Hardcore Christians | Growing Up | Music Education | The Beginning | Faith on the Road | Getting Personal | Ministry Opportunity | Music and Their Future
What was your early music experience?
Melissa:
I’ve played piano all my life, so I’ve always been in music, but never really thought about being in a band until I was 16.
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| Jessica |
Jessica:
I grew up playing violin. I believe I was in 2nd grade when I started playing. I only played until the 8th grade because I didn't want to practice, and if you didn't practice, you weren't going to be able to play violin very well. I ended up quitting because I wasn’t committed enough. I knew that I really loved music, and had always taken my CD player on family trips and everything. They were always like "When are you going to put down your headphones?" and I was like "I just love music." I guess I was called to music around that time.
Lindsey:
When I was 16, I joined the choir, and really found God there.
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| Alyssa |
Alyssa:
The thing about my school is that I was the first graduating class because it was so new. They did have a choir, but I’m not that kind of girl, you know? I took general music class, and that’s where I learned the basics.
Lindsey:
I was never really able to be part of a youth group until I was 16. I begged my parents to let me go to this big youth conference that Katie invited me to go to, and they let me. Katie and I were part of the choir there actually, and it was really there that I found God.
Ilia at the Music and Worship Arts College in Memphis
Melissa:
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| Melissa |
I graduated from home school in 2005, and went to the Visible School in the fall. Lindsey and Jessica were there with me. It was very intense! I had never had a guitar lesson even though I had played guitar for about two and a half years before I went there. The whole aspect of lessons and reading music for guitar was so intense. Since I played piano I could read music, and that helped. We had small groups of people the first year. There were only like 40 of us, so we all got to know each other very well.
Lindsey:
I took a year off after I graduated from high school because I knew I wanted to go to a music college with the girls.
Jessica:
The other girls were all home schooled, and I was public schooled until 11th grade. They were all a year ahead of me in school. They wanted to go to music school as a band, so I decided to home school my 11th grade year to get ahead. So I did 11th and 12th grade together so I could graduate with them and go to music school with them.
Music school was really cool. I had gone so young, and everyone else there was already 19 and 20. I started out at 16, so it was a pretty good sized age difference. I took drum classes, and everyone in the class had been playing for 5 or 6 years. I had only played for about a year or two, so I kind of felt like I was behind in that. We also had a lot of Bible classes which were really intense. I had never really read through the whole Bible, and we had a class on that. We had all the New Testament, and it was really a thorough dig from cover to cover. I ended up learning a lot from there and it helped me grow a lot spiritually by knowing more about the Bible.
Melissa:
Even going to the Visible School I struggled with that because if that is what God wanted me to do, it was going to be a lot of money that my family didn't have. He provided a way, and it’s just really cool.
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| Katie |
Katie:
Our drummer that we had and Lindsey and Melissa went to the Visible School in Memphis, and I went to college that was about an hour away from home. We weren’t really planning on seeing each other very much again. They graduated within a year on a one-year program at the school, and I didn’t think I’d be back in the band. When they came back from school, they asked me to get back in the band. They had gotten a new lead singer from the school, but she left the band this past December.
Hardcore Christians | Growing Up | Music Education | The Beginning | Faith on the Road | Getting Personal | Ministry Opportunity | Music and Their Future