Font ResizeBand: Between the Lions
Members: Kyle Barninger, guitar; Devin Farless, bass; Brittan Peterson, vocals; Hayden Sauzer, drums; Joey Schultheiss, guitar
Who we talked to: Schultheiss, 24
How did you guys meet/ How long have you been performing together? It was ... almost two years ago. Me and the other guitar player, Kyle, have been in bands for a while now. We've been playing guitar together since we've been in (Eastern York) Middle School, and we've been trying different bands. Brittan met Hayden ... and Hayden was in a band with Devin. We all just went over to Hayden's one time and just tried to jam stuff out and
How did you come up with the name? When we came up with it ... I don't know why no one looked it up on Google. It's (also the name of) a very popular kids show - a puppet show on PBS. I've told people about it, and they're like, "how did you not know about that growing up?" I think we looked it up to see if it was another band's name but we probably didn't ... even realize that it might be a kids' puppet show. I think the way we take (the name) is that ... between the lions (means between) a rock and a hard place.
Who are your influences? We usually play The Champion Ship in Lemoyne ... and also the Chameleon Club. In Gettysburg, we played a place called The Bombshelter.
You guys played the Launch Music Conference and Festival last month in Lancaster, right? It's really cool. This is the second year we did it. It's a cool weekend overall. It was a good show for us. It's nice for the band to go ... to the trade show ... and meet other bands. They also have panels that we attended ... about how to get signed (and) endorsements. They had a lot of people from different areas of the music industry, from booking agencies to people from labels (and) people dealing with legal issues. That was one of the really helpful parts because you can't always just go up to someone in a booking agency and just ask them to talk about how to do stuff for an hour. No one has time for that. It was nice to have people there (who) you could ask questions and talk to about that.
Is that one of the biggest challenges for bands trying to make it? It's getting a lot easier (to find information) because of the Internet. You can look up a lot of stuff yourself. It's hard to know what to do and where to start. There are so many things that you should be doing or can be doing to get your band's name out there. It can be really confusing and overwhelming.
Are you guys working on an album? In January (we) finished recording our EP. It has six songs on it. We recorded it at Atrium Audio in Lancaster. We're not sure when we want to put it out. We would like to send it out and shop it out to labels. We want to try to get it out as soon as we can, but we just want to try to take the right steps to doing that.
What's coming up for you this summer? We want to ... keep playing more and more shows. We've been working on a few things to get shows booked for the coming months. We don't have any tours or anything, but that's another thing we can hopefully do by the end of the year.
How would you describe your sound and style? Mainly, it's metal. It's heavy, but there (are) a lot of technical, melodic aspects to it. We pride ourselves more on that than just trying to be the heaviest and the hardest band. There (are) a lot of complicated guitar parts and there's singing as well as screaming. I like to describe it as ... progressive metal. It's seems like you can do whatever you want because it's progressive and the music keeps changing.
Are there other bands you guys like? I know a couple of bands that we're all huge fans of. One is Animals as Leaders. They're an instrumental/progressive metal band. They have a lot of classical (and) jazz influences. I personally really like that because I was at York College (and) majored in classical guitar performance. I've always been a fan of classical music in general. I still listen to that (and) a lot of jazz. There are bits and pieces of that in our music. The band Periphery is another (band) that's heavy, but if you listen to them, it's not what stands out the most. They have very good melodic and technical sense about their music.
- Erin McCracken,
FlipSide staff
