DEC 5, 2024 | FEATURES | By Anabel Shenk
They had decided as a group to meet at 3:00 pm in the Packard recording studio. By 3:45, the whole band had rolled in. I followed Jason Smith ‘25, the bass player for the group, around a little while he set up the session. I listened as he grumbled about his missing band members. I sat in the control room of the studio with all five members of the band Strip. Strip was formed in 2021, the freshman year for all of the members. Forgiving some breaks due to studying abroad and other complications, the band is still together, thanks to their love and dedication to music and each other. Three years ago you could find them messing around in the Mathias basement, or getting noise complaints in their Loomis dorms. Now, more often than not they are in one of their garages on Wahsatch.
I met with the five of them in the recording studio which is not typically where they would be playing. Strip is a band completely dedicated to joy. It is obvious when you sit down in a room with them. The shift towards the studio, as lead singer Henry Wilde ‘25 put it, is that “we have all acknowledged how fun it is and how special it is to create music together rather than just play.”
After playing lots of live shows for the Colorado College community at house parties, it feels like time to move towards a place where they can really hone in on their own songs. As Wilde added, “Sometimes choosing the wrong gigs turns having fun with each other into a chore or into work.”
When Strip plays a house show, they tend towards covers that their audience will know. “I think musicians as a whole can only do the same thing for so long before you get bored. That’s what’s given us some of the best albums and songs of all time. So it kind of feels like a natural chain of events/progression for us to be moving in this direction because it feels like we have said all we can say playing covers. When you don’t have anything to say, the music becomes flat.” Smith explained. The reason for Smith to be in the studio is to take the handful of songs they have written as a band and “really discover or figure out what the songs really are.”
Charlie Stacey ‘25, the lead guitarist, and drummer George Sowles ‘25 spoke to the art of covering songs, which is what Strip has been most known for up until this point. Stacey explained that “the way I play, you know, I never really learn guitar parts for songs, I just look at the chords and then fuck around so the way I think about covers is like making it my own.”
Sowles added, “The type of covers matters. Sometimes you can make a song your own and with ‘Money,’ you know, we jam on it and make it our own. Yeah, you didn’t write it but you can put your own flavor on it.” The consensus in the group was that this year feels like the time to direct focus towards their originals and maintain a sense of freshness, energy and joy.
Even though there is a shift occurring, the group is still enthusiastic about playing live shows like they have in the past. Stacey, who has played many college parties, when asked about playing house shows, remarked on his deep appreciation for the opportunity to play live. “I love performing and playing for people. When you’re playing for people there’s kind of like that interplay between the audience and the performer, like you’re giving energy and they’re giving it back to you. I always love that.” However, the crowd at a party can also be problematic, “like when it’s really crowded and someone spills a beer on my pedal and my guitar’s getting unplugged and my friends are being goofy and touching me. And it feels like there is no respect for it, which irritates me because I put a lot of work into it. And I get it’s for fun but you know. It’s a room full of drunk college kids.”
Wilde’s thoughts are similarly mixed. “If our friends are there, and it’s outdoors, and it’s a nice day, I think we all just love playing music. When it comes to a place where it feels forced or it’s in a house or a space where the people just want us there as an amenity, it becomes a chore. I can only think of like two times we have felt like that but I feel like the campus community is incredibly open and big smiles and wide arms for live music which is unbelievable.”
You can tell by being around these five people that they all truly embody a passion for the music they play and contribute to the musical landscape around them. All of them have been playing since they were much younger. “I started playing guitar in kindergarten. My mom signed me up for classical guitar lessons in a group and pretty much day one I was hype on it, brought my guitar home and was grinding the one note,” Stacey explained. For Sowles, Smith and Stacey, music is something they want to pursue after college as well. Sowles’ dream is to become a studio musician, Stacey would also like to do music professionally, and Smith wants to eventually be a producer. “I want to be a producer and work with bands and artists and help them realize the full potential of their work.”
As the conversation lulled in the control room, Stacey, with a subtle smile, looked around the room at his bandmates and gave me a concise rundown of everyone’s role during a typical practice. “Jason’s usually like in the mood or grumpy and getting mad about some random stuff. Bella is just like chillin’ but gets annoyed because we are yapping. I would say Henry is generally pretty chill and probably gets annoyed when me and Jason are arguing about some bullshit. George is just trying to play “Tush.”’
Last year, Battle of the Bands 2024, Strip got voted into the second round after performing in the Worner basement. This meant that they could now prepare for a set in Ed Robson Arena, a tremendous opportunity for a Colorado College band. It was so exciting, that two of the members had family flying out to see them. Two days before the event, the student organizer for the SoCC (Sounds of Colorado College, the student organization putting the event on) informed the band members that they had been disqualified due to cheating. It turns out that band members are not allowed to vote for themselves in the first and second round of the competition. Voting happens on anonymous, online forms. The members of Strip were not aware of this rule. “We know firsthand that other bands also voted for themselves, we were just the only ones dumb enough to put our emails on the form – it’s an anonymous form, but it asked me for the email so I put it in,” Smith reported. “If we were actually trying to beat the system, we would be the dumbest criminals, it would be like robbing a bank and leaving your business card” Sowles added.
Confused and hurt, as it was an innocent misunderstanding on their part, Smith explained that he could have understood it if there was some partially valid reasoning behind it. “I could understand the case of wanting other voices. It is a big challenge on this campus that the bands that play consistently are predominantly white, male, with maybe one or two girls in the band. If you’re disqualifying us for this and you want different representation, I would understand that. But we got replaced by a band with basically the same lineup as us.”
This was not the first time that Strip had conflict with the Battle of the Bands team. In 2023, the first time Strip played the event, Stacey could not find his guitar tuner about thirty seconds before they were supposed to perform. Because this is a timed competition, his refusal to play without a tuner began eating into their playing time. “I’d rather get disqualified from the whole thing than play with my G string out of tune,” Stacey remarked. Finally, after a stressful minute of looking for his tuner, they began to play. When their time was up, which was inevitably in the middle of a song, the sound engineer pulled the plug on them before they could finish. “It was right as we were getting to the big conclusion and he unplugged my bass…I was pissed. You don’t do that,” Smith said. “We always have some guff with the BOTB.”
When asked about this year’s Battle of the Bands, Wilde said “As of last year we were not really keen on doing it this year.” “It was incredibly depressing to get that news last year” Sowles added. “It left a sour taste in my mouth,” Smith agreed. Bella Takacs ‘25, saxophone player, expressed that it would be fun to play and that it is important to participate in “fun campus events” such as this.
For Strip, it is all about playing and having a good time. It’s why they do what they do. “A lot of what gets in the way of live music at CC is the CC bureaucracy and jumping through hoops. Musicians like us, nobody wants to do that shit. We’d rather just not play,” Smith stated.
As Battle of the Bands approaches, Strip has a decision to make. This year, Battle of the Bands is taking on a new configuration. Instead of there being two rounds of competition, there is only one. In the past, there has been a preliminary round where all the bands play a small set and students can vote after hearing all the performances for who they think should go to the next round. This year, each band that is interested in performing must submit a recording of themselves right to the committee in order to qualify for the “second round.” For bands like Strip, who have struggled with the bureaucracy of the event getting in the way of the fun, it is still a question of whether this new approach will help or hurt things and attract bands or repel them.