Syracuse-based band Professional Victims went back to basics to find their voice again
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When talks of COVID-19 lockdowns began in New York City in 2020, Ashley Cox and Shawn Sullivan, the founding members of the band Professional Victims, were in Costa Rica. The husband and wife musical duo quickly booked a last-minute flight to their home in North Syracuse to narrowly avoid quarantining outside the country.
Suddenly, they found themselves self-isolated, working from home and unable to play music in public. With plenty of time on their hands, they got to work.
“When things changed like that, and we spent so much time in the house together, we just started writing music, and it was to dig ourselves out of a serious depression,” Cox said. “Everything shut down on the weekend, so anything that we had planned was canceled. We just jammed and we jammed.”
Professional Victims’ fourth album, “High and Mighty,” is the product of their quarantine jam sessions. The album comes out on Nov. 11 with a release party performance at The Song & Dance. Co-headliner KOPPS will also perform alongside openers A Kid Called Danger and The Accountant and All Thumbs.
The new album is Professional Victims’ first since 2015’s “Fathom the Cosmos.” Some of the album’s songs have been in the making for years, like “Let Go,” which the band made a music video for in 2017 and remixed for the album. Other tracks are brand new, products of the couple’s mid-pandemic creative outpouring.
Bassist Jay Fabbri and drummer Rob Zaccaria also joined Professional Victims’ lineup on the album. Both are seasoned local musicians recruited to help elevate the band’s sound.
Zaccaria first saw Professional Victims perform in 2018 at the Syracuse Area Music Awards, where his band, Bad Mama’s Blues Band, won “Best Blues.” He said he instantly loved their music and wanted to play with them. At the time, Professional Victims used a drum machine on stage instead of having a drummer.
He got his chance a year later when Cox and Sullivan invited him to play in Fondu, a disco throwback band they started as a side project. Eventually, he also joined Professional Victims.
“I was blown away with the songs, the production values, and they have such a great reputation of being top-quality musicians in the area,” Zaccaria said. “They might be reading the article the first time they find this out, but I really joined Fondu because I was hoping it would lead to the Professional Victims gig.”
“High and Mighty” features 10 songs in total, and Cox and Sullivan split songwriting duties. Cox and Sullivan both wrote four and collaborated on the remaining two. Their daughter, Chloe Danes, 29, contributed lyrics to “Aftermath” and “Tightrope.”
The two have their own styles as well, Cox said. Her work is “more moody” electronica, while Sullivan tends to write guitar-heavy rock songs.
“We weren’t sure how these two vibes were going to feel on an album,” Cox said.
“It’s always been like that, though,” Sullivan added. “We’re two different songwriters. She writes in her style.”
Besides the band’s main lineup of Cox, Fabbri, Sullivan and Zaccaria, the album features bass from Mike Featherstone on several songs and drums from Jesse Morrison on the track “Let Go.”
Cox and Sullivan met in New York City in the 1990s while both were pursuing music. Cox said she admired his guitar skills and sense of humor and eventually joined his band, Bitch Cassidy. The two fell in love, and when the band fell apart, they formed Professional Victims together. The lineup has rotated throughout the years, but Cox and Sullivan remain constant.
To devote more time to music, Cox recently left her position as a sales executive for CXtec, where she worked for 16 years. After she left her job, the couple moved from the suburbs of North Syracuse to a home in Jamesville.
The house looks out over a thick forest, a tranquil orange-hued sight in the fall. Their neighbors can barely be seen over the treeline. In the middle of this nature, they have a home music studio.
In the past, they recorded at home on their own equipment and brought their tracks to Moletrax Studio in Syracuse for mixing. However, most of the music for “High and Mighty” was recorded at Moletrax, a departure for Professional Victims.
Not only was the recording location new for the band, but the way they went about recording it was too. Early in the process, they decided to record most of the album live. Sullivan was inspired to record live after he first helped another band, Paper Planes, with an EP.
“(Paper Planes and I) went in the studio and actually recorded a six-song EP in one day … everything was all live,” Sullivan said. “I used to be so afraid of it, but with that being not my band, I was just a guitar player in someone else’s band, it was easy for me to just go in and see what happens. It’s no pressure for me. And then it was awesome.”
Zaccaria said he had recorded live a few times before and appreciated that the band was able to record on tape instead of digital, giving the tracks a “warm” sound.
“If you’re listening to a track, that was a full take for the most part — with few exceptions. That is start to finish, you know, no mistakes,” Zaccaria said. “It’s almost like when people talk about wanting vinyl versus listening to something off their phone.”
Professional Victims used this style of recording to give “High and Mighty” a more authentic sound. Sullivan estimated that more than half of “High and Mighty” is recorded live.
“I’ve listened to this album front to back maybe only a handful of times, maybe five times,” Cox said. “And every time (Shawn) would put it on, it would inspire me, I would lose my mind because I can’t believe that this is us. I can’t believe that we did this. I’m so proud of it.”
