My interest in this band started on my 11th birthday weekend playing Ultima VI on my sister's computer and having become bored of the "Top Gun" soundtrack, I decided to check that "Take on Me" band out once I found their album sitting in the record collection. This would have been around 1993, so imagine how different it was when I bought "Memorial Beach"...which was around the time the neighbor Jonathan loaned me Spin Doctors and Stone Temple Pilots (the latter of which were also this list), solidifying A-ha as a band I have a lot of respect for considering they went from synth pop to alt-rock in almost a decade. Pal Waaktaar was the reason I wanted a blue Fender Stratocaster guitar originally, because I saw him playing one in a clip for a "Sounds of the Eighties" compilation around the same time I got into the first record.

When I found these guys it was a bit before everyone else did. I was doom-scrolling Instagram one night and then I kept getting these two people in weird costumes...one looking like a Adventure Time character with a floppy nose, the other looking something like an attempt at a abstract paper mache Layne Stayley. I knew right away that the guitarist/bassist was running a microtonal setup because back when I was in Zombie Jihad and JAck Endino (our mixer/producer) was over to look at the album, he was talking about a microtonal Les Paul he just had built. Either way, was seriously tempted to make one of my newer guitar builds microtonal because of this.

I found Lee because I was looking for some obscure bands at the time, I think I was looking to see if any women had made it in metal and found her first. This was way back during my early YouTube days, like 2008-2009ish, and found the video for "Under your Spell". Um, I cannot deny, she's pretty, and the guitar sounds were sick - right up my alley - Marshall crunch tone with a heavy chorus, and through her is where I found out about Rick Santers. Crazy, I'm not at all a Canadian (well, maybe French Canadian heritage by my wife's side), but I sure have a LOT of Canadian musicians on this roster.