Farms that they dubbed the “shingle shanty,” which they

Farms that they dubbed the “shingle shanty,” which they still call home.

Craig, 27, lead singer and guitarist, grew up in Maryland. Nathan Brown, 26, drummer, Wolfe Quinn, 31, keyboards, Tbone player and auxiliary percussionist, and Steve Van Dam, 28, guitarist, alto saxophonist, clarinetist and vocalist, grew up in northern Virginia. David Slankard, 27, bass player, and Rich Bradley, 27, tenor sax, guitar, and vocalist, are from Richmond.

Room after room of the house is filled with an assortment of instruments while microphones and cables run everywhere until they converge in the central control room with a no-nonsense engineer hovering over a six-foot mixing console.

A computer monitor displays the sound visually and at the very heart of it all, is a tape machine with a two-inch tape that was the permanent sound record. “The room actually becomes part of the instrument, part of the sound the human ear hears,” Craig said.

All of the band members had formal musical training. Nathan, a gifted drummer, said he started lessons in percussion, drums, and vocals in ninth grade and was in a marching band in school. Craig said he started playing the snare drum in a third-grade band.

Steve Van Dam has the greatest amount of formal training including the clarinet, saxophone, piano, bass and guitar, and in college continued with composing and symphonic and orchestral arranging. Rich Bradley said he began playing the saxophone when he was about 11-years-old.

It all seems so glamorous and creative, however, there is another side to their lives. They perform at over 200 events each year which involves sometime six to eight weeks of traveling before they can come home. Their performance scheduled, starting Sept. 4 and ending Sept. 28, rockets back and forth between North Carolina, Virginia, South