Branden Baxley

These bios are silly, usually quite pompous even, but here it goes: I suppose you'll be wanting to know about the music. It's like this: I'm 33 years old, and I started playing guitar and writing songs in 1990. This was at the peak of hair metal and shred guitar. Even at that point I knew that that was not what I wanted to do, although I hadn't yet formulated any sort of strategy. The one thing I did know was that I wanted to write songs, so I did. I spent well over a decade in and out of various bands, none of which did much other than drinking alot of beer and smoking a lot of...cigarettes. I can't lay the blame on anyone but myself for the fact that I could never get it together musically speaking, although there were certainly plenty of obstacles thrown in the way. The biggest problem was living in a town so overrun by evangelical christians that there were never really any good places to play that stayed in business for long unless you were willing to play in a cover band at a redneck bar and/or frat parties. I wasn't. The single decent place to play in town would never give me a gig. I an outsider on the scene and still am to this day. I like to think that all of my songs are quite different and I refuse to be limited to a single genre since because my influences are so eclectic. I have never catered to the mainstream and never will. That's fine by me-pretty much every one of the bands I love never achieved mass appeal, and I have no idea why this is the case. In I've always been very insecure about my musical ability. Although I wrote and recorded many songs, I would always end up destroying the tapes and tearing up the lyrics. Because of, that I have forgotten more songs than I remember. So the new millenium dawned and I pretty much gave up on the idea of a band altogether. I started playing around as a solo acoustic guy at open mikes and such, but that was never really who I was-at least not completely. I was never supported by anyone outside of my circle of friends anyway. So I started recording songs where I played all the instruments on a crappy analog 4-track and never looked back. Not a whole lot has changed since then-I finally went digital and got enough of a stranglehold on my demons to really get into composing and arranging songs. That's pretty much where I'm at now. I'm currently recording an album, so for now these rough demos will have to serve as sketches of what I'm trying to do. If all goes well, I hope to have my first album completed sometime this year. Maybe-just maybe-at that point I will take a crack at forming a band again, assuming I can find relatively sane individuals that are willing to deal with my nonsense.