Black is the New AP Style

Spending summers in a van has its good and bad moments, and Forth Worth rock band The Unlikely Candidates can tell you all about it.

They’re not strangers to life on the road, as they’ve been touring together nonstop over the last six years. They’ve gone through record labels, RVs with no air conditioning and towns large and small to get to where they are now.

What gets them through long, hot drives is music. They throw playlists together and add to them as they go, sharing music with everyone in the van. It opens up the dialogue between them and gives them the opportunity to hear new acts or favorite musicians and dissect the thing that they too spend so much time on.

What’s currently on their summer playlist? For bassist Jared Hornbeek, he’s been listening to a lot of Mt. Joy and new albums from Vampire Weekend and Cage the Elephant. They also have Portugal. The Man on there; a band that Hornbeek has admired for quite some time and got to meet at Firefly Music Festival a few summers ago.

“We got to watch their set and when they got off stage we got to kick it with them; they were the nicest fucking guys ever,” Hornbeek said. “The coolest, nicest humans, period.”

When they aren’t sharing their new favorite songs, they’re doing the only thing that really helps to pass the time: sleeping.

“It’s almost like teleporting if you do it right,” Hornbeek jokes.

Sometimes there’s really glamorous parts to touring. Recently, the band played a four-song set for a convention in southern Florida, complete with hotel rooms where the convention was and right on the beach. While it was technically a business trip, it ended up being a great band vacation. They got to go swimming, relax by the pool, enjoy Cuban food, have drinks by the ocean and be in one another’s company.

Sometimes there’s not-so-glamorous parts of touring. Hornbeek joked that “you haven’t toured unless you’ve gotten your shit stolen” and he isn’t completely wrong. One time they left their RV for 20 minutes to have dinner and by the time they came back their windows were smashed in and thousands of dollars worth of equipment, money and personal items were taken. Miraculously they got their passports back, but they took a major hit that day.

Through the ups and downs of touring, they’ve learned so much about one another and themselves as individuals.

“I see it in everyone that we've all just learned the ins and out of the industry,” Hornbeek said. “Especially with touring, everyone has gotten more mature and grasped a better understanding of it. All of this has been a learning experience.”

Photo courtesy of Darro Chea

I’ve always had a tough time going to concerts. Beyond my struggles to swallow my pride and give credit where it is due, I feel out of place in the audience. I don’t sway with the crowd, and I feel more self-conscious about myself in the audience than I do on stage. So when I finally get around to attending a show, it's a big deal for me personally.

In the fall of 2016, I was attending grad school in Spain. I was studying Contemporary Performance at Berklee College of Music, and some classmates were taking a weekend trip to Barcelona to see Lianne La Havas. I hadn’t heard her music before, but everyone in my class was raving about her, and I thought I might as well go, more so to bond with my classmates than to see her perform.

You see, I had a hard time connecting with my classmates. I constantly felt like I didn’t fit in, and that I was struggling so much more than everyone else. I didn’t know it at the time but I was battling a brain tumor this whole year, and it was severely affecting my moods (and still is). Because of the havoc the tumor wreaked on my body and hormones, I was essentially in a high state of anxiety and fight or flight. Combine that with being in a foreign country, the stress of being a musician and in grad school, and you get a recipe for depression and mental instability.

I was also extremely jaded about music by this point too. Going to music school turns music into work, and it was tough trying to separate the joy of music and the tediousness of work. It all started to blur together to where I was exhausted of music and sometimes hardly enjoyed music at all.

Anyway, after being a tourist for a few days in Barcelona, the night of the show arrived and everyone was so excited. I still didn’t see what all the fuss was about but I already paid the ticket, traveled to Barcelona, and I wanted to fit in, so I stuck it out with them. We entered the venue and I immediately felt like I was in a Broadway theater. The architecture was grandeur with blood red curtains, fancy cushioned theater seats and gold railings. And there was a lot of people, packed to the brim.

We made our way to our seats where we had a perfect view of the stage. All I see on stage are two small guitar amps (Mesa Boogie Mark V 35 Combos), two guitars (couldn’t make the models but definitely hollow bodies), a microphone stand, and a table with a couple of water bottles. No drum set, no bass amps, not even a tambourine. I figured the rest of the band would eventually come out.

Lianne made her way out on stage and addresses the audience. She spoke in such an elegant and smokey British accent; it was smooth, like chocolate and velvet for my ears. The audience cheered in response to her introduction and I cheered along to be a good sport, but I had no idea what I was in for when she started her first song.

She played completely solo on her guitar, strumming complex rhythmic patterns and jazz-inspired chords with tensions and pedal-tones. After properly establishing her groove, she started singing and I was absolutely floored. Stunned. She sang so effortlessly and freely it felt like she had been singing before she learned how to walk. The edges of her voice were crisp and slightly rasp, while the center of her vocal tone was thick and smooth, her vibrato rose perfectly sharp and flat, completely in sync with her guitar playing. I consider myself a really good musician, I even got a master’s degree in it. But what she did on that stage transcended any training a person could receive. Lianne La Havas has a soul made of pure music.

No band ever came out to support her. No extra instruments, no backup vocalists, or anything of the sort. She changed guitars maybe once or twice. She was completely alone, standing essentially still in one spot for the duration of the show, and for the duration of the show she had the entire audience in the palm of her hand.

I cried during that concert. I don’t remember when it started or when it stopped. Chalk it up to hormones, pent-up emotions, stress, anxiety or brain-tumor chaos, but Lianne’s music cut through my wall of depression and connected to me in a way that I hadn’t been connected to music for years. It completely brought me back to my love of music and how powerful it is to connect with people, in ways that ordinary words cannot. That was one defining moment that inspired me to get back to songwriting and making my own music. I no longer wanted to be just a guitarist for other artists, but I wanted to find my own voice, and connect with people through my own experiences.

The mysterious duo wandered through the wasteland and arrived at a mountain, which they scaled. At the top, they discovered a shaman who changed the brothers' lives and way of thinking forever.
Descending the mountain, they channeled Johnny Cash, Flavor Flav, and Billy Gibbons. Dressed in black denim, rocking solid gold grills and long beards, their eyes were obscured by heavy shadows from the brims of their black hats.

The most startling change was their music, full of subterranean grooves, plump cavernous bass lines, and a jangly, grungy guitar. Their sound blends psych-rock, alt-rock, and elements of electro-pop and jangle pop into unique and potent sonic concoctions.

Mountain Head's goal is to travel to your city and steal your head by means of mesmerizing vocals and contagious melodies. They're skull bandits, but polite ones, because after they steal your head, they give it back to you.

According to Mountain Head, the only way to hold on to your head is to lose it.

It’s hard to forget the first time you see your idols live. For me, it was February 13, 2001. I was 9 years old, and I was told we were driving up to see my grandparents. What I was met with instead was a massive building that I had only been in once before. Inside that building, Allstate Arena, was 20,000 seats, two stages and five people that I was utterly obsessed with: the Backstreet Boys.

That show was just the beginning of the nearly two decades I’ve been seeing the Backstreet Boys live. That night, my parents and I were front row for the Black and Blue Tour as I gripped onto the new shirt, poster and necklace that I still own to this day. Seven months later, I sat in the very last row of the now-Hollywood Casino Amphitheatre with my mother, her boss and her boss’ daughter and watched the tiniest screen I’d ever seen project an updated version of the same tour. A week after my 20th birthday, my mother and I had perfect seats for the NKOTBSB Tour at United Center. In 2013, my friend Sam and I watched the Chicago Police Department shut down their set at Huntington Bank Pavilion at Northerly Island. Three years later I not only met Nick Carter, A.J. McLean and Howie Dorough but got to interview them. Just two months ago, I took my mother to their Las Vegas residency at Planet Hollywood.

While all of these shows mean something special to me, this was the first time I got to treat my mother to one of their shows instead of the other way around. I splurged on better seats, got us matching shirts and walked into that show prepared to sing along to every song. What I wasn’t prepared for was how emotional I was going to get.

So many of their songs bring me back to specific times in my life, and when they slowly descended from the ceiling to “Larger Than Life”, I was instantly reminded of summer camp talent shows and choreographed dance routines. “Shape Of My Heart” brought me back to that front row seat at Allstate Arena. “The Call” had me reminiscing on when their Black and Blue album was waiting for me in the back seat of my mother’s car when I got out of school the day it was released.

On this particular night - April 10, 2019 - the audience got to witness the mayor of Las Vegas award them a key to the city and officially make it Backstreet Boys Day. Kevin got choked up during his speech, which in turn made me equally as emotional. I remember owning their self-titled album in 1997 and now look where they were - and where I was.

Towards the end of their set, they sang “All I Have To Give”. Right before the song began, crew members walked past us and laid down a platform that had been leaning against the barricade. My mother and I turned to each other and said out loud, “No way.” Yes way. A side door opened and out walked A.J. followed by Howie. Howie made his way to the platform that was literally inches away from us and almost immediately grabbed my mother’s hand as everyone around us outstretched their own. Watching that interaction made me incredibly emotional because not only was I thinking about how far they’ve come and how I’ve been a small part of their journey, but everything my mother did to let me be a part of that journey. It was a night that I won’t soon forget.