 If you watch Common Ground online, consider becoming a member or making a donation at lptv.org. Common Ground is brought to you by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund, with money from the vote of the people November 4th, 2008. Playing live, it's fun to provide the entertainment, so to speak. It's a real surreal experience, having people there just to watch and listen to what you came up with. It's really a cool feeling. We're Crimson Winter and I'm John Murphy and I play the bass and I also take care of vocal duties. My name's Nathan Kelly. I'm the drummer for the band. And my name's Sebastian. I play guitar and sing vocals as well. Collectively, as individuals, we've played together for about two years, but Crimson Winter has been together for about nine months or so. It's a good question to ask, like, what our sound is, because I think that's a question we don't even fully understand ourselves. Well, it's been described as like 70s, like kind of on the progressive rock scene and infused with a bit of metal. We also kind of have some a little bit of punk elements with how Nathan drums and how he incorporates his own style in there. It's interesting just how everything comes together as far as the writing style comes. We have multiple elements in it, all the way leading from your prog rock and your hard rock towards your metal and everything. And when everything comes together, it seems to work out nice. We're able to get everything to flow the way we want to and we're very happy with our sound. Writing music for us, the way we approach it, there's a couple different ways. Sometimes Sebastian comes in with a quarter of a song written or like most of a song written or sometimes all of a song written and he'll be like, guys, what do you think about this? I threw this together and we're like, yeah, that's awesome. And we'll write different parts for an arrangement like he'll throw in a drum track or two. And sometimes we'll get together and we'll be jamming, you know, we'll be doing just random stuff and we'll stop and say, hey, you know, what was that? You're just playing right now and they'll come in. Well, I don't know. It's like, okay, well, that was really cool. I like that what you're doing. And then we just kind of take that and we roll with it and see what happens. I'd say in general, as far as like melody or lyrics, it's typically more of like the backing music behind it all will come up with like the riffs and the drum parts. And then once that's kind of solid and we're getting a feel to that, typically me or John will start like coming up with some melodies and then we'll all like throw in some lyrics to it. That's kind of true of my own writing as well. I'm Barry Riff's first melody later. And I wouldn't say it's anything like in disregard to the melody. It's just that's kind of what presents itself last to us at least. I think it's a lot more like focused on the motif until the melody eventually reveals itself because I think it's a lot of what I like thinking about when writing a song is serving the song and putting into the song what it deserves. You need a good pancake batter for the pancake. The overall feeling of the Terrapin station show. I mean, I was really excited, but there was a little part of me that was a bit nervous because this was a bit of our pioneering show for the community where we practice and write our music. So this wasn't just, you know, Minneapolis where people are like, sure, it's another band, you know, this is like our home turf. There was a little bit riding on you in that way, but I think overall it became a really fun experience for me and it was something I was able to walk away from and be like, yeah, that was a really good show. Going into it, yeah, I'll admit, I'm sure they could admit too that, yeah, we were nervous. If we weren't, then we wouldn't have had the passion behind it. Definitely for the first few songs, like, I was a bit nervous, but kind of once we got playing and more in the rhythm of things, the groove, it kind of died down, got more comfortable with it. But I mean, it's really crazy just like being the focal point of 50 plus people. I'm Kiki Carter Webb and our band is called Dancing Light. This is my husband, Greg Webb. The Terrapin Station performance really came about because we had a bunch of family coming to visit for Greg's mother's 90th birthday. And so they all wanted to hear us play. They wanted to hear Sebastian and his band play. So we called Brian at Terrapin and said, hey, how about a show over at Terrapin while the family's here? He thought it was a great idea and we put that together. It was so much fun. We love Terrapin Station. Playing at Terrapin Station has always been a real treat for us from the very first time we performed there and we performed there several times over the years. I love any environment that's comparable to that that's really designed for listening to music. And there is really no other focus going on there. Very different than playing in a bar where there's some other activity that sometimes is more important to the people in the room. When you're just there and everybody's just there for the music, it's so beautiful. It allows you to really go deep into the playing, into the performance and into the interaction with the audience. The idea of bringing Crimson Winter in there to perform, I just knew that they would love it. I knew that it would give them an opportunity that they hadn't really had yet. The night at Terrapin Station was just a wild night. We had family there, we had friends there, we had the public there, it was open to the public as well. And there was just such an energy of anticipation both in performing for family that lives far away and our grandchildren being there and then having Crimson Winter play a real concert for the first time. And it was just so much fun to watch those boys come alive on stage. Having our son get into music is sort of a dream come true. We have other children who connect with music, but he is the first one who we feel the camaraderie of being deeply into music and passionately loving to play and to write and to perform. We've sort of been mentoring Crimson Winter just in the sense of offering them our experience as musicians and doing a concert together just seemed like a really good idea. And I think they had some question about, well, how is that going to work because of the difference in our musical style? We all had that question. Yeah, I think we did. When I was approaching people to even to tell them about the concert, there was at first a little bit of wondering, well, now is this person going to like both of these musical genres together or is this person going to prefer one over the other? And there was an inspiration behind the whole idea of doing a show together. And I started to just allow that to be what it was and to trust that I didn't really have to decide for the people coming to see us what they were going to like or not like. And I could just say, well, come out and experience it. It was amazing to be playing songs that we've done for years like, yes it does, with Crimson Winter because they were just had all this youthful energy, so powerful. And there too are the grandchildren coming up on stage. The energy was just electric for me personally. I had such a good time playing music with Crimson Winter. We had some beautiful rehearsals here days than the weeks before we did the Terrapin show and to do that with them on stage, it's kind of amazing really in so many ways because of course we've known Sebastian all his life and he's known John Murphy since he was probably in third grade and there was a long time there where most of what they would do together is play video games and it was never really, I never imagined that there'd be a day not only that they would both be so focused on music but that we would get to play with them on stage and be a part of a concert together and having the grandchildren come up on stage and play percussion it was a lot of fun and I know for them it was huge. They were just like beaming afterwards like that they had been a part of the band. They were rock stars. I think the general feeling you get from playing with Sebastian's parents I think practicing up to it, it's kind of a cool feeling because you get to play out of your style and you get to play with something that's a little bit softer and yada yada and you kind of get a different sonic experience and musical experience and in a way it's a nice sort of break for you as a musician. Playing with my parents and we all had family in the audience even if we totally botched the show they hate our songs whatever like they're still going to love us they care for us. The show feels a little more intimate just because you have that family there and you feel a little bit less pressure on one hand because you know that if you screw up I mean there's still your family but then again you don't want to screw up because you want your family to like your music. True and another aspect of that is that it's also your family so it's like wow I don't know what these guys think of it because it's like here's the first time it's like hey mom, hey dad check out this heavy riff. This is what I do. If you watch Common Ground Online consider becoming a member or making a donation at lptv.org.