Chad- Drummer

I’ve loved music for as long as I can remember, even when I was too young to understand the lyrics. Like every other kid in America, I too, started out by playing the pots and pans in my parents’ kitchen, banging cooking kettles of various shapes and sizes with wooden spoons and plastic spatulas. I loved the rhythm, the raw power, and most of all, I loved performing, although I had a much more lukewarm reception than I had hoped for from my mother who would often stumble upon this scene and take her cooking supplies away from me. But even when she collected the pots and pans and stored them on shelves I was (at the time) too short to reach, even when I was out of “instruments” I still found myself tapping out little beats and rhythms onto any tabletop or any loud sounding thing I could find. By the time I was about 6, I knew I really wanted to be a drummer.

I did not start to realize this goal until I entered grade school at Brighton, and reached 4th grade. They have a wonderful musical program at the school district, and even though I was tempted to pick Bass, when it came time to choose which instrument I would be learning how to play, I knew it had to be the drums. I learned a lot at Brighton, but I never got exactly what I wanted out of it: learning how to play the drum set. So when I received my first starter kit at age 13 I decided I would just take the basics I knew and teach myself the rest.

Fast-forward to high school, where I formed my first band, “Uncommon Sense,” with a couple of good friends of mine. I would play the drums and sing, but the problem with that band was that we never came up with anything original. Halfway through 2008, Uncommon Sense was over with, and I had already met another guitarist with a lot of potential and a desire to write his own music. That guitarist was Tommy Walsh. After a few jam sessions between the two of us (where most of our original songs got started out) we decided to form a band, which we named “Thought Phazer.” We were just sitting in my basement after jamming, and the name simply came to us. Then we found Mike, Ryan, and Blaine, and the rest is history.

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