Whoever came up with the grand idea that a band’s essence could be adequately conveyed in a few paragraphs should be shot. With that said, here I go. I was lying in the back of the van the other day. We were en route to a show in Mississippi, and I was taking care of my most important tour responsibility- namely, that of sleeping for the majority of the time spent in the van. I’m confident that I could’ve slept for the duration of the entire trip, but my nap was cut short by what sounded like a machine gun shooting continuous rounds into the side of our van. Oh God, the terrorists found us, I thought to myself.
Now… the idea that terrorists could gain anything by coming after my band, specifically, seemed a little farfetched at first. But it only took half a second for the connection to begin registering, for the wheels to start turning, for my mega-genius to piece everything together. (Here’s where it gets really good…) I could almost hear a choir of children singing the refrain of “America the Beautiful” as I sat up abruptly to symbolize how swiftly and clearly the truth had been revealed to me.
With much accomplished in the last four and a half years, and with our having established ourselves as a band that can’t be pigeon-holed, a contrived rant would be easy to manufacture. Yes, we’re a band mostly comprised of siblings. Yes, we walk along that fine line of attracting certain attention by being female-fronted, but without being pegged as a gimmick. Yes, our sound is not only accessible to a wide mainstream audience; it’s also innovative and makes original use of catchy pop hooks, so we can impress even the toughest critics. Yes, our music transcends the trendy genres that pop up and fade out in the course of six months. C’mon… I know you’re starting to hum along with the children’s choi yourself.
We’ve sold 12,000 copies, collectively, of our two self-released EP’s. We’ve done an extensive amount of touring, much of which has been self-booked. We’ve managed to create a network of friends and fans through our websites, both cruiserweight.com and our Myspace site, to which our plugged in drummer, Yogi, pays significant attention.
So what does this all mean? You can put all these elements together and still not completely grasp the spirit of Cruiserweight. I could take a simplistic mantra off the back of a straight-edge band’s tee shirt, (i.e. “I’ve made my choice,” or “We’re a gang that plays music,”) and try to pass it off in a half-assed attempt to explain the unexplainable. But there are no mantras. We don’t feel restricted by what’s cool or acceptable right this minute- if we did, we’d stand no chance of lasting, and then the Thanksgiving dinner that followed the break-up would be a little bleak. We just do what we love- it’s the only thing that feels right. Shit, maybe that’s our mantra. And you know who hates cheesy optimistic mantras? That’s right. Terrorists.
Let me paint a little picture for you. We drive from city to city, not knowing where we’ll stay night after night. There’s nobody telling us when to go home, how to be creative, or how to do any of what we do. Sure, we ask for help sometimes. Our families, our label, our manager- we have a great support system. But when we have a tire blow-out on the road that’s as loud as a machine gun, who changes the tire? Who decides whether or not we can afford to buy a new one? We make our rules. (To be specific, Urny, our guitarist/leader, would actually change the tire, while the rest of us stand around, laughing that none of the rest of us ever sully our hands with such work. It’s the nature of our band. Urny knows that his taking care of the mundane crap is a sacrifice well worth being made. He’s like Mufasa in The Lion King. He’s wise enough to take care of all the other animals, but he’s okay with it, and we know it when he’s singing to Simba about the circle of life.)
We embody the American dream. We’re gonna have a big-ass American flag airbrushed on the side of our van next week… not really. But it’s plain to see how I could actually think that Al Qaeda is after us. No matter what stands in our way, you know who’ll prevail. Go ask George W. Bush. C-R-U-I-S-E-R-W-E-I-G-H-T spells FREEDOM, bitches. Hallelujah.
