When someone close to you is constantly in crisis, you can spend all of your energy on that person without even realizing it. Years go by in the blink of an eye and suddenly you …
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As Danno Simpson sat in the intake room of the Larimer County Jail sobering up, he tried to piece together the disjointed fragments of the night before. He remembered getting angry, swinging his fists and …
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The Comedian, Writer & Actor Talks Parenting & Life On The Road David Cross is perhaps best known from his role as the naive and tumultuous psychiatrist Tobias Futge on FOX’s Arrested Development. His voice …
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Rootsy Fort Collins singer-songwriter Nathaniel Riley can’t help but pour his emotional life into music. To him, songwriting isn’t just art, “storytelling” or entertainment, it’s a way to sort things out and heal old wounds. …
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Snail Mail’s bandleader on love, existential dread and losing her voice Lindsey Jordan’s Pain and Healing Sometimes the best albums are born from the worst circumstances. When Lindsey Jordan first began to string chords, melodies …
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“When I moved to Fort Collins, I didn’t want to have to drive to Denver to go to hardcore shows,” Billy Fabrocini tells BandWagon. “Now people will drive up here to go to shows. That’s what DeadBeat was always about. DeadBeat was about showing people, ‘yeah, we can do it ourselves. We can do it here.’”
In addition to being a hardcore band, xDeadBeatx is “straight edge,” a label that arose from the hardcore scene in 1981, after the seminal band Minor Threat released a 46-second track by the same name that disparaged drug and alcohol abuse. Since then, straight edge has evolved, morphed and splintered into its own genre and subgenres. A strict set of ethical guidelines come along with the musical characteristics — no drinking, smoking, drugs, promiscuous sex or addictive behaviors of any kind for life.
Each member of xDeadBeatx has his own reason for embracing the straight edge ethos. Each of those reasons can be traced back to long before the band was founded in 2019.
J.R.’s life as a touring bluesman came later than some. In his late 20’s, he was living in Brooklyn, bartending and teaching at a pre-school. He had a masters degree in printmaking, but the medium was quickly being usurped by digital alternatives. Still, he needed a creative outlet.
A few years before, J.R.’s college roommate had introduced him to a song that made him fall in love with the blues. It was Blind Lemon Jefferson, a 1920’s singer and guitarist who is sometimes credited as the “Father of the Texas Blues.”
“I had never heard that raw, gritty passion in anything else,” he said. “It just kind of leveled me.”
From then on, J.R. spent his in-between time — in between work, school, relationships and everything else — playing the blues.
“There were a lot of DIY venues that popped up in loft spaces or garages. They were perfect for the type of music I was playing,” he explained. “All you needed was a condenser microphone, a picnic table and a cooler of PBR.”
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Michal Menert has been thinking about fire.
The fires that have burned vast tracts of land near his childhood home in Colorado and not far from his former home in California. The fire that burned a warehouse full of his merch in Detroit last December. A fire that burned down the house in Fort Collins where he used to live with his bandmates in 2004. And all of the other metaphorical fires that have raged through his life over the years.
“Things burn down and then you watch the flowers grow back out of the cracks,” Menert reflected in an interview with BandWagon.
The theme has permeated the Pretty Lights cofounder’s music in recent months.
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