Piece of Me

Band: Piece of Me

Members: Bill Stevens, vocals; Kevin Beichner, guitar; Mike Hocker, bass guitar; Randy Gray, drums and Matt Shenberger, sound.

Who we talked to: Beichner

How did your name come about? It came from our lead singer. He had started writing stuff on his own. He just came up with it because it started out as an original band. It just seemed like "piece of me" was just a term for the original music we write. It's kind of a piece of me, a piece of you. Each person in the band contributes a part of themselves.

Describe your sound: The sound of our original stuff is somewhere around Alice in Chains mixed with Led Zeppelin, mixed with Godsmack. It's hard to compare when you hear our original songs, but that's about as close as I can come.

Best local place to play: We play a lot around York and up around Harrisburg and Mechanicsburg. We are doing a CD release party at Zingers down in Dallastown. . . We just love going out to where the crowds are really into it and getting wild and getting into whatever we're doing.

What song(s) do you love to cover? We have a variety of ages in the band. We cover a lot of things, anything from like old Led Zeppelin and Jimmy Hendrix. Everyone loves Metallica. Our singer's voice is really compatible for a lot of Alice in Chains and Soundgarden, right up to a lot of the modern things coming out right now. We try to keep a good mix, but keep it up to date also.

What is your take on the music scene in York? I used to be in band called Dead Lock. We were around from the early to mid-'90s up until about 2001. It doesn't seem as lively as far as the crowd participation, at least in the bars. The people that come out are great, but a lot of the clubs are having problems filling. We're trying to bring back more of how it used to be where you could pack a club and everyone could have a killer time that night.

What are your goals for the future? The CD we are releasing . . . is an actually unplugged CD. It's kind of unusual for the first actual CD release to be unplugged. The way our singer Billy Stevens composes is acoustic. It seemed more natural to just put that out first. We have about half a dozen songs we are working on in the studio now for a regular hard rock album. We're releasing things online as we're finishing the actual product in the studio. Eventually, we are going to compile that into a CD and have another release I would say in about a year.

If you could share the stage with any artist, who would it be? I'd love to open for Ozzy or Metallica. Just one of those legends.

Shoutouts: I just want to thank everyone that's come out to see us and support us so far.

- ERIN McCRACKEN, FLIPSIDE STAFF