We’re only this focused on concise songwriting because of our limitations as instrumentalists. If we could write and play self-indulgent, 40-minute, multi-suite instrumental epics at 400 bpm we absolutely would! But alas, we’re a lot closer to The Ramones in terms of technical prowess than Dream Theater, so we have to make do with what we can do.

But in all seriousness, that’s an interesting question because we have gotten feedback from people about our songs being too busy and too focused on technical prowess, even though we don’t think we have nearly enough technical prowess to let it overshadow anything! At the end of the day we’re just trying to write music that we would find enjoyable as listeners, and as much as we all love listening to complicated instrumental parts, we enjoy nice melodies, strong dynamics, and coherent flow in the songwriting a lot more. So that’s what we aim for when we’re writing songs too. The key to writing good prog is to probably not try to write good prog. Just write a song and make it interesting and let it go wherever it needs to go. That isn’t to say that we’re not prone to missteps and to over-writing things, but the great part of being in a band is that you have multiple perspectives and levels of filtration for ideas, and thankfully we trust each other enough to be able to say, “are you really attached to that idea because, if you’re aren’t, we should probably pare it down a bit.”
 

“Andromeda” is probably the song we’re most proud of as a band. It’s the most adventurous thing we’ve written and is also the closest we’ve gotten as a band to the union of ideation and execution. The idea was to tell the story of Andromeda and Perseus, through both words and music, with the music serving to set the mood for the story beats, and I think we got as close to succeeding as we’ve ever gotten. In fact, I think the music tells the story better than the lyrics, which is mostly my fault because I used up all my creative juices writing the guitar parts and had none left over for the words. It’s also fun to play, and challenging as hell to pull off live, so every time we manage to nail it live it puts a smile on our faces.The song that I’m most proud of personally is probably “Sea and Sky”. It was composed around a poem written by my then-girlfriend-now-wife about our then-long-distance relationship. I was so moved by the poem that I had to try and capture the emotions of it in music. I think I may have even succeeded because the instrumental demo I recorded for her made her cry (in a good way…I hope) and hell, if you can make someone cry—for any reason, good or bad—you’re probably doing something right as an artist.

Hoo boy. When we put out Signs of Life we were looking forward to doing some regional touring in the spring and summer of 2020. I was also playing in a couple of cover bands and was supposed to audition for a wedding band. Things were looking up, but the pandemic put the kibosh on all of that. Not only did it make touring impossible, but we also couldn’t jam or even spend any time together. Plus the isolation and anxiety weren’t particularly conducive to being creative and writing and recording new music, despite how hard we tried to be productive at the start of the pandemic. Then I left New York and moved to Connecticut to save on rent and get some space, which will probably continue making rehearsal somewhat complicated if and when things go back to normal enough for us to be comfortable playing live again.

 

I was probably exaggerating a tiny bit when I said it’s the greatest movie of all time—definitely Top 5 though—and my bandmates don’t love it nearly as much as I do, but in the early days of the quarantine in 2020 I got bored and talked them into giving it a shot, because I love goofy metal covers of pop songs. I even got my buddy Kunal, who has his own jazz fusion-y prog project called “Wanderer’s Soul”, to play a sweet saxophone solo on it. Lenny (the bassist) was initially resistant to the whole idea because he, unlike Michael (the drummer) and myself, is old enough to actually remember the ’80s and disapproves of my love for ’80s pop-culture cheese. But he ended up liking our version of Danger Zone so much that we added it to our live set and performed it at our only show in 2021.

In keeping with the cinema-inspired theme we also recorded a Van Halen-ized and Rush-ified cover of “That Thing You Do” last year as a tribute to Adam Schelsinger, Eddie Van Halen, Neil Peart, and a friend of mine who was a terrific musician and an even better person, who all passed away in 2020. We also made a stop motion parody of a “quarantine music video” since those types of videos were all the rage at the time. That’ll probably be the last cover we do for a while though…unless I can talk my boys into covering songs from The Karate Kid.

We’re currently working on our second EP, Winds of Light, and it’s intended to be a loose concept album, because we’re making a serious effort to earn our prog cred! The writing and recording process has been long and painfully drawn out because of the pandemic isolation and my own struggles with a lack of motivation and inspiration, but I think we’re finally in a good place in terms of being motivated to finish it. The plan is to put a single out early next month and to release the EP this Summer!

After that, who knows? Hopefully we’ll actually be able to play a few shows this year, but I’m not getting my hopes up.

I don’t know if it counts as lurking necessarily, but I visited Sputnik every once in a while for a year or two before finally biting the bullet and signing up in 2009. I joined up mainly to review local Indian bands who I felt deserved some exposure, but Sputnik was the reason I discovered bands like Karnivool, Periphery, Tesseract, Destrage, and so on, who have all made a huge impact on me both as a music listener and as a musician. Therefore, if y’all hate my music you have no one to blame but yourselves! You made this happen!

It’s been a pretty interesting experience growing up with the people on this site—from a bunch of plebs in our teens and twenties with far-too-strong opinions about everything to crotchety adults and parents in our thirties and forties with far-too-strong opinions about everything. The site has been an undeniably important part of my life for over a decade and, while I need a break from it every once in a while, the community here has given me a much-needed outlet and a channel of communication with other people who love music, as well as a means to discover some great music.