Welcome to the Ghost Party
Monsoon is a two-piece indie rock band from Athens, Georgia who weave together unorthodox styles to create music that dips between the conscious and subconscious. Their new album Ghost Party is now available on all streaming platforms.
It was only a couple months after the release of Monsoon's debut album “Ride A’Rolla” that the band garnered the attention of Toyota and were contacted about using the title track for a commercial. From there, the placement landed a spot just after the 2016 Super Bowl half-time show and the band was invited to participate in the world’s first “360 multi-cam music video” launched by Google. Between the reach of the placements and touring, Monsoon gained a small cult-like following along the East Coast. “I had no idea something of this magnitude could happen at such an early stage in our career. It’s the kind of thing you hope for, but don’t ordinarily see from a band that’s just starting out.”
Post Super Bowl, both members of Monsoon [Sienna Chandler and Joey Kegel] went their separate ways before reuniting to create Ghost Party. “I think we were the youngest group ever to say ‘we’re gettin’ the band back together.”
Joey took some time for himself, traveled to Canada, became an expert in cars, and explored things outside of music. Chandler continued Monsoon, played a supporting role in the upcoming film Ragged Heart, and worked as an extra on Walking Dead. "I attended a few semesters of college, and even received a certificate in recording engineering in Chillicothe, OH where I lived for several months."
"Towards the end of my time in Ohio, I had an overwhelming need to reconnect with Joey and return back to the foundation that we’d built with Monsoon. We’d never officially had a falling out, there were simply too many cooks in the kitchen after the release of Ride A’Rolla that were pushing their own agenda and it inevitably led to our split. We stopped playing and stopped talking for two years. I held off from reaching out. I wrote the feelings off as delayed blues from the initial parting, but over time, it became apparent that I was feeling intense grief over the lost friendship. I was mourning someone who was still alive and mourning a time in my life that felt complete. Most of all, I felt like too much time had passed to fix any of it. I felt so many emotions. At one point I remember writing music pretending that we were still in a band together as a tactic to trick myself into creating decent material, instead all of my anger fell out. That’s when I started writing Ghost Party. It became a way for me to make sense of why I felt like this and figure out how I was going to fix it. I was inside my head 100% of the time, living and breathing my own subconscious. Finally, in October 2017, I called Joey and we haven’t spent a day apart since.
Ghost Party is the soul creation of Joey and myself. We are every voice and every instrument on the album. Joey mixed the songs, co-produced the harmonies, and engineered many of the sections on the record. I wrote and arranged the songs, produced harmony sections, and am in charge of creating our music videos- writing, directing, editing footage, SFX makeup, everything except holding the actual camera. We’ve become incredibly selective about who we involve in our lives both personally and professionally. Ride A’Rolla caught us off guard because we were young and unable to see red flags as they arose. It was an incredibly difficult lesson, but ultimately, an invaluable one that needed to be learned so that moving forward we would become the unbreakable extension of one another that we are now.
Notable mentions
Monsoon featured in independent film "Ragged Heart" that premiered at the Austin City Film Festival Oct 2021. Sienna Chandler cast as supporting role "Quinn"
Chandler plays role in Modest Mouse-Lampshades on Fire
Monsoon featured in Wieuca's "Get Off My Cloud" song and video
Monsoon's "Ride A'Rolla" placement in the 2016 Toyota Corolla commerical that aired on the Super Bowl
Chandler plays role in Of Montreal's "Bassem Sabry"
Monsoon featured in Don Broco's everybody