In the summer of 2011, four boys from Roseburg, Oregon, started a band in the attic of one of their houses on Hemlock Lane — the street that later became their name.
What originated from casual jam sessions morphed into an unofficial John Mayer tribute band, and later grew into something no one had anticipated. Now, the band is overbooking themselves with shows and producing original music — including their most recent single, Halfway There, which was produced with the help of Portland’s Larry Crane and L.A.’s Mark Needham, who has worked with the Killers, Walk the Moon and Imagine Dragons.
Their music has several influences, including The Killers, Young the Giant, even the Beatles and Daft Punk. And those influences are evident in Hemlock Lane’s sound — Halfway There sounds exactly like something you’d hear from Young the Giant.
The current band members include 20-year-old drummer Nate Hansen, 19-year-old vocalist and keyboardist Natty Burmeister, 22-year-old bassist John Queant and 18-year-old guitarist Isaac Brickner. Though the band has included others in the past, these four have been close from the beginning.
“Isaac wasn’t even in high school when I graduated. He was still a middle school kid,” Queant said. “Just this weird, awkward kid who broke a bass string the first time we practiced. And I just remember thinking, ‘Why is this little kid at our practices?’ And it’s so funny because over that summer, he and I became best friends.”
Currently, Queant is “technically a junior” at the University of Oregon, majoring in biology. Hansen is a UO junior majoring in history and minoring in music, Burmeister is attending George Fox and Brickner is at Lane Community College.
Having started as a group of small-town kids, they’ve been doing everything themselves — from managing the band to producing their own songs.
“When we came to Eugene, we were definitely kind of an unusual presence,” Hansen said. “We grew up without anyone to show us the ropes. We learned all of it ourselves through a process of trial and error.”
The most recent single, however, was “the complete antithesis” of how they usually create their music, according to Hansen. It started out as a jam session, and was the first with an outsourced producer, who happened to have worked with one of their favorite bands in the past.
“I just remember one morning, I was getting ready to go to school and Nate called me and told me that Mark really loved our music and wanted to work with us,” Queant said. “I think I ended up skipping school. I was just on my laptop clicking refresh all day, waiting to see when that song would come in.”
With uplifting lyrics complementing a live-in-concert feel, the end product is easily one of the best songs they’ve released so far.
Although the band is taking a break for the summer, they plan to continue performing and producing new music afterward.
To stream or download Hemlock Lane’s newest single, Halfway There, check out their Soundcloud page.
Student band Hemlock Lane releases new single Halfway There with famed producer Mark Needham
Andrea Harvey
August 2, 2015
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