Minor League Rocker

Whenever people find out I’m in a band, they always ask me what kind of music we play. And it’s really a very hard question to answer. The best I can usually do is to tell them some of the cover songs we might mix into a set with our originals.

That usually helps, but the picture is far from complete.

When we first started out, Todd had this man-crush on The Refreshments. So a lot of the songs were in that vein, with kind of cutesy-pop lyrics welded to my much more hard rock-influenced guitar phrasing and tone. That marriage of sounds made one person say we were “a cross between The Scorpions and The Refreshments.”

That changed as new people came into the band, and as Todd experimented more with the heavier side of music. These days, he’s all about Primal Fear and trying to sing like Ronnie James Dio - I approve on both counts.

Early on, people said we sounded like everything from Husker Du to Dick Dale. These days, I hear the phrase “old school metal” a lot. That means no screaming or grunting, but a big, heavy guitar sound and a medium-busy drummer who gives us some nice double-bass drumming.