With one album under their belts, We The Living has been doing a great job at making a name for themselves.
This Wisconsin-native-currently-living-in-LA band left the crowd, and a few floors up and down Channel in Sandburg Hall, awed by their melodic and hard-to-place sound last Monday.
Lead singer John Paul (J.P.) Roney and drummer Ben Schaefer began as The Profits at the University of Wisconsin. They released their first album, “The Sign of the Dollar,” in 2004, and their second, “Far From You and Your Everyday Noise,” in 2005.
After two of their bandmates left, they added Matt Holmen on guitar and Stefan Benkowski (later to be Jasper Smith, who played Monday night) on bass and became We The Living.
Since then they’ve recorded and released, and re-released, “Heights of Heaven,” an entrancing and amazingly heart-melting album that I’ve not been able to stop listening to since I first heard it about 12 hours before seeing them live. I got a chance to catch up with the band as they arrived on campus and started getting set up. The guys play a different venue every night and have played 250 shows this year and cannot imagine it any other way. “Days off are horrible” said Ben. Matt and Jasper had little space to work with on the stage but they made their presence known. During Matt’s solos and the interludes, the lights would change and his hands looked like they were moving a mile a minute on that guitar and Jasper’s facial expressions were a mixture of concentration and excitement.
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