I think I'm one of the few people I know who can look back at high school and really not hate all of it. By and large, high school was a pretty good time in my life. Sure, there was always some dumb shit going on, but that's high school. I did well, grade-wise (excluding pre-calc with Ms. Barnes...), had a pretty good group of friends, it really wasn't too bad.

Most of my friends were people that were part of the school's fine arts department, I guess that nerds of a feather flock together sometimes (sorry, I really can't help myself sometimes). And of course, because we were kids with varying degrees of musical talent, there were a ton of bands in our area.

I really do mean a ton. I don't know much about high school music scenes around the country, but I felt like we had an incredibly large and diverse music scene. We had Southern Rock bands like Singletree (or the artist formerly known as Shattered on Saturday) and Wasted Youth. We had progressive metal and death metal bands like Chaos and Clockwork and Six Foot Orchard. **Quick aside, Six Foot Orchard has been around a while now as As Oceans, based mostly out of the Boone area. Check them out, they're awesome dudes.** We had Christian rock groups, some ska bands, a few blues outfits, we had it all. And we also had an area pop/punk band. My band.

I actually hated pop/punk music. I hated Fallout Boy and Panic! at the Disco, I hated We the Kings. I was an elitist in my musical tastes and I was an ass about it. If it was on the radio or on a girl's iPod, there was a 95% chance I despised it. But there was this drummer named Chris Lusuriello that I really wanted to play with. He was new to the region, but he'd cut his teeth in both Chaos and Clockwork and Shattered on Saturday. I played and still play guitar, but I was not very good then. I just really wanted to be in a band, because chicks dig guys in bands. Not even gonna pretend, I wanted to be a star. And before my junior year of high school, i finally got that invite.

See, a new singer had moved in to Chris' neighborhood. He was older than us, a college kid, just a big, goofy Midwestern guy. Chris told me that this dude could sing and was looking for a project in the area. But Chris told me it would be more poppy than I would want. I was willing to give it a shot though, thinking that I could use this band to meet other bands to my liking. So I said sure, I'll come by and hang out with this new guy.

Kevin King wasn't what I expected. He was tall and wide, your stereotypical fat punk singer (sorry, Kevin). We got to talking and I'd never heard of most of the bands that he was into, but we decided to jam anyways. So the first song we did became one of our staples in our live action, the fun "Work of Art". And the second Kevin started singing, I looked at Chris and grinned. No one in town had a singer like this.

"And I will always be with you, just say you will be here with me too...."

And we were off and running. Kevin had some songs already written and Chris knew the right people, so we added in the greatest rhythm player in the area, Dillon D'Ambrosio, and go to work.

We had our first show about three months after we started as a band and man, we were tight together. We designed our setlists to hit certain highs and lows, we had instrument changes and extended solos planned out in advance, we were professional as shit. We actually headlined our first show, much to the chagrin of one of the area bands that I won't name, starting a hilarious sort of Cold War-type atmosphere for a few months. And we crushed it. We knew that people didn't know us, but we had great covers of "Hey Ya" and "Use Somebody", which was actually our closer. If you've never performed before, let me tell you something: There is no feeling in this world like putting on a badass show.

Fast forward about a month or two and we were the most popular band in the area. We had a pretty consistent following of probably around 30 people and we were in "the studio" working on our "album". We were actually in another mutual friend's basement, but he had some dope recording stuff and he wasn't charging us too much. We were living the high life. We even recorded an acoustic track, the little-bit-too-long "Losing My Mind", a song that Kevin wrote mostly with me via Facebook.

That's right, we even had a fucking music video! Full disclosure, I think this actually happened after I left the band, but still. We were good. We were also going by Trial and Error at the time, which became a problem.

See, we had hours and hours of discussion to find a band name. I think that we were working with around 130 different band names at one point. We went with Trial and Error because we were lazy and couldn't think of anything better. But after doing all of our recording, we were looking to go on iTunes. Well, there was already a Trial and Error on iTunes and they were some rasta-rappers of some variety, if I remember correctly. So we had to go through a name change. Thankfully, the Duke men's basketball team picked around that time to hit like 17,000 three pointers on some sorry school and Chris and I heard the phrase "Danger From a Distance" on ESPN and decided that was the one.

So we scheduled an album release show, the only show ever played as Danger From a Distance with the original lineup. Our CD had 10 tracks and the organizer, the fantastic Dori Staehle, let us play the whole thing, start to finish. And the show was incredible. We sold a whole bunch of CDs, made a bunch of money off the door, I fell in love with this older redhead girl named Alyssa, it was a good time.

And just like that, it was over. I quit the band not long after, to try to do my own thing. Didn't go all that well. They continued on, adding in a different guitarist and bassist, I played a couple of solo shows before I was really capable of singing in public, joined a one-off band named Who's to Say, and that was it. Haven't played in a band since. But I think about those days a few times a week, of jamming in Chris' basement and staying up til 5am when we have to go record in a few hours. We were a good, possibly great high school band and we were gone long before our time.

"I don't wanna wake up to find out that I failed everyone I loved. But someday, this hand won't fit that glove"- Someday, Track 8, Open Casket Birthday Party, DFAD.