Shutters

Joel Koehler began drumming in middle school. As he grew up a bit and entered high school he spent a fair amount of his free time skateboarding which led to his discovery of every subgenera of punk: pop punk, post-hardcore, and emo music. Although these genres were becoming increasingly unpopular Koehler found a sense of honesty and heavy emotion in the music that he wanted to be a part of.

Shutters was born as a solo project when Koehler moved away for college. He was unable to have his drum set in his dorm room so he fell back on his voice and his guitar. The ability to create a whole song on his own gave him a major sense of accomplishment. However, the music he was making did not fit with the sound he was creating with his band back at home, File Thirteen. While he loves his band, he was writing music that was a bit heavier than File Thirteen's lyrics about heelys and vehicular man slaughter. So he began to make a few demos of his own. Unfortunately his lack of production experience made for subpar demos so he reached out to his friend and fellow musician, Drew Kauffman. Together they produced 'Call Me When You Get Home', Shutters' first song. Roughly a year later Koehler is still collaborating with Kauffman on a few Shutters songs. 

Shutters has helped Koehler deal with loss in what seems like the most healthy way possible. "I was going through a painful loss and used songwriting as a form of thereapy for myself, to get my thoughts out of my head," Koehler says. Shutter's first big release will be a six song concept record created out of this pain and healing. The record takes the listener through the five stages of grief. While taking the listener through his grief was not the plan as he started writing he quickly realized that was what he was doing. The album opens with a love song whose goal is to set up the rest of the album; paint a picture for the listener that there is going to be loss. The following five songs are dedicated to denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and finally acceptance. "My hope is for people to see a common thread in their own past or present experience of loss," says Koehler. "And that maybe it can help them see that it's okay to feel and it's okay to experience the whole slew of messy emotions." 

The creation of Shutters was more or less a happy accident. The project was not meant to be released at all. The idea was to just experiment with a sound he had fallen in love with during high school. "My hope is that Shutters, with myself removed from the concept, could capture a nostalgic sound and convey a common human experience," explains Koehler.