What makes up a Five, Plus three piece band?

The core of Buxton Road’s sound is a five piece rock and roll band, consisting of Joel VanKoughnet on Guitar, Jason Sheldon on Guitar, Kali Spencer on Keyboards, Chris Adams on Bass, and Jeremy McGill on drums. With four singers among these five, we can layer harmonies, with guitars, keyboards, and bass to create a huge sound overtop of a steady and powerful rhythm from the drums. With the vocal and instrumental tools to cover a huge range of music, picking songs is not about learning something easy, but finding songs we love to play, and that really showcase the different members of the band. Keyboard solo at the beginning of Bloody Well Right? You got it! Dueling guitars at the end of Hotel California? Absolutely. The layered harmonies of The Weight? Every show!

When it fits the show, we’re fortunate enough to have three other exceptional musicians join us on the stage. (Nathan Fischer on Trumpet, Jenna Schmidt on Saxophone, and Darren Fife on Trombone) Having a three piece horn section brings in a whole new world of options and adds a whole new dimension to our set. Tired of guitar solos? How about a Sax? Exactly. And the best part? Most of them sings, too, which only makes our range of songs even broader. Rather than switch our set to only horn songs when we have them along, we take the opportunity to play the best of everything we have.

How do you end up in a band like that?!

Buxton Road began with the need to fundraise a recording project for Ecco Singers (a local choral group which many of us are a part of) and the idea that within that group, calling on only a couple of outside friends, we had the necessary talent, both vocally and instrumentally, to organize a fundraiser in the form of a big rock show. The premise of this was that we could let a group of great singers who had never had the chance to sing with a band before, all get the opportunity to be a rock star for a night. Within a group of 30 singers, its no surprise that we had a wide variety of instrumentalists, which gave us the unique opportunity to perform with a horn section as well. The event went so well, and we all enjoyed our role in the new band such that it became its own group. While there have been a few changes in the band since then, and both groups do their own thing for 363 nights a year, we’re always looking forward to the next big annual event together.