Billboard Women in Music 2025
Pigeons Playing Ping Pong strike a hopeful tone on its buoyant new single, “Dawn a New Day,” premiering exclusively on Billboard today (Nov. 7). The band hopes to use the song to help others do the same.
The Baltimore quartet, no stranger to philanthropic enterprise, has partnered with Backline, a music industry initiative providing mental health and wellness resources, to present the song. “As a band we try to focus on the sunny side of things and try to find the joy in life in an otherwise troubling times these days,” the group’s Greg Ormont says of the song, which was started by guitarist Jeremy Schon and fleshed out by the rest of the band.
“Dawn a New Day,” he explains, “is a reminder to look at the glass half full and use the support of your friends and yourself to get through tougher times and dawn a new day.”
The Backline partnership makes sense, Ormont says, because there’s been a lot of conversations about the mental health arena and, if you need help, ask for it. “That’s something we support. [The song] is about a handful of ways to deal with whatever’s going on in your life, and we feel like [Backline] is doing a great job to destigmatize the conversation about mental health and make sure people feel supported by the people around them,” he says.
“And maybe the bands they like can be there to let them know that if you have any mental health issues currently that’s natural and normal and there are resources that can assist you through that. It seemed like a very logical organization to align with that shares our message that there are people here to support you no matter what, through the good times and bad times.”
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Pigeons, according to Ormont, is also in the midst of unrolling its own foundation around the song “Dawn a New Day,” which he says will support and fund a variety of charities.
“Dawn a New Day,” along with the previously released “King Kong” (featuring the Here Come the Mummies horn section), previews Pigeons’ fifth studio album, which the group has finished recording and expects to release during the spring of 2020.
Meanwhile, Pigeons — celebrating the 10th anniversary of Ormont and Schon meeting and starting to make music together at the University of Maryland, taking its name from a BF Skinner behavioral psychology experiment — has just started a new tour that will lead up to its first-ever arena concert, a New Year’s Eve bash at the ExploreAshville.com Arena in North Carolina. The theme is “The Electric Kool-Aid Asheville Test,” for which Ormont promises Pigeons “will be pulling out all the stops.”
“It will be quite the spectacle, as the theme might imply,” Ormont says. “Plus it’s our first time playing an arena, which feels weird to say but we’re more than ready to take it on full-speed. I love those holiday shows, like New Year’s Eve and Halloween. We always try to bring the heat, but these shows are particularly special, and we try to one-up ourselves every year. I think this one is gonna be hard to beat, but I’m more than up for the task — of trying, at least.”
Listen to “Dawn a New Day” below.