and in hand. Whether it’s reggae blaring from speakers set in dorm windows on those first hazy days of spring, a car shaking with an ambitious hip-hop bass line, or Mozart playing on a rehearsal piano late at night, it seems the college experience is always set to a distinct rhythm. For most of us, all that means is there’s always a song in our head-and usually one we didn’t put there. But what does it mean to the musicians whose job it is to actually come up with said tunes? And how does college perpetuate an environment in which would-be crooners can come together and learn how to not only make music, but how to actually make something of a living doing so?
According to USM sophomore Ben Burgess, lead singer for the band Vague Valentine, “In college, there are so many options at your fingertips…I wasn’t even planning on going to college, but now that I’m here, I realize it was silly to think I could have just stayed in my hometown and made anything happen that way.” In the past year, Vague Valentine has gained a reputation as one of the up-and-coming bands in Southern Maine, opening for Paranoid Social Club and Jeremiah Freed. Currently restructuring after losing lead guitarist Calvin Goodale to the Pete Kilpatrick Supergroup, Vague Valentine will be out and about again within the next month, and is scheduled to play Orono’s annual music festival, Bumstock, on April 23.
While Vague Valentine is an example of a band actively playing out to a growing audience, college also provides a forum for those-for lack of a better term-less ambitious artists who simply want to experiment with their music. Dominic Aulisio, currently in his first semester in the USM Creative Writing MFA, started the band Solyoni with his best friend, Dan Lurie, during their undergraduate years at Ohio University, purely on a whim.
“We had this massive six-sided keyboard; we basically decided it was our responsibility to create a band because we had this great centerpiece.” Though the band began with modest ambitions, Solyoni has continued to grow over the past few years, and now boasts an impressive repertoire of original songs penned by Lurie and Aulisio.
Lacking the music classes, bulletin boards, and chance encounters that abound on a college campus, the real world is admittedly a tougher place to make a go of it as a musician. Oren Robinson, a 2004 USM Music Education graduate, is working with fellow musician Ryan Myrick on building both a base of original work, and on finding appropriate venues in which to play. Robinson and Myrick regularly play the Early Evening Show at Buckfield Maine’s Oddfellow Theater, but Robinson admits, “I wish I’d done more about playing out when I was in school, where there was an actual music scene and a cultural hub to draw from.”
Whether you’ve always secretly fancied yourself the next Janis Joplin, or are content to quietly kazoo for the cat, it seems that the university climate is the ideal one in which to test your musical limits. So the next time you’re talking yourself out of taking that number from the ragged ad looking for a bassist for a seedy-sounding band, don’t be so quick to deny yourself. College is, after all, all about experimenting.
For more information on the musicians mentioned in this article, check out: www.vaguevalentine.com,
www.solyoni.com and, for the Oddfellow Theater season schedule, www.oddfellows.com.