We played back to back Fri. & Sat. shows at Club 90. It's always our favorite place because there's always a good turn out, and it's exhilarating to see people dancing to the music you're playing. We worked on making our transition flow better, and to playing songs right into each other. Also, this was our first time playing this much with Dean, which helped us groove with better.
Friday was great. The highlight for me was Mark's funny leather shirt.
Saturday was remarkable, if we were playing the game Guitar Hero, we were using star power pretty much the whole night. A lot of our friends and family showed up. Nate was in town and he let loose. He danced the whole night, and helped us sing the last song. April was there as well, Mark's ex-band mate and ex-wife, she rocked the house by playing keys for two sets and singing backup vocals. Rachelle, the venue owner sang with us for a song as well. It was a night of good vibes, silliness, and good music. When I thought that we have a million good shots at Club 90, and we wouldn't need any more, these were taken by Aaron's mom Kirsten and are absolutely great!
Be sure to catch us at Club 90 April 20, and 21!
Nate joins us on stage to sing "I Wanna Rock N Roll All Nite"
Rachelle joins us on stage to sing "Don't Stop Believing"
April killed it on the keys!
Mark's guapo shirt.
Allison did amazing as usual.
It was a lot of fun rocking with this gal.
Nate said "If we can play lead guitar, surely we can learn the Cupid Shuffle"
We had the opportunity to play at a wedding reception at the popular museum, The Leonardo. We were not only excited to be playing at one of the nicest venues in Salt Lake City, but the museum's Event Planner said that if she liked us, she'd suggest us for future weddings and events at the museum.
Preparation
Dean really stepped up for this gig. He's still getting up to speed, and he had to learn a lot of material for this gig, and he nailed it! While, we knew all the songs, it was essential to practice with Dean to be able to jive with him.
We learned a few new wedding appropriate songs. The bride and groom requested that we play "I Was Made For Loving You" by Tori Kelly feat. Ed Sheeran. We made an acoustic version of "All of Me" by John Legend for slow dancing. Also some other love themed dance songs, "Brass in Pocket" by Pretenders, "Lights" by Journey, "Sugar" by Maroon 5, and "Some Kind of Wonderful" by Grand Funk Railroad.
We got the idea of incorporating lights into our shows. Luckily t
here's dozens of videos on YouTube, and my friend Tyler gave me lots of advice and lent me some lights. I'll discuss more details about what we did for lighting in another blog post. But, the lighting was essential to our success.
The Show
Congrats to Kristy & Steve!
The Leonardo has a large event center on the top floor. We setup early in the afternoon, because the room was going to be used for the actual ceremony as well as the reception. Aaron's cousins, the Ohumukini Twins, offered to be our sound engineers and they did a fantastic job. We were given the entire auditorium as our "green room". A room were we could put our cases, and eat our delicious catered spaghetti meal.
The audience was very kind, lively, and receptive. It was one of the most energetic crowds we've performed to. It was awesome to see all the colorful lights swirling over all of them. One of the guests asked to sing a Backstreet Boys song. The whole crowd loved it!
The bride and groom afterward shook our hands and told us that they loved us.
Conclusion
It was an awesome show, we had fun, the guests had fun, and the event coordinator, Emily said that we definitely made her list for future performances. We also were able to get a 5-star review on GigSalad! Thanks to Aaron's mom, Kirsten for taking some awesome pictures! More of them here.
It was March 2015, and we were doing really well as a band. We had just released our Starlit Horizons, EP and had been receiving good feedback from it. We were trying to play as many shows as we could to promote our original stuff. Our songs we wrote to be full, energetic, have anthem-like choruses, raging guitar solos, lots of crash cymbals, and harmonic guitars.
Allison's Scandalous Dress
We were invited to play BYU's Restaurant/Venue, "The Wall", part of their semi-annual Battle of the Bands. This was our first time playing in Provo, and we were stoked to be reaching a new audience!
We scoped the competition beforehand by looking at their social media to gauge our chances of winning. There were some good bands playing, and we were lucky to be sharing the stage with such talent.
I probably most-likely overestimated how good we were, at least at live performance. In theory, we had one of the larger followings, probably the best looking web presence (my opinion isn't biased by the fact that I do all of our media, I promise), and our songs had probably the most complexity as far as musicianship was concerned.
Us old geezers at the Wall with our stage banner!
We were pretty stoked, brought all our new stage banner, our fans, friends, and family and we were ready to rock! The first offsetting thing was that we were one of the last performers, and people
looked like they were ready for this event to be over. Everybody was sitting, and it was clear that they weren't going to engage in our high-energy music. Next was the sound guy, he insisted that
we didn't need a sound check. The guitars were so loud and overpowering. It was a small venue, and it wasn't enjoyable to listen to us. The sound guy didn't adjust any level on his mixing board during our whole set. It threw off our mojo every time we'd look out at the empty-eyed, reaction-less audience. (Besides my wife and sister who were jumping up and down by the stage.)
We got our score card back from the judges, and we placed dead last. Most of the comments were, that they couldn't hear us over the overbearing guitar.
Then we got this awesome press in some music blog of one of the concert goers.
It's true, Ryan the bassist at the time was in his early 30's. The rest of us were college-aged; in our early 20's. I just turned 24. I thought that was a weird comment coming from someone attending BYU. Men at BYU go on missions and then begin college at age 21. I'm 6'5", and that might make me look older.
Allison was wearing a modest dress that would be fitting to go to Church. She was moving around the stage, but it wasn't sexualized at all. (You can see how she moves around on the video below)
I hope this blogger's discomfort of women wasn't shared by the whole audience that night. Then there was this gem:
His verdict rage at the end seemed to be directed at us. It's no secret that folk/singer-song writer/indy music isn't my favorite. Even though that genre was extremely trendy at the time, especially in Provo. I grew up on Rush and Dream Theater. More is more. I'm not a fan of super simple guitar or piano riffs, lack of instrumentation, lack of drum fills (if there's even drums), lack of guitar solos, lack of energy and the obsession of trying to be "original", by dressing like a hipster and trying to sound like The Lumineers. *
Whatever the case, we felt like a lot of people were extremely judgmental and it gave us a bad first impression of Provo. (We don't want to discount all the awesome support we got to everyone who went down to that show!) But, we're over it now.
Honestly, the main reason that we don't play down there because we have plenty of opportunity here in Salt Lake City; and we all live in Salt Lake City. When we weren't having as many opportunities to gig, we were willing to make the long drive down to Provo for a 20 - 30 minute unpaid set. We are totally willing to play there again given the right opportunity. In fact, we did a livestream concert at Rock Canyon Studios last June, and it was a blast, you can check out some of those songs on our YouTube!
*My statements on the indy genre were over simplified and generalized. I do appreicate the talent that goes into it, and blah blah blah. If you're offended, get over it. ;) I'm just one guy, what do I know?
The long awaited, highly anticipated album will finally be launched into the world! And we want you to be part of the party! We'll be doing this podcast style, like a radio talk show. We'll all be at Aaron's place, and we'll be live streaming the recordings, talking about stuff, and answering your questions! It's going to be epic! We decided to release this album over a FB livestream! We came to this decision because Nate has left the state, and while we could train a new guitarist and release the album at a traditional concert, this album is long overdue and we cannot wait a day longer to release this! It's been in the works for 2.5 years! Tune in at 7pm, August 9th! Promo Video 1
The city of South Jordan hosted their first annual Battle of the Bands competition, at their SummerFest celebration. The Summerfest had food trucks, carnival rides, and a large number of events such as a 5k race, a tennis tournament, etc... They had several judges, who looked at various factors, such as originality of songs, crowd participation, stage presence, etc... Their were two categories of performances, those under 18, and those over 18, and each category had 4 bands. Everybody that performed, had to submit 2 videos of live performance, and the top 4 submissions of each category were selected.
The first band, 7Bridges, were a Brazilian country acoustic duo. They were not only musicians, but performers. They dressed up. Their banter was scripted, and did a great job connecting with the crowd. It was more of an entertaining show, rather than a couple guys playing a bunch of songs. They harmonized on all of their vocals. I think that in general it is hard for an acoustic group to compete against a full band, because the full band has a more full sound with bass and drums. They were confident, and they did awesome.
EIGHTH DAY
Aaron, our drummer, is away on National Guard duty, so my high school friend, Trevor Ockey filled in on drums. He did an awesome job, especially since we only practiced with him once, 4 days before the show. We struggled in selecting the perfect set list; we weren't sure what the judges would find the most appealing. We ended playing 2 originals, and 4 covers. The covers were selected based on which ones would highlight different attributes of the band, such as guitar solos, and vocals.
Cephas
Cephas, a folk/pop band, was really good. Instead of each member learning their parts to the songs, and playing those parts in unison, they took a step back and really focused on the quality of the overall sound. They played along to pre-recorded audio, which requires that their drummer play to a click track. We tried that route a few years back and it didn't seem to work with us. Also their bassist sang harmonies the whole song, every song, which Mark tells me is difficult.
Carver Louis & Old Lincoln Highway Band
Carver Louis & Old Lincoln Highway Band, a modern country band, was the last band. They're a Tooele band, which got me kind of excited, since I'm a citizen of Tooele now. They are currently finishing up an album at the same studio that we are, and the singer stated that they were going to release their album after it's mixed and mastered later this month, and I was thinking, "Yeah, us too." They had two electric guitar players, the singer played acoustic guitar, a bassist, a drummer, and another guy who played drums, harmonica, and mandolin depending on the song. It's hard to have that many instruments in the mix, but they sounded really good! People were really getting into their music. At one point in their show, they abruptly stopped playing, saying that there was something about the monitor mix not being quite right, and started on the next song.
They played well past the 25 minute limit, and it appeared that they had no intention of stopping until one of the event organizers ran up to the stage and told them to stop. Honestly, that's what we should have done, we had like 3 really good ones that we reluctantly dropped.
Verdict
I was excited to be playing in my home town, and I was very excited at a city government event, especially after watching the television series, Parks and Rec. Every band that played was awesome, and deserved to be the recipient of the award. Cephas was the winner. We were honored to perform with such talented artists, in world's awesomest city. (Although, Rome is a close second.) My wife got a participation medal for playing at SoJo fest tennis tournament, and she may or may not have let me wear it a bit.
We were contacted last week to play at a Wedding Reception last week. The groom is the one who contacted us, we were a surprise for his bride-to-be. She loves the genre that we play. After we played, a DJ came on and played Latino Dance Music. The crowd was awesome, people were dancing, singing along, and cheering us on. The colors were Navy Blue and Pink. The food was delicious. We played in the front yard, which was unusual, but it was huge, and the neighbors were far apart. We wish the best to Hyrum and Anna!
Hopefully we'll get more photos from the wedding photographers! Here's some photos that we took: (Tried to get more of Mark and Aaron this time)
We played an awesome gig last Independence Day. Our host Howard was pleased with our work that he invited us to perform at a Make A Wish Foundation Charity Gig that he was hosting at his house. We played for about an hour and then they had some speakers from the Make A Wish Foundation speak. Then there was a powerful testimonial from a father whose son had a head tumour and about how the organization made that child's wish come true; to meet his favorite baseball team. (Red Sox I think). Then we played for another hour and a half. They had some yummy Venezuelan food catered. Overall it was a fantastic gig. We look forward to playing for Howard again.
Here's a few snapshots from the event, and some videos:
Friday was great. The highlight for me was Mark's funny leather shirt.
