Rachel Kaylor is a junior at USF majoring in broadcast journalism. She'll be writing about USF topics for the Daily Loaf, including the music scene.
The deafening sound of the stereo being turned up, the banter of instruments, the first note of the song and the concert begins. This scene attracted four USF students back in 2007 when they took their backgrounds as band geeks and started a ska band.
The four boys were in band together at Satellite Beach High School in Satellite, Florida. In 2007, when they were juniors, they started to think about starting a band of their own. Elliot Dickinson, now a USF sophomore majoring in music performance, said, “We wanted something less formal, we all excelled at music and we hung out all the time anyway.”
Dickinson said the idea for the name came from a shirt he got while visiting his sister in Japan. "The shirt said 'The Ambassy Want You' and we liked that it didn’t make sense.” With a name in place, the only thing left was the music.
“We really had to figure it out, listening to different bands and creating our own sound with different ideas,” said Dickinson. The band started out covering the band Reel Big Fish, and as they got better they started to define their own style, said Will Brant, a sophomore at USF majoring in music composition.
The music comes straight from their heads to their hands and is quickly written on paper. “Most of the time we just sit around with an acoustic guitar and write down melodies," said Dickinson.
The boys collaborate to make a final product that sounds good to them. “A lot of songs are inspired by our life situations or things that have happened to us,” said John Macdonald, a sophomore majoring in music performance.
This article appears in Feb 10-16, 2010.