A few thoughts on starting the band

Pete and I met at the Minneapolis/St. Paul airport. We were both part of a program that sends college students to study in Tanzania for a semester, and we spotted each other at the departure gate, easily identified by over-packed backpacks and hints of anxiety on our faces. On the plane, Pete had a seat with some of the other students in the program, and I sat next to a Dutch woman with a baby in her lap. I watched from across the aisle as he had the usual get-to-know-you conversations with the other kids, my tray table filling up with bottles and baby toys while we crossed the Atlantic, doing my best to dodge the occasional spit ups.

In Tanzania, we roomed together during orientation, oversleeping our alarm on the first day and struggling to learn basic Swahili. We took trips, wandering around downtown Dar es Salaam to haggle over handmade, child-sized guitars with spray-paint-paint-jobs and traveling for three days on dirty trains and buses to the heart of the continent to visit Victoria Falls. We were fast friends, but we never really brought up the idea of making music together. At the end of five months, we went back to our respective colleges and fell out of touch.

It’s funny that our friendship started in such an exotic place as East Africa, because at heart Pete and I are just two guys from the Midwest. We both had the small town upbringing; we both feel at home in humid summers, freezing winters, and miles and miles of farm fields. In the end, this is what brought us together. A few months after graduating we both found ourselves in Minnesota—Pete in Northfield and me in Minneapolis.

We started hanging out again, and sometimes we would pick up our guitars. Someone in Pete’s family had given him a mandolin for graduation, so he began playing that, stopping in the middle of songs to learn the chords he didn’t know. At some point we became a band, making frequent trips up and down I-35 to try out new songs for friends in living rooms, record demos on our laptops, discuss the merits of creating a MySpace profile, and toss out possible band names over beers at the Contented Cow. It was a great way to spend a Minnesota winter, and in the spring of 2005 we played our first show at the 400 Bar in Minneapolis, opening for a friend’s band.

When it comes down to it, this is what making music means to us: it’s about moving through the seasons with friends, singing songs about the things we know and love. We are ever grateful for all of the people who have joined us in this, and we hope we get to do it for a long time.

--Zach, April 2009
North Manchester, IN