About this user
A woodsman and songwriter named Jule Medders and his pretty wife Joy had three sons in the 1980s in North Georgia. Cheyenne, Carson and Will. We grew up together for the most part happy and healthy... a few mild skuffles and stinging bike wrecks, yellow jacket attacks and run-ins with the police after curfew. Our soundtrack back then was Neil Young, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Johnny Horton and Elton John... and Dad singing his own songs and those of Elvis.
And then we all went country! Dad, thanks to the hook up from cousin Monty, started writing for big country stars of the early nineties: Diamond Rio, Pam Tillis, Billy Dean etc. At the height of this, 1994, something clicked and we discovered rock and roll.... in the form of "Alternative" and "Grunge." I was instantly captivated by MTV videos of Weezer and Red Hot Chili Peppers. Kids at school had a cd called "Dookie" in their backpacks. We had to form a band. Friends Blake and Daniel and cousin Jesse joined in. Dad taught me some guitar chords (starting with A... not an easy one!). At first Will and Carson would be "stagehands" in charge of things like flipping the lights on and off for a strobe effect during guitar solos. We went through 20 band names that we wont mention here. We were terrible... but you have to start somewhere.
Slowly and subconsciously we began to fall in love with the music that was there from the beginning: the 70's songwriter rock and the old time country. And in the late nineties new bands captured our hearts... Wilco, Wallflowers, Counting Crows etc. Carson got heavy into Led Zeppelin and at Jimmy Page's sonic urging, starting really getting serious about guitar.
In college at Harding University, I was away from my brothers and I wrote a lot of songs... probably three or four hundred. A handful I thought were pretty good and I played these for people. I also made friends and collaborated with some really outside the box people. We wrote things that made sense and things that made no sense at all. When you're having fun it doesn't always have to make sense.
Meanwhile in Georgia, Carson was playing Led Zeppelin songs and Will had begun to play drums with Trey and Andrew Bentley (now the Van Lears). The Bentleys could sing like the Everly Brothers and the alt countryish songs they were writing were refreshing, to say the least against the backdrop of rap-rock and nu-metal bands forming at Calhoun High School. I joined them when I came home for the summer. We started and record and played some very sweet gigs, but ultimately Will's college and Trey's marriage put us on an indefinite hiatus.
For one year all three brothers lived in Arkansas together at Harding. The first week of classes in fall of 2004 a freshman named Joshua Stauter heard someone playing electric guitar in the dorm. It was shaking the walls. Carson told me later that day he had met a trained pianist who liked rock and roll. We went through two unsatisfactory band names and played some fun gigs. Not much happened. Then I moved to Nashville, where cousin Monty had an amazing studio called The Court. In addition to being a songwriter and artist, I wanted to be a producer. Monty had praised some of my recordings, and was/is very generous in letting me grow as my own producer in his studio. He eventually hired me as his manager and engineer. I made two solo records and saved up the money to press them into cds. For each of the releases I formed an acoustic band with some music friends and hit the road. We traveled all over the country, from Seattle to L.A. to Montreal and New York.
In Summer 2008 the three brothers and Joshua were all in Nashville, finally! With college behind us we decided to be a real band again, and at our girlfriends' suggestion, decided to be practical and call ourselves The Medders. We had started to record some demos with Robin Eaton (Butterfly Boucher) and Lij Shaw (Autumn Defense) in 2007, but living in separate zip codes had prevented us from finding our true sound, and the producers urged us to work on that for the time being. We began recording ourselves at The Court last July, and it became what will be our debut album. It's self-titled and will be available everywhere, if production runs on time, August 25, 2009. As for our sound... I think we've found it to some extent, though it keeps evolving and revealing more of itself. Basically, it's..................
Cheyenne Medders, April 2009
Age
29
Hometown
Resaca, GA
Country
United States
themedders
uploaded
