Denver band profile: My Body Sings Electric hits their stride

Alt-rock band My Body Sings Electric is a Denver band with a memorable name, but one most folks hadn’t heard about until this past year, although they’ve been around since 2007. After spending a couple of years in basically formative stages, exploring and growing as musicians, they’ve spent the past year taking big strides in the Denver music scene, most visibly placing in the Top 3 in the 2010 Hometown For the Holidays competition, and seeing radio play of their current single “Step Into the Light.” The band attributes their recent successes to a blend of maturing their sound and careful planning.

 

My Body Sings Electric (whose name is loosely derived from a Walt Whitman poem) formed as sort of a blended family, when musicians from a couple of other bands decided to get together. In the beginning, they say, they were fairly experimental with their sound.  “We tried a lot of crazy stuff,” says frontman Brandon Whalen. “It didn’t work out so much with us gaining a lot of fans and momentum, but what it did do is help us become a really tight band, and it helped us become really good musicians in the process, and by the time we decided to make more of a pop-driven record, we were just primed and ready to make it happen.”

 

It is actually the infusing of pop sensibilities that created the sound that has caused My Body Sings Electric to gain more attention this past year. Along with influences such as Glassjaw, Minus the Bear and Brand New, bandmates admit to liking Top-40 artists like Rihanna, Katy Perry, and Lady Gaga almost as a guilty pleasure.  

 

“We admire people who know what is gonna be widely accepted by a target market,” says guitarist Nick Crawford. 

 

Whalen adds, “My favorite guy in the music business is Will.I.Am from the Black-Eyed Peas…Two years ago he said, ‘You know what? Electro is coming in, dance is coming back, people are gonna want to hear poppy-electro-dance songs.’ And they went out and made that record, and today all you hear on the radio are these dance-influenced records.  He knew it two years ago.”

 

This isn’t to say people should expect Top-40 electro-dance grooves from My Body Sings Electric; this is decidedly an alternative-rock band. Rather, this is a band that is learning from other genres how to temper their sound to connect with a broader audience. Gauging from the momentum they’ve gained in 2010, it’s working for them.

 

So, what’s on the horizon for the band? They completed tracking on a full-length CD in late 2010, recorded by Stephan Hawkes at Interlace Audio in Portland. Expect a release show at the Gothic Theatre in late March or early April. But you don’t have to wait that long to hear them play; they’re on the bill this Friday night, January 21, at Summit Music Hall with The Northern Way. Go check them out if you have the chance.