"What kind of music do you play?"

Tyrannovox @ Crane Farm (7/24/2010). Photo by David Loomis. Undeniable charisma by Raymond Crane.


Hello, there. Ken here.

I don't know about the other guys in the band, but there's one question I get asked a lot: "What kind of music do you play?"*

It's very hard for us to describe our own music. I know it's a stereotype, and you've probably heard it before. Ask a musician what he plays, and he'll go into a long, stammering speech about the 46 different genres he incorporates into his playing. The short explanation is that it's just not something that we've thought about very hard. But it's also something that we shouldn't think about very hard.

Allow me to explain. When Raymond, Mike, and I first convened a long time ago, we didn't know what kind of music we were going to make. We each brought our own skills and tastes with us, and we tried to keep an ear out for what was meshing and what wasn't. Our earliest music was born of that process. We never gave it a name, and we didn't set out to make music that fit within a certain category. We just tried to let it happen.

I think it's for the best that we can't easily describe what we do. If we had set out to make music with a certain genre in mind, then we might have rejected some very good material. Genres separate the stuff that fits in from the stuff that doesn't. For us, whatever fits in is whatever sounds good to us. If we were to decide what our music is (and what it isn't), then we might lose that freedom. We might start accepting and rejecting stuff based on whether or not it "fits in" with the category we're striving for, rather than using our own sense of what's good and what isn't.

For that reason, I just call it "rock." It's broad, but it seems to cover the most common ground. If you want a more elaborate answer, you can listen to our songs on the left side of this page.

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Don't forget about our show at The Loft this Wednesday. Check out the details in this post.

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*It's right up there with "You're the one in that Tyrannosaurus band, right?"