The High Strung

The High Strung on Myspace

Josh Malerman, the voice of the High Strung, likes to say it’s because the band has been best friends since they were eleven that they were able to live in a bus together for 300 shows a year, five years running. But he also says it’s the songs… and the way Derek Berk (drums) and Chad Stocker (bass) play them… that gets them to love the experience as much now as when they were, well, eleven.

The High Strung are a curious band. Extremely hard workers (Malerman once hung up on a potential manager who said a band wasn’t good just because they work hard), they are often mistaken as something much more simple than they are. The High Strung are not a traditional rock and roll band. The High Strung don’t have a bluesy bone in their body (though they sometimes long for one). And because of a vigorous tour schedule that wasn’t planned but continued to feed off itself nonetheless, the High Strung do not belong to any one scene or “movement”. They can’t sit still! It is hard to say exactly who the band sounds like (the words “quirky” and “autonomous” are ascribed them often) and it’s maybe more telling to explain them in unusual musical terms.

NPR’s This American Life did a feature on the band for a tour of public libraries they did this past summer. How does one explain that exactly? A band who doesn’t play anything close to kids’ music, playing libraries at three in the afternoon or seven at night… standing on their amps… answering questions about girlfriends and volume and beer?

The press has been kind to the High Strung. Their Rolling Stone feature was bigger than Jewel’s on the same page. They had a full page in Entertainment Weekly. And the Washington Post named “The Songbird” the second best song to come out that year. NPR has done three separate features on the band. Playboy, Spin, MTV2. Stuff Magazine named “Never Saw It As Union”, the lead-off track for Moxie Bravo, as the song to download that issue… ahead of Kanye West’s enormous hit Goldigger.

The High Strung are a band to root for. A band you can get behind. And the landscape (mountains, we’ll say) created by a rhythm section who do not quit, and the bird-like voice that echoes off those mountains, makes for a hell of a back-drop for characters who do not fit exactly into the traditional rock n’ roll landscape.

Both the characters sung about and the ones doing the singing, too.