By June I was gleefully handing out homemade Beauty & Chaos cassette tape demos to people at school and in any social environments. The three songs on the demo consisted of “Beauty and Chaos”, “Life” and “Grim Reality”. It was a somewhat diversified collection of songs featuring heavy riffs, melodic guitar lines, vocal harmonies, hardcore influences, fast tempos and guttural growls. We continued to play in clubs. We played at least one show without a bass player and then we asked Jeremy to come back and…

I was flourishing in Madison high school as a central guitarist in the school music program. My romantic relationship with Ella was in full bloom and apparently healthy. While I did have a slight case of senioritis, I basically did my best until the end of the school year without pushing myself too hard or overly stressing out. My melodic metal band Beauty and Chaos was underway recording its first official demo. This would also be the first official release of my “musical career” as well. I couldn’t wait…

By the beginning of 1994 I had begun jamming with my neighbor Jack Longman. I’d play guitar and he would play drums. We called ourselves Impact. These jam sessions were fun and while he was newer to playing music than I was, we were managing to work together and create some pretty cool sounds. “Jam sessions” as we called them, would often take place on Saturdays although weekday jam sessions were also known to happen on occasion. At that age, Friday the 13th was a big deal since we loved the horror movie…

In June of 1994 I graduated 8th grade from St. Thomas Aquinas school. I know it was bittersweet for some to part with old friends and a familiar place. I don’t recall feeling much emotion about ending my time there however. I was anxious though about going from a familiar and relatively small private school to a huge and utterly unknown public high school. As I had heard many stories through word of mouth over the years about the reputation of public school, my main worry was that I would be picked on and…