The Violet Lights are Joel Nass and Amber Garvey, who left Green Bay, Wisconsin, for Los Angeles in 2008 and started the band within a year. He sings and plays guitar; she plays keyboards and sings. Their first record, the five-song Sex & Sound EP, was cut at Sunset Sound in Hollywood, their first time in a real studio, produced by Nass and paid for by the two of them. It came out on 24 May 2011. The title track is the third song, 3:39 long, and by August college radio had picked up the EP: No. 12 on CMJ’s adds chart, then No. 158 on the Radio 200.
Nass told the Wilmington StarNews he wanted the EP to capture the move from the calm of the Midwest to Los Angeles, and said Garvey called the result “controlled chaos”. The lyric of “Sex & Sound” is a list of demands, everything and right away, and its last verse turns jealous. Buzzbands.LA filed it under Britpop, naming the Kooks, Oasis and Johnny Marr. In January 2012 the band gave the song away as a free download ahead of a wider release of the EP that April.
The tour behind it started on 25 January 2012 in Portland, Oregon, billed as 45 cities. Nass had quit his office job, and on the road they played as a duo, without the full band they used at home, sleeping in a cubby under a loft for their gear. On 17 March they played South by Southwest in Austin. A second leg ran from June through the summer and a third from October to a last show in Chicago on 20 November, with stops in Canada, and across the year that came to more than 100 dates. In July Garvey wrote that they had spent three of the first six months of 2012 on the road, showering at YMCAs and truck stops and often earning less than the day’s gas and food.
They toured again in January 2013 and released “New Year’s Song” that year. By Garvey’s account, they stopped making music and touring about a year later to raise a family. In June 2024 they put out Old Goodies, five songs from those tours that had never been recorded, and their site listed a show at the Lime Light Pub in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, for 23 July 2026.
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