It goes without saying that our Jesuit community has had a plethora of gifted musicians walk these halls since its beginning.This can be clearly seen in a group like Moon waves, a neo-psychedelic rock group formed out of students at Zounds Sounds School of Rock, established in the summer of 2005 and located in Dallas, which specializes in a new form of rock containing slick basslines, intuitive beats and melodic vocals.
The band is comprised of John Kuzmick (guitar; senior at W.T. White),  Leah Lane (keys, guitar, vocals; sophomore at Booker T. Washington), Trey Bihari (bass; junior at Booker T. Washington) and Baldwin (drums; freshman at Jesuit). The style of neo-psychedelic rock the band adopted revolves heavily around guitar leads played by Lane and Kuzmick combined using a series of pedals and heavy reverb. The use of pedals and effects on guitar sounds provides a texture that takes the listener back into the genre’s hey day. Also, the addition of deep baselines and an omnipresent keyboard sound thickens the sound of the group’s first album.
Zounds Sounds School of Rock used to enroll kids for all ages and offered classes after school to students. However, Zounds Sounds recently had to close its doors because of an exodus of instructors to a similar school called The Spud Foundation.
Gus Baldwin ’17, drummer for Moon waves and student of Zounds Sounds since he was eight, describes how the band got started by saying, “It was all people who had been at the school for a long time. I joined the school when I was eight, and [Marc Solomon, the owner,] got some people together and we eventually formed a band called the Psychosonics.” Zounds Sounds School of Music has been amongst the premier music schools, since its inception in 2005. Baldwin continued, “We just wanted to keep playing music so we just formed Moon waves in September of 2013, which was the same exact band [as Psychosonics]… and we just continued to go from there.”
When asked how he first got into drumming as a child, Baldwin recounted, “I always wanted to be a drummer when I was like a little kid, but my dad got me into music really young and I wanted to be a drummer. I ended up learning guitar, which I don’t know how that worked, but I played guitar for five years. At Zounds Sounds music school, they taught drums and I [watched] a lot of drummers and movies and all sorts of drumming. I listened to a lot of rhythms and I just kind of started playing. Eventually, I bought myself my own drum set and I was completely self taught. I never took a lesson, but it’s just something I’ve evolved myself to do.”
Baldwin describes his view on the band by saying, “It’s a thing where we’re all happy in the band. Musically, we’re all still getting better, but we’re really gelling together and we’re starting to branch out a little bit and play, you know, some covers… we play a lot of Led Zeppelin covers… Almost all of the music we play is original and we can write a song and play it that night and we can just work things out.”
When asked about the band currently, Baldwin proudly stated, “[This month] is pretty big for us because we have the album coming out, of course, and we’ve had our EP out already which has gotten really good reviews on iTunes, which was really nice… We are starting to get a fan base, especially on Facebook because we’re getting hundreds of likes a week, which is tremendous.” Moon waves’ album, ‘Try Harder, Little Hypnotist’ is available on iTunes now along with their EP, Phosphate Fever.
