Quietdrive

The Band that Melts Your Heart and Your Face
By: Allie Daugherty

Imagine having your next door neighbors suddenly become famous rock stars. In 2004, 5 talented musicians with the boy-next-door quality came together to captivate the hearts and souls of every audience. Although they originate from Minneapolis, Minnesota, the band Quietdrive is touring so frequently that they now call the open road their new home. And with an address like that, everyone becomes their neighbor. Block party anyone?

Quietdrive, so named to define the quiet drive within them all to succeed, consists of Kevin Truckenmiller, vocals; Justin Bonhiver, lead guitar; Matt Kirby, guitar; Droo Hastings, bass; and Brandon Lanier, drums. At first, Hastings claims they met each other on eHarmony.com, but then explains, “Kirby and Kevin were college buddies. The other three of us were high school buddies.”

While at college, Truckenmiller and Kirby started their own guitar duo, known as Sneaker2Bombs, which Kirby describes as “the ugly duckling stage, before we blossomed into new life.” Meanwhile, Bonhiver, Hastings, and Lanier were looking to start their own band, but needed a lead singer. They soon found Truckenmiller’s voice samples on a website known as MP3.com, and started the first edition of Quietdrive.

However, Hastings, the funniest of the group, continues to explain, “eventually, we were like ‘Hey, we've got these two separate projects going on, why don't we just put them together?’” The two bands joined forces and kept the name Quietdrive. Four years later, they’re still going strong, but things did not start out smoothly.

“There was a rough patch, I think. Everyone had a different vision of where they wanted to take it, and I think we had two projects and we ended up agreeing on one thing, and that was that we wanted to be really successful and we stopped butting heads and we started doing one project, and we got good,” explains Kirby.

Hastings jokes, “Originally there were going to be nine band members. Four of them died during that period. We don't like to talk about it a whole lot, but here we are, the five. Kinda like survivor.”

One obstacle the band had to encounter was the adaptation of having two guitarists. Bonhiver says, “Kirby and I were actually the ones butting heads the most on the whole merging thing because I had a vision for where Quietdrive was going, and he had a vision where Sneaker2Bombs was going. After awhile we realized that the visions can work together simultaneously and actually make each other stronger. It just took a while to get to that point.”

Truckenmiller knows the bands ultimate goal: “I think we all have a goal… to be successful in what we do, and I think that's a goal that can be shared by many people. When you do something, whether you're a computer programmer, an artist, whether you work at sears, whatever you do, you want to be successful at what you do because you want to continue to do it and improve your quality of life, and that's what we focus on as a band. The day we started doing that was the day we started becoming noticed and we started gaining fans, because we wanted to make our life the best that it could be, and we wanted to make our music the best that it could be, and at that point, we knew what we wanted to do. We wanted to pursue music, and we wanted to be successful at that, and that's kinda where we're at today.”

This decision has led them to gain a spot on the Billboard Music Top 25 chart with their rendition of “Time After Time”, sell over 55,000 copies of their debut album, When All That’s Left is You, and lead a sold-out headlining tour. “The best part [about touring],” says Hastings, “is making new friends and having a lot of fun. I get to spend everyday of my life with some of my best friends. And getting to stay up past my bedtime every night.” Yet the worst part “is living in a van. Apparently the reason why most people live inside houses is because it’s better.” Another downside of touring is that “You’re away from home a lot. Its hard to hold onto relationships.”

One way the band entertains themselves on the road is by making Podcasts. As Kirby explains,

“We try to make them entertaining… it started out as a newsletter of what we were doing and then it kinda turned into an audio SNL version. We just wanted to give people something to laugh about and show a different side. A lot of people view us as musicians, and we have a lot of serious songs, but we have a lighter side. It’s an outlet we can creatively use.” These news bulletins let their fans travel alongside Quietdrive, participating in all the hilarity and fun with them. (To download them, visit their website Quietdrivemusic.com, or myspace.com/Quietdrive.)

One of the other entertaining aspects of Quietdrive is their unofficial sixth member, merchandise man Sexual J.

“I met him in a jewelry class in high school,” says Bonhiver. “He had this beat up crappy Honda that he wanted to take us on tour with. [When] we started actually touring, he wanted to come.”

Kirby notes, “He decided to make himself the merch guy.” This assertion has made Sexual J the friendliest, coolest, most entertaining merch guy a person can ever hope to meet while at a show, with one of the most exotic names.

J excuses this absurd name by saying, “I couldn’t get girls in high school so I figured maybe if I changed my name….”

“He’s come a long way since then,” comments Bonhiver. And as for his merch skills? “He’s the best.”

Another thing that makes Quietdrive unique is the use of the violin, both on-stage and in the studio. However, according to Hastings, “It didn’t even really occur to us. Kevin had made the transition from playing the violin to doing more of the singer-songwriter thing with an acoustic guitar and his voice. And it dawned at us at one point, ‘Kevin knows how to play the violin, we should work that into the band somehow.’ He wasn’t sure if he wanted to do it at first or not, but we tried it and it sounded really good, so I think with the new record we’ll be able to experiment more with it a little bit.” One song featuring the violin is Rush Together, a gentle ballad about one of Truckenmiller’s good friends, whom he didn’t realize he had feelings for until he left her. Although he was able to share a little about the song, it was a rare occurrence. “I don’t really like to literally explain what these stories are about, because I don’t want to taint your vision that you already have of the stuff,” he clarifies.

The band comes up with these songs in many different ways. “Kevin does most of the songwriting and lyrics,” says Hastings. “It’s kinda like he builds the basement to the house and the structure and the blueprints and then everybody kinda comes in and fills in what they need to.”

Truckenmiller goes into further detail. “The songwriting process for us has always been whatever works the best. First when we all started writing songs, we’d get in a room together, and all come up with an idea. The next person would come up with an idea, we’d kinda hodge-podge a song together, and then give the song to me, and I’d come up with lyrics for it, and then we’d construct the song more after that. We did that for a while, and then another song writing style we used was when me and Matt would come together and come up with melodies, with the music underneath all the melodies. And then when I write songs alone, I have melodies on my phone that I record. When I feel inspired or when I feel a melody is really strong I’ll record it into my phone, and then I’ll go and I’ll record the melody and the lyrics to a beat. Once I have that beat down, and the melody and the lyrics down, then I start recording music, and the music makes everything come alive more than it usually has so there’s a bunch of very different styles. I’ll never say that one works better than the other, but I’ve had awesome results from each.”

One song the band did not write, however, is their hit single “Time After Time”, a new age version of Cyndi Lauper’s song. Truckenmiller heard the song while shopping. “It came on the speaker and I just started singing along to it and coming up with my own little version of it. I brought it into the studio and we started playing around with it a little bit and it started taking on a life of its own. And after that, the rest is history.” Besides creating breath-taking songs, the band’s talent surprisingly lies in the drummer’s ability to get down. “Brandon’s a great dancer,” says Truckenmiller. Nonetheless, Lanier is more likely to pursue a career as a pilot over a dancer if Quietdrive ever ends, and even had his own pilot license before touring. The other boys enjoy things such as computer science, but aren’t too keen on the idea of football.

“Where you get hurt?” asks Kirby. “No. there’s no man-up in Quietdrive. There’s golf, there’s videogames, there’s violin; that’s where Quietdrive is.”

Yet despite their wholesome personalities, these five rockers can melt your face clean off. Their live performances refuse to allow you to stop moving, and their album is so upbeat and fresh that you’ll want to blast it from your stereo until the cops come. While making and titling the album, Truckenmiller describes, “Every song starts out like a small microcosmic relationship between yourself and another part of your personality. Then all those emotions, all those relationships, all those memories just exploded onto the CD.”

And although Quietdrive is quickly rising in fame, they still take the time to meet with fans before and after the show, perform at high schools, and even stop by a fan’s house for dinner, even though, according to Truckenmiller, “We barely have enough time to sleep.”

Nonetheless, the fame doesn’t go to their heads. As Kirby reassures me, “We still like peanut butter and jelly.”