Secondhand Serenade

It’s not often that you get a band whose story hits genuinely heart-breaking peaks, but Secondhand Serenade are very much one of those bands. Born in Melo Park and raised in the San Francisco Bay area, John Vesely discovered music at the age of twelve and after that there was nothing else that he wanted to do with his time. He learnt to play the bass guitar as he figured there would always be a band looking for a bassist and as it turned out, he was right. He spent the next eight years hopping from band to band, playing ska, hardcore, rock and everything in between until he turned 20. When he hit that age he picked up an acoustic guitar and started writing songs, and like so very many others before him, the inspiration behind that burst of creativity was a woman.

The woman in question would become his wife soon afterwards, and Candice Vesely knocked John so hard for six that he started writing songs just for her. However, John felt creatively liberated by songwriting on the guitar, and the songs he was writing started to get very, very good very, very quickly, so he began to record them and needed a name to perform them under. Inspired by how these “serenades” were being sung to his wife and everyone else was, for lack of a better phrase, an afterthought, he called this new project of his Secondhand Serenade. By 2005, he’d recorded his debut album of demos, “Awake”, he’d set up an online headquarters on the Secondhand Serenade Myspace page, and within a year he was the sites most succesful unsigned artist.

He sold over 15’000 copies of Awake without any label assistance whatsoever, and so the label’s came knocking soon afterwards. By early 2007, Vesely had signed with Glassnote Records and “Awake” had been reissued, charting at a highly respectable #16 on the Billboard Heatseekers charts. More important than any chart placing however, was the concerts that he played off the back of it, making his TV debut on Late Night With Conan O’Brien, supporting The All-American Rejects and Hawthorne Heights and playing festivals with the likes of My Chemical Romance And Linkin Park. Vesely had truly arrived, and the one thing left to do was take the sound he’d established with “Awake” and expand upon it. However, life is rarely that fair.

Here’s where things get heart-breaking, as John and Candice divorced in 2008 with two little boys in the middle of it all. Vesely poured the pain of that experience into “A Twist In My Story”, his second album and his first with a full band. Fortunately, Vesely could take some solace in the fact that “A Twist In My Story” also acted as his commercial breakthrough, with its lead single “Fall For You” peaking at number 21 on the Billboard Hot 100 and going platinum over the course of summer 2008. Ever since then, Secondhand Serenade have been one of the unsung heroes of American rock in the 2000’s, not quite getting the recognition that some of their peers have seen but releasing more consistently great music than the vast majority of them ever could. Yes, their story might be sad at points, but so is everyone’s, regardless of whether they form a band or not, and because of their skill at taking the difficult points of life and making something beautiful out of it, Secondhand Serenade come highly recommended.