Buddy Nielsen celebrates the 20-year anniversary of Senses Fail with heartfelt essay about the “path to healing”

While perhaps not attaining the kind of commercial heights that some of their contemporaries did in the emo/pop-punk/post-hardcore boom of the early part of the new millennium, Senses Fail have certainly managed to outlive some of their same cohorts by many years and many records released. That in and of itself is pretty impressive, but even moreso is the ability of Senses Fail to adapt to different musical climates and trends, even exploring different genres of their own.

You might also be surprised to hear the band is turning 20 this year. In fact, vocalist and founder Buddy Nielsen recently explained in-depth about how the band actually got together, and you can read that below. It’s a lengthy read!

In a lengthy post via Substack, Nielsen explained how the band’s name came together, as well as the various member changes, and that the band will “never end”.

On this day twenty years ago myself, Dan Trapp, Dave Miller and Garrett Zablocki got in a basement together in River Vale, NJ and played music. It was the official start of what would be the Senses Fail you have come to know. It’s hard to quantify what that means for me. There is no real separation from who I am and what the band Senses Fail is. I am not the same person I was when I was 17 but there are aspects of that person that shine through, the same can be said for the band. There have been many so many changes: people, years, age, genres, music styles, managers, bands, labels, tours but the constant has been what the band represents. It has always been committed to the journey of self discovery leading down a path of spiritual and intuitive healing. What I have written music and lyrics about is the journey and the path to healing.

The name Senses Fail was actually coined in an earlier iteration of Senses Fail. Yes! There was actually a previous version of Senses Fail that existed with just Garett myself and a couple other people in late 2001. We played one show at Ridgewood High School in September 2001 and disbanded shortly there after. The name came to me while studying Brahim ascetic practice in an Eastern Philosophy class I was taking. The idea of ascetic practice in early Hinduism was based upon looking at the body as unsatisfactory and something that needed to be tamed. A body that had sense pleasures and desires distracts from the spiritual yoking and obscures the experience of Atman, which is considered true self or ultimate self. After studying Hinduism we looked at Buddhism, specifically the story of Gautama Siddartha, the birth name of the Buddha. For those who don’t know the story here is a brief summation: Gautama was a prince, he grew up rich and well to do. He was shielded by his parents from ever seeing that outside world. One day in his late 20’s he ventured outside the palace walls and encountered what is referred to in Buddhism as, the four sights. He came across someone of old age, someone who was sick and diseased, someone who had died and their resulting lifeless body and an ascetic who was practicing meditation to end human suffering. Having never encountered these aspects of life he was deeply troubled and vowed to search for answers to these existential experiences. He left his family, renounced his rights to his father throne and set off into the world to practice asceticism. Over time he realized the practice was not to avoid and transcend suffering but to be able to walk a middle way between the absolutism of extremes.

This story of a heroes journey from the experience of suffering, to acceptance of suffering and finally to equanimity with suffering, deeply touched me. From one of the passages in Herman Hess’ Siddartha I pulled the name Senses Fail. At the time I believed it to mean that our senses fail to deliver us from present suffering and in actuality might cause deeper suffering. I now have a much more nuanced understanding to what the senses mean and a more objective relationship to what they show me about my own truth or the truth I perceive. My senses are no longer the only way I construct my view of the world. I include mind and how the mind functions as a sense organ. I am in a body that encounters other things in the world and through my senses I am able to have experiences with those objects. My mind interprets these sense experiences and I start to build a belief system around what I feel, taste, touch, hear, see and think. Ultimately truth is subjective and what is true in my experience is not true in another’s experience. Our senses fail to show us exactly what is true because what is true can only be experienced from our limited subjective sense organs. Of course when we touch something hot, we recoil and in pain or fear of pain and that is a shared experience of truth. However, as you’ve seen in our current political climate, agreed upon facts and experiences are subject to many different truths and rarely there is agreed upon Truth.

Senses Fail is not just the name of the band, it is a statement I made and agreed with all those years ago. I will never answer the question of what this experience of life is, senses fail to show the immense expanse or the subtle nuances of what this is but our senses are the gates to which we enter show of life. What is this? That is the question I ask. To try and give an answer to the whole of our experience is impossible. What we get when we look at our senses and how our senses fail us is a chance to be open to what life is and how life is happening. Senses fail us when we fully believe them to be true and factual or who we dismiss them as fully false. Asking the question can give us a chance to bypass the ideas of our senses and the stories we craft out of them and allow us to have direct contact with the here and the now.

I feel an immense amount of gratitude for the support for all these years. There were many times I almost walked away, either because I couldn’t bare the experience or because it didn’t make sense to continue. At this point I do not think it ever ends. There is no appropriate time to stop searching. There might be periods of non-activity but the band will never end because we exist outside of just what a band is and have hopefully become and idea of how to live and look at life. Even when I am not here my voice will be.

Of particular note, the band’s new full-length album arrives later this year, so you’ll want to stay excited for that as well.