An incomplete bio by Colin...

I came to Annandale High in the fall of 2003. It was not your typical high school environment and it was rather disappointing to me for the most part. At this time, I was in a kind of emo-punk band named Epyllon, which never really did anything for me, besides give me some helpful experiences. That was my freshman year and it wasn’t too memorable. It was around the winter of 2004 that we all met up. We had a guitar class around the corner of the drama lobby and there were benches you could sit on right outside the theater. So I was down there one afternoon for one reason or another with one of the school’s guitars. I started playing the solo to “All My Loving” by the Beatles. Suddenly this kid came up to me and introduced himself and asked if I could teach it to him. Well, it seemed a little forward to me, but I did the favor he asked of me. That was Dan. He was a year younger than I was, but it didn’t bother either one of us really. And to me, that moment was the real beginning of what became The Newloves. We became great friends and we went over to eachother’s houses and played guitar and made music for whatever it was worth.

Pretty soon after that I realized his brother, Adam, was in my chemistry class. And we eventually became great friends as well. But our friendship started truly based on our comedy and jokes and things. We’d draw goofy pictures or notes about various subjects. Neither one of us ever learned a thing about chemistry though.

Adam was a bass player and he was also a good singer. On top of that he was quite the engineer. He understood computers and programs far better than anyone else I knew personally. Between him, his little brother, and I, we had something. It was still a “jam-band” at this point, but it was a focus.

For Dan’s birthday, he asked his parents for drum kit, which I thought was an interesting choice, but I liked the idea. He couldn’t play drums and neither could Adam for that matter. But for a price, Dan got a used drum set, which sounded and performed very nicely. I’ll never forget going down into their basement and seeing it for the first time. It was a great time.

Now, despite the fact that none of us could really play drums, we made the most of our situation. Adam had a little karaoke machine with two shoddy mics downstairs, where all the instruments were held. We hung these mics from the pipes going across the ceiling of the basement. It was rather ridiculous, but it all worked. It was in the Spring of 2005 this was going on. Whenever the three of us got into the same room to make a friendly jam, me and Dan would always have to choose who wanted to play drums. It was a little silly because neither one of us played the drums, but we tried our best.So the “band” was three quarters of the way complete, with the absence of a real drummer. None of us cared at this point though, we were really just doing it for laughs. As soon as the summer rolled around, we all got jobs. I became an ice cream caterer and the brothers became life guards. The thing was that I would get off work around 5 or 6 p.m. As soon as I was done I’d come visit them at their pool. Once they got off work around 9, the three of us would go home to their house, where we’d record music until 10 and then I would go back home. The next day would probably bring the very same routine. It was not the summer any of us had envisioned in the Spring, but it was a great time.

Around July or so of that summer Adam and I began to talk about the possibility of recording music with better mics or better equipment in general. We still shied away when people asked us if we were in a band together, but we liked the idea of trying to record with better quality. It was still up in the air though, because we didn’t even have a drummer. I was the drummer most of the time, and I was a guitarist at heart. We definitely wanted better equipment regardless though. Between the three of us, we considered ourselves a kind of jam-band. We had no name, barley any songs to speak of, and nobody knew us.

Around the beginning of the next school year, we were moving well into our “recording stage.” We had obtained a nicer mic and we were looking at one another now as potential band members for real, but we found ourselves still covering ‘Wipe-Out’ and other standards. Around September and October of 2005 we broke loose with our money, anyway, and purchased all kinds of upgraded recording equipment: mics, cables, cymbals, sound boards, and other things. We felt like a recording band, but there were still only three of us. It wasn’t The Newloves and it wasn’t anything at all yet. It was just anticipation of what we could be.

We all were pushing in the direction to record. But we thought, ‘What happens after you finish recording a song? I guess you make another song.’ It was an album were talking about now. By this point we had a bigger backlog of songs and we had more to work with. It was a good feeling and we had a real focus now. Dan and I shared the drums at this point when it came to recording. Neither one of us liked it that way, but we had no other option.

Somewhere between the summer and winter of 2005 we talked about a name. I don’t remember where ‘new-love’ came from. We all had that name in the back of our minds, but never liked it too much at the beginning. I was not keen on telling people that was the name of our band. Besides, we didn’t even have a drummer yet. Sometime in the beginning of 2006 we started calling ourselves Sailway and we all liked it. We all thought it was a nice sounding word, even though it didn’t mean anything. I however was the one who said it sounded too much like ‘Safeway’ and that teenagers would laugh at the idea. So from then on, we stuck with The Newloves.

The Spring of 2006 brought about what we had waited so long for: a drummer. The three of us were all friends with a senior named Chris Morewitz. I met him through another friendship. However the three of us were also great friends with a junior named Drew Wildes. We had all known Drew through high school, but never thought he was available enough to play in a band. There were both debatably the best drummers at our school. And since Chris would be in college in a few months, we asked him to record on a couple songs of ours. He was recorded on “Black Maria” and “Never Seem To Know.” However, much to our surprise, he was rarely available. Despite the progress we made with those two songs, it was not fast enough. And Drew joined us in late March of 2006. So we were The Newloves, and in mid April we finished 12 original songs which all went onto the album. The album was appropriately entitled “Sailway.”

I’d say we’re just another sound in a big bowl of bigger sounds. If we have any effect on that big bowl, then great. It’s simple that if we can only do what we can do. We’ll hope for the best. Cheers~