That’s a side of the hill finger eleven are well acquainted with. The band had a rocky start when Mercury Records dropped the band right after it’s debut album Tip came out.
    “Right before that, the drummer we recorded our first record with (Rob Gommerman) quit. So we were busy trying out new drummers; we mush have tried 35 drummers, and no one was any good. Then we got the news that we were dropped. For a split second it was the lowest. Bu then we said, ‘Fine, we’ll find a better label.’ No one was going to tell us that it was over. If they didn’t get it, why would we wanna be on their label any ways? That whole experience opened our eyes to a lot of things on the business side that we didn’t pay attention to before. That’s why we signed with Wind-Up Records.”
    A lot of that anger and disappointment greased the creative process for finger eleven whit it recorded it’s second and latest album, The greyest of blue skies. “Overall, the vibes of the new record is about the positive and negative of the whole experience of getting dropped and pulling ourselves together. At the time, we didn’t think it was a positive thing, but now that we’re looking back on it, we see it really was a good for us; a maturing experience. It was the inspiration for us to make an amazing record.”
    “As we got into the heart of our six-month recording session, things got cloudy. It was as though we had been admiring a mural from half an inch away and finally thought “What does this thing look like?” Once we could see the big picture, once we were listening to the songs as “songs” rather than a pile of parts, we started to get that clarity back. The music started shaping our visions and us, and with that, a new vision started shaping the songs.”
    The artwork for The greyest of blue skies depicts a marionette being dropped by its’ puppeteer only to be picked up by another puppeteer. It’s a metaphoric representation of the band’s trials and tribulations since their debut, says Black who came up with the idea while he was doodling, one of the ways he likes to pass time.
    “The idea was to show what happened since we were dropped with this kind of visual pun. On the cover you see the marionette is dropped, and then inside he picks himself up ans starts climbing uphill. In the end, he’ll get picked up by a different hand, and he’ll get dropped again. It’s a cycle we all go through. The important part is what happens between those points. The marionette keeps getting up and trying, and so did we.”