Eldritch Owlbear

It all starts with me, Mike. I'm thirty-one years old and the married father of two boys. I spent the nineties playing in a bunch of hardcore punk bands. The only one of those bands that you might have heard of is MK Ultraviolence. I stopped playing music for a few years because I was busy with babies. During my musical hiatus, I developed other interests. One of my interests is what I call Contemporary American Mythology, otherwise known as "nerd culture". This includes role-playing games, comic books, weird fiction, sword & sorcery and gothic horror. From an occult/pagan perspective, nerd culture is clearly the modern manifestation of ancient archetypes. The legends of our past live on through the tradition established by Tolkien, Lovecraft, Michael Moorcock, Robert E. Howard and of course, Dungeons and Dragons.I started playing music again a few years back. I was unable to resist how easy Garage Band and MySpace made it to participate in a scene without actually leaving the house. I didn't even need other people to be a "band". Many bands I met on MySpace were just one person, which made selecting the correct pronoun and possessive tense very confusing. Anyway, I wrote and recorded a few new songs, mostly about Harry Potter and Dungeons & Dragons. I posted the Harry Potter songs as "Order of Merlin" and the D&D songs as "Eldritch Owlbear". Generally speaking, people loved the Harry Potter songs and nobody gave a shit about the D&D songs.My adoring public wanted to experience Order of Merlin live, so began an mostly successful experiment. With Ryan Bedino and the McDevitt brothers, Order of Merlin became a "real band". We had a decent little following, but then everyone developed irreconcilable opinions about what the band should be. We played our last show in May of 2007.After much headache-inducing social turmoil, I decided to play music with the greatest person I know: my wife, Melissa. We spent the later half of 2007 writing, recording and performing music as 25 Hour Unicorn Diner. Most 25-HUD songs were based around my bass and Melissa's keyboard, but then Melissa began playing guitar. Wanting to do something more metal-oriented, we decided to revive Eldritch Owlbear. Our long-time friend Ted (my former song-writing partner in MK Ultraviolence, currently in Exit Wound) has agreed to play drums. Now I just have to scrounge up enough pieces for a decent drumset.How high can this Owlbear fly? Stay tuned and find out.