Tom Howie and Jimmy Vallance have learned a lesson in patience.
Over the past two years, the electronic music duo, known as Bob Moses, have taken the time to create the tracks that will become ‘The Silence in Between’.
The Los Angeles-based duo’s third full album was released on March 4.
“It’s always weird putting out records,” says Howie. “No matter how fast you work on an album, there’s always that waiting period to see what an audience gets out of it. It takes time for people to digest it.”
The duo were based in Canada before the pandemic.
After their last concert on March 7, 2020, they moved to Los Angeles and built their studio.
It was then that insecurity and fear began to set in.
“We didn’t know if we were going to put out another record,” says Howie. “It was a really scary time. But we put hope in the lyrics when we started writing.
Since the majority of his life is earned through music, Vallance agrees there have been moments of fear.
“We lost touch with an audience and people, but we were able to channel everything into creativity,” says Vallance. “It’s a pretty diverse album.”
Howie says doing “The Silence in Between” was a way for the couple to process what they had been through and figure out how to move on.
“We lost a good friend during the pandemic, I had my first child, Jimmy’s parents got divorced and there were so many other upsetting things going on around us,” Howie says. “…music has become like our life raft. It allowed us to really focus on the purity and magic of our working relationship, to regain faith in our instincts and to be as honest as possible.
Howie and Vallance locked themselves in the Los Angeles home studio.
The couple wrote their hearts and ended up with dozens of songs. They took their time, cutting it down to 10 for the album.
“The self-publishing is good and we’re big fans of the 10-track album,” says Howie. “We’ll find a home for the songs that didn’t make the album.”
Vallance says after years of working together, he and Howie are on the same page. This helps make the process easier for the pair.
“Our rule is that we have to feel really confident with the song,” says Vallance. “If it’s good for both of us, it will pass. We set ourselves high standards. Because we write so much and there was time to keep writing, we immediately felt the songs that would make the album. We have learned that it is nice to have time to write and it has produced a deeper flow and we are able to get into the zone. We tend to say “yes” to concerts. It is important to enter into this calm moment.
One track that resonates with fans is “Broken Belief”. The duo knew there was something special about the track at the time of writing it.
“We wrote ‘Broken Belief’ as the protests unfolded in the summer of 2020, when there was this feeling that the world as we knew it was imploding,” says Howie. “It’s about realizing that everything we’ve been told to believe in is broken and recognizing that our priorities may be wrong.”
