘shot in the arm for new goth and cold wave music.’ But as an independent band, our relationship with our audience is still a very special and intimate one that is 100% a two-way street. The interesting thing about where we’re at now is that we’ve gone from having no audience to having an audience that’s at a size where we can be on a first-name basis with them. As independent artists, the line between fans and friends is blurry to the point of being nonexistent. Fans are involved in everything we do – from helping us make videos to booking tours, giving us places to crash, bugging DJs to play us, connecting us with other bands and ultimately inspiring our work. It’s a special connection that I wouldn’t trade for anything.

And it’s this connection that led me to build this new site, because I wanted to create a new platform for interaction with the people who listen to and care about our music. Think of this as a larger window into what we do. I’m tired of the social networks – not everything I want to say can be condensed into a short post on Facebook or Twitter. So rather than spamming 99 social networks with the same thing, I’ll just post everything here – unfiltered.

Leave a comment below, tell us where you’re from and what you think – and if what you’ve heard so far is interesting, click here to listen to our full album.

Thank you for being a listener and for being part of this.

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