Growning up in a Military, Latter Day Saint family in Waiouru there wasn't a whole lot to get up to except listen to music. Our Dad raised us on a balanced diet of AC/DC and Led Zeppelin so I never strayed far from heavy music. I'd been in bands previously (Metallica cover bands in high school) but when it came to starting my own band (In Dread Response) I drew from my influences of Iron Maiden, Megadeth and the likes of Darkest Hour.

At the time I'd also really been getting into a japanese band called Envy which is where I took my more melodic influence from. When all the music was written it came time to find a vocalist. I'd previously worked with Irish madman Sean O'Kane-Connolly in the band Cold By Winter and quickly jumped at the chance to put his lyrical genius to good use. We were set. We quickly recorded a 6 track EP and printed & pressed them ourselves which went down well. After a very short tour of NZ and Australia we headed back into the studio to record our full length album From the Oceanic Graves.

Lets be honest, I'm not that big on salad. Sure I'll eat it if its there, but I don't spend my days actively seeking out salad to get involved with. However, salad is good for describing my musical interests, as salad tends to involve a fair few different varieties of vegetable/fruit/whathaveyou. So lets get on with it.

I read somewhere that when hearing music some people listen to the melody and some people focus on the words. I’m a words girl. Don’t get me wrong, I’ll tap my foot to a good melody, but if the words don’t make sense or I can’t understand them a song can lose its appeal. Step on up Mr. Jason Mraz whose "I'm Yours" is surely a candidate for a wedding song classic. It’s about love, taking that leap, being in the moment and looking at your tongue in the mirror. In fact, not even a look, Jason tells us he’s "bending over backwards just trying to see it clearer." Dude, where were you going with that? What does it mean?

Course there’s always the good old misheard song lyric where you think a song makes no sense as you have misheard it. Case in point I thought J-Lo was being contrary by saying "Think you got to keep me? Yes you don’t." In her hit "My Love Don’t Cost a Thing." Course she was saying "Think you got to keep me iced? You don’t Iced?" I lived on the Shore, what did I know about ice?

Of course I could feel it, I was ten foot away from the bass bins, Freq Nasty was agitating the atoms all around us with bass frequencies lower than a Bush policy, and the very seams of my jeans were vibrating against my legs in time with the wobble.

Wasn't what she meant tho. Closed my eyes. Everything but the sound, gone. Try it some time, a dj spinning tunes in a club always feels different from listening to those same tunes at home.

Nothing to do with the volume either, its the atmosphere. The sum of the whole, Music and People, together.

We had got there fairly on in the night, to catch a friend playing warm up. Most arriving with us had that same look of anticipation, excitement of what was to come, and most, headed straight to the bar to order drinks. To set their mood. Bars can be awkward places early on in the night, with people waiting patiently for the bartender to get to their turn to take an order, shoulders touching other patrons, you would think that it would be a hot bed of conversation, which it is, but not yet. That happens after....

I started my first band Handsome Geoffery with my friends Janna and Aidee when I was about 15. I remember the first time we ever played through an entire song with some degree of in-time-ness and in-tune-ness.

We started our band mostly because we wanted to hold instruments and make noise with them. Unfortunately we were all drummers, but I knew parts of a few Nirvana and Red Hot Chili Peppers songs on guitar so I defaulted to that, and Janna picked up the bass. We had no idea what we were doing. It was great.

We tried playing a few covers but because I didn’t know any whole songs we could never get through one and they sounded pretty bad. Then one day I wrote my first song “I Sort of Love You”. It was a song that made fun of love songs because I was young and cynical with a cutting teenage wit. I played it to the girls, red-faced and embarrassed, but they loved it so I showed Janna where the fingers go on the bass (didn’t know what the chords I was playing were), Aidee tapped along on the drums and sang a few harmonies, and we realized the beauty of writing your own songs- there are no mistakes! It’s yours so you can do whatever you want and say it’s supposed to be that way!