STLCC-Meramec students rock the music scene with a new sound and original music
Kimberly Morice
-Sr Staff Writer-
Heartbreakers, a bar on Laclede’s Landing in downtown St. Louis, has a graffiti-covered entrance, brick walls and a disco ball. People of all ages congregate in the back corner, furthest away from the makeshift stage at the front of the bar. Sound checks, feedback and guitar strums make their way to the group in the back.
After 45 minutes of mind-numbing sound, three STLCC-Meramec students take the stage.
“Check, one, two, check,” Derek Baker, lead singer and guitarist, mumbles into the microphone.
With the sound check done, Chaseblue takes the stage.
“Senior year, there was a battle of the bands at our high school so we made the band a month before that and it was terrible. We won, but it was still really bad,” Baker said.
The guitar crackles through the speaker and reverberates throughout the bar.
“These venues ask you to sell so many tickets, so our family really helps out with our ticket sales and come out to every single show. It makes us look a lot better, I think,” Baker said.
Baker fumbles with his guitar amp before beginning the next song.
“I get stressed out really bad,” Baker said. “We just play a lot. With this last show we didn’t get to practice a lot because I had strep throat, but we just played for about three days straight and we just go through the set each time. We’re at a point now that if we were to play at a venue every night, we wouldn’t have to practice. Sometimes we forget–I forget words and guitar parts all the time.”
Two years ago, no one had heard of Chaseblue, but they have slowly been working their way up in the local music scene.
“Things just started picking up, we just started doing bigger shows. Making more friends with bigger bands helps out a lot,” Baker said.
Another band shuffles through the door, late, setting equipment up against the wall.
“What I like the best is when we play and then other bands come up and talk to us. People talking to us about how we’re different musically from what you would normally hear here is my favorite part about it,” Baker said. “I like being different, I’ve always liked to be different.”
Chaseblue opened with their original song, “P.O.W.”
“I wrote it in the state of mind if I was a prisoner of war or something, so I put myself into a dark place for that one. It’s actually one of our more popular songs.” Baker said this song holds his favorite lyric from any of their songs. “’And I’ll gasp for air to keep myself from suffocating with thoughts of you wrapped around my head’.”
Green lights reflect off the disco ball and bounce off of spectators.
“Just overall hearing that song, you can tell that [Baker] spent a little bit of time writing it. So it’s one of my favorites, lyrically especially,” Tony Medina, bassist, said.
The audience members sway along to the song playing through the speakers of Heartbreakers.
“I get really heavily influenced by what I’m listening to at the time. I think that’s what makes our music sound so different from song to song; it’s still us playing so it comes together,” Baker said. “I write songs so sporadically and whatever I’m listening to will influence each song a little bit.”
Miles Johnson rolls along the drums as Baker and Medina sing together in melody.
“Other bands have compared us to Saves the Day, The Weaker Thans–which I still don’t get, but whatever,” Baker said. “Basically what they’ve said to us is that we sound like harder rock-sounding music for the most part with pop influences. It’s really hard to give every band a genre, there’s too many.”
With musical tastes and sounds always changing, Chaseblue said that it is always a new surprise with what they come up with.
“It’s kind of hard to pin [our influences] down because musical taste changes so much and there are new things that inspire you,” Miles Johnson, drummer, said.
Johnson taps his drumsticks while Baker belts out lyrics.
“We are here,” Baker said. “I just want people to know about us, that’s the hardest thing. Nobody cares anymore about bands, they do and then they don’t.”
For a local band, Chaseblue said they have a decent following. Thirty to 40 fans came out to listen to their music at Heartbreakers.
Faster-paced songs prompt bigger reactions from the crowd, causing a half-naked woman standing on the bar to strut to the music.
The last note is played, Baker shouts out a thank you to the crowd and a bra is thrown on stage, to be picked up by Baker. “This isn’t my size,” Baker mumbled into the microphone after studying the piece of lingerie.
“I think it’s just fun to perform for people, there’s not a whole lot else that I get out of it,” Johnson said. “I still don’t get the whole ‘chicks are into musicians’ thing, that doesn’t happen to me.”
