New Year's Edition 2022: Aviatrix

with KingusKong and Grizzlerd

-Formation and evolution of Aviatrix-

When I was in high school my best friend Adrian and I wanted to form a band, so I actually made us some album artwork and when we were brainstorming band names I always wanted to do Charles and Amelia for Charles Lindbergh and Amelia Earhart and so that kind of started the brainstorm session and then we settled on the Old School Aviators and I made us some artwork based off some stupid pictures that we took, but we never wrote any songs. I think we learned a couple Decemberists covers but then later when I was looking to form my own rock band, I wanted to kind of pay homage to that name ... My father was a pilot for many years, both in the Airforce and as airline pilot and I got to fly for free a lot because of that so I love traveling and have been very fortunate to have gotten to do a lot of that. So that’s kind of where that came from, was just the kind of roaming, jet setting, free-flight kind of theme. 

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Aviatrix formed in 2014, and that was Bill Burswela on bass, Nick Learned on drums, and myself on guitar. Bill and I had been playing at open mic night at the Buckhorn together and he liked some of the songs I had been writing and kind of was like “yeah I would love to play music with you.” 

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Then I was in an open mic night in Centennial and was talking to a group of musicians about how I wanted to add another guitarist, and low and behold, Sean Francis was like “oh, I’d love to play guitar with you guys and at the time I knew him as a drummer in Patti Fiasco and didn’t realize that he was a phenomenal guitarist and was also kind of starstruck, like, “you’re like, a really good musician, are you sure you wanna play music with me?” So Sean and I are the remaining original band members. Seth McGee joined us a few years in. He replaced Bill as our bass player and it was kind of funny, for a while there we had all different band members, all four of us living in all different towns. We had Sean living in Lander, Wyoming, Seth in Laramie, Nick was in Casper, Wyoming, and then I was in Lincoln, Nebraska and/or Omaha and so it was a very kind of low-commitment band, but we all were kind of used to just getting together, doing a quick practice, and then you know, doing a show and whatever happened happened, and we had good enough chemistry that we kind of made that work. 

We did record an album as that lineup: as Sean, Seth, me and Nick. We recorded, oh probably right before I left Laramie or right after, so we recorded probably in 2018, and then kind of sat on that album for a while. Then when quarantine happened, I personally felt inspired to reconnect with art and music. Green Door Recording down in Evergreen, Philippe Palantino, he was running a quarantine special with half-off mixing and mastering so I reached out to him and it worked out perfectly. What we had in our band fund was what he would charge to master our album so in I believe May of 2020 was when we came out with the album Zenith.

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Shortly after we put out Zenith, which also harkens to aviation...where a Zenith is like your trajectory, it’s another bearing. I like plays on words a lot. But after we put that out, Nick Learned, our drummer, reached out to us to say “hey guys, best of luck, I have to step down because I am going to be moving to Idaho.” So we wish him the best. Aviatrix wouldn’t be what it was without him, but I decided that was a good time to check in with everybody. I had just moved back to town right at the beginning of quarantine, and so we hadn’t had a chance to really come back together as a band yet, so I reached out to all of the members individually and Seth was really on board with sticking with us, but as everyone knows, he was in a million music projects and planning going back to school, so he graciously stepped down as well and unfortunately a few months after that he passed away. I don’t know if the band would be continuing on if things had timed differently, if I hadn’t reached out to him beforehand, because I don’t know if we could have survived that blow. So he is greatly missed and his contributions to the band are largely why our album sounds the way it does. He was also integral in picking the name of the album. I was really kind of going for a Captain Marvel theme because as a kid who grew up on the Air Force base in the 90s and who was a big fan of girl power. He and I both really enjoyed Marvel quite a bit so we kind of did a few plays on that. I kind of wanted to call it Carol. He kind of wanted to call it Danvers. But eventually we settled back on the original thought of doing Zenith.
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Right around that time, Evan Cook, the lead singer of my other project, Shotgun Shogun, moved to D.C. We’re still an active project, but without our, you know, fearless leader around, we don’t practice as much. We’re not working on as much new music. Having a vacancy with a bass player and a drummer in Aviatrix, it was the perfect opportunity to have Zach Hobart and Paul Bartow come on over and join the band, so we now have overlap of three members — myself Zach and Paul  — are all members of Shotgun Shogun and Aviatrix, which is highly convenient for a lot of reasons: sharing gear and sharing practice space, and sharing influences as well. Also just having a working relationship with these guys for ten years now has been really convenient in keeping this project going. 

When I found out that I have arthritis, I have an autoimmune disorder that causes a lot of inflammation which makes it hard to play guitar for me sometimes, I actually didn’t touch a guitar for about two years before moving back to Laramie, other than when I was actually playing a show with Shotgun Shogun, and so I decided I wanted to add a third guitarist to Aviatrix to give me the option of putting down the guitar, fronting the band without playing, giving my hands a chance to like, catch up. So we added Ryan Archibald who has been a campfire friend of mine for a while. We’ve played many acoustic covers and open mic nights together and he has fit right into the band and has a pretty good understanding of what we’re going for as far as sound goes so now we have three guitarists and are a giant five-piece that barely fits on a lot of stages, so that’s pretty fun.

-Songwriting-

So the Zenith lyrics were written by me and the majority of the structures of the songs were written by me, but I have a background writing a lot of more folk-style, singer-songwriter music and so I’ve always kind of taken a bare-bones, like, here is the chord structure and the melody and the lyrics and then everyone writes their own parts around that, or you know, offers suggestions as to how we can make it more interesting, how we can structure it to have a bridge in there, and I would say that Seans driving melody lines with guitar have been integral into our sound. Its’ very much the whole band and what they contribute and it’s just a very cool process to take a song that’s very simple from acoustic guitar and then watch it grow into a five-piece composition, and that’s not possible without every member contributing, and everyone writes their own parts and occasionally Sean will bring a chord progression and guitar part to me and say like “hey would you like to write some lyrics for this and kind of gives me the opportunity to write melody and lyrics on top of some of his compositions and then we continue that process of everyone building their own part around what we’ve brought to to them.

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As I mentioned earlier, finding out that I had a chronic illness and realizing that that is why I struggled with mastering the guitar, I would say I’m definitely a competent guitarist, but it was always frustrating to me that I couldn’t make chord shapes or couldn’t do certain things that I saw my colleagues doing and so I took some time to kind of go through a grieving process, a morning process. I felt like I was losing my hands, however that was not true. Believing in growth mindset, if I had taken time to look at that as a challenge, of, “well, if I continue to practice and do exercises then I can maintain,” then I probably would have been in a better place, but instead I kind of shut down for a couple of years. I wasn’t playing guitar. I wasn’t really writing and I realized I was homesick, was a big part of it too, so I made the move back to Laramie, pretty determined to remain present and remain in my body, and then the pandemic happened and that just became so much more challenging for everybody. I feel like we’ve been in a state of crisis for two years now almost, but at the beginning of the pandemic I took that crisis and I decided to commit myself to expression and art, so I participated in a singer-songwriter contest and it was like, the quarantine lockdown challenge and wrote my first full song in a couple years. I used to be scared about being overly sentimental in songs, didn’t want to sound sappy, didn’t want to sound stupid or just it felt very vulnerable and I’ve actually retired some songs that I felt were too vulnerable despite bandmates and friends saying “no, that’s a good song because it’s an honest song.” So, I wrote a song called Cartography, and it was kind of about how we didn’t have a roadmap, these were unprecedented times, and how are we managing it, and I wrote it on ukulele which was a new experience — just kind of picked that up for funsies during that time. And I wrote the song overnight, and that’s not normally my process. My process is normally slow and arduous, and like pulling my own teeth to get me to actually string all of the lines together. But this I wrote in a night and stayed up all night doing it and I recorded a Youtube video of it and submitted it to the competition, not really expecting much competition wise. I never really go to these singer-songwriter competitions with any sort of goal of winning. I enjoy the process and I enjoy the people who are actually invested in lyrics and the song content more so than in other settings. And I really enjoy the song, even though it is very sentimental. It is very, like, my heart is on the surface, and so that was a new experience. I liked that the ukulele was kind of a more of a tender instrument to do that on as well. I don’t know if we’re going to incorporate the ukulele into Aviatrix just because we do like the heavy, kind of grunge punk sound, but I like having that versatility as a songwriter. I write a lot about interpersonal relationships. Most of my songs that are about relationships are an amalgamation of a lot of different interactions with a lot of different people. Not a lot of my songs are about just one event or one person. It used to concern me that people would think my songs, particularly ones that are about love and care or tumultuous relationships, were about romantic relationships when they often weren’t and I think that’s another reason why I stopped myself from writing a lot more vulnerable songs because to me, being romantically caring for someone was weakness. I’ve since progressed as a person and kind of realized that people can take their own meaning from what I write. They may not get the intended meaning but it might mean something different to them that is significant. It might resonate with them about their relationship with their partner. Sometimes I feel like I do a little bit of storytelling, and they might have a different take on the story, a different interpretation of it, and I’m a lot more comfortable with that these days. I like to use metaphor. I like to use nature and science as metaphors. One song that’s one of my favorites in particular, it’s called Guilty by Dissociation, when I was writing it, I was taking thermodynamics in engineering school, and a lot of the verses contain a theme from from my thermodynamics textbook. I was just kind of leafing through it and looking at matter transfer, and Newton's laws and things of that nature. One of my favorite lines I wrote is in a different song, but it’s “I cried over the loss of potential energy, some turned kinetic but most was lost to heat,” because energy and matter can neither be created nor destroyed, so it’s got to go somewhere and that was a direct metaphor for a relationship that started off hot and heavy and then fizzled out and I was sad about the fizzling out more so than the loss of that particular person. I like using those types of metaphors, less overt and again open to interpretation of the listener.