Lavendear kept Joseph Baker from having the blues during the 2020 quarantine.
“It started as a solo project I had been working on during Covid while I was staying at home,” says Baker, 18. “It was just the result of me being in my room and needing to write songs during that time period we had.”
That project blossomed into an indie rock band, which, in addition to Baker on guitar and vocals, includes Olivre Heck, 17, on bass and guitar, and Joey Eddins, 16, on drums.
Acting, not music, was Baker’s first creative outlet. Instead of a guitar, Baker carried a staff in his favorite role as “Little Bog Man” on stage when he was 11 years old.
His parents were part of the Our Own Voice Theatre Troupe at TheatreWorks, so Baker was exposed to theater at 3 or 4 years old. “Little Bog Man,” a character in an original production Attorney/Joker: Part Sign, was a “very peculiar character. Lived in the woods in the bog. He came into town and caused a ruckus. I loved that character. He was like Mr. Tumnus from Narnia. I had a beard and I was dressed in very nature-driven clothes, a wreath around my head. I was barefoot.”
Baker got into music at the Rock and Romp summer camp. “They had local musicians just teaching kids how to play instruments.”
He loved it. “Playing drums was exciting to me. And the idea of being with a group of people and putting a song together and playing it was a lot of fun. I couldn’t get enough of it.”
Baker was a die-hard David Bowie fan at the time. “I would carry my David Bowie CD around with me even if I wasn’t listening to it in the car. [The Rise and Fall of] Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. I would just open it up and look at the lyrics. I just loved David Bowie as a kid. He was definitely my favorite. I love that he was just all about putting on a show. And every Bowie era and album was so distinctive and masterfully crafted into this cacophony of sound and visuals.”
Baker’s first Rock and Romp show was playing drums with a “makeshift” band at Young Avenue Deli. “I think it went fine. We played one song. And the crowd made some noise. So, it must have been OK for some 12 year olds on stage.”
He was hooked. “After that, music was everything.”
Baker began going to Goner Records and Shangri-La Records on weekends with his parents. “I would just get Minor Threat, Bad Brains, Black Flag, and all those old hardcore punk band records. I was in love with that scene.
“I was totally in love with Dischord Records, that really hardcore and post-hardcore scene. All those great bands doing it all themselves. They were the definition of what punk is: People getting together, making music, and making it happen. They were pressing their own records, starting their own labels, making their own merch. No big record labels influencing their art.”
His parents, who were more into Bruce Springsteen and Bob Dylan, were supportive, but they “weren’t really into this weird punk scene I was into,” Baker says, adding, “I was making my own T-shirts for bands that weren’t around anymore. I was taking Sharpies and making my own Bad Brains shirt in my room.”
That summer before he went to White Station Middle School, Baker “so desperately wanted to be in a band and playing music with people.”
He wanted “that hunger for the feeling of pure happiness when you’re playing music and you look out and you see people smiling. Which is a feeling I didn’t really get to feel until this last summer. But the idea was so wonderful. My young mind just needed it.”
Baker made posters saying he was looking for a drummer. “And I put them up everywhere. All over Cooper-Young, Goner Records, Shangri-La. I put up these posters everywhere saying I was looking for a drummer who wanted to do punk and metal music.”
He only got one response, but it didn’t work out. “He was definitely more interested in doing progressive rock.”
Baker began writing songs at the beginning of sixth grade. “I know I wrote some songs about Star Wars just as a writing exercise.”
But, he admits, “I’m a huge nerd. That was familiar material when you’re 12. You don’t have many experiences. Unless I want to write about ‘I don’t want to do my homework.’”
He described those songs as “punk songs with a pop sensibility,” Baker says. “Almost power pop. Elvis Costello meets Bad Brains.”
He began working on a song project that he called “Guilloteen,” he says. “With the added irony I wasn’t a teen yet. I was still 12 years old. I so desperately wanted to be this punk rock teenager. Ian MacKaye is who I wanted to be. I was a funny kid.”
Baker recorded four songs on his Tascam dp-008ex eight track recorder. “I emailed them to myself and burned them to a CD and made five copies and gave them to my mom and my dad and a few friends.”
“One Punk Rock Jesus” was about MacKaye. “It’s the only one I can still kind of remember how it went.”
Baker then joined “this weird internet community of kids that just liked metal music. It was a Google hangout chat called ‘Metal.’ We all met in a YouTube comment section and all commented on our emails and created this group chat.”
He and a member, Theo Charlesworth, “would listen to songs together and talk about them. He introduced me to pretty much all my favorite music now. Bands like Alcest and Dance Gavin Dance.”
They recorded Ephemeral Eternity, an EP of songs they wrote. “It was definitely a very post-hardcore kind of like a concept EP about that transitional period between middle and high school.”
And, he says, “We used a lot of imagery and words that made it seem a lot more whimsical and magical than it actually was. That was my first band. It was the first time I really sat down and wrote songs with somebody else. It taught me a lot about working with other people and taught me how much I love writing music with other people. Telling stories with other people.”
During his freshman year at Crosstown High School, Baker formed a Christian metalcore band, Victimless Disconnect. “We only played one gig at Visible Music College. It went pretty well.”
He was in church camp at the time. “The other members of the band were also Christian, so it made sense to follow that direction.”
The band broke up six months later when one of the members moved away. “I took a little bit of a break from playing music. I would sit in my room and learn songs I liked, but I didn’t really write until quarantine happened and I had nothing to do.
“I originally wanted to do a five song EP kind of like Shoegaze dream pop songs. I was a big fan of bands like Ride and Alcest. I love pretty-sounding music and that’s the kind of music I wanted to make.”
He knew he wanted “Lavendear” as the name of his project. “The smell of lavender is one I’ve always associated with comfort because in my house we had lavender candles or lavender soap, lavender laundry detergent. That was what I was used to. This tranquil scent of lavender.”
Baker thought “Lavendear” sounded cool and “read” very well. “And kind of reminded me of bands like Hopesfall. It had a very nice ring to it.”
He wrote five songs, but “Meet Sleep,” an instrumental, and “Balloon,” are the only two songs Lavendear now plays.
“Balloon” is about the “disjointed summer” he went through that year, Baker says. “Things are all over the place. And we’re all young and not really sure what we’re doing and why we’re doing it. Adolescence was a beautifully confusing time.”
He asked Eddins, who he met last April at Society Skatepark & Coffee, if he wanted to play drums. “He instantly came up with a brilliant drum part. I was like, ‘Now, we would just be a band. No point in being a solo project.’”
Their first gig was at Society Skatepark & Coffee. “It was more just hanging out and playing music on the little mini ramp.”
But, he says, “After the first show Joey and I were like, ‘This can be something real.’ So, we decided to just start working really hard on writing songs.”
Baker wanted Heck, who went to school with him, in the band, but, he says, “I was nervous to approach him. This guy is so talented and cool. I texted him, ‘Hey, man. You want to come jam with us?’ And he was like, ‘Yeah.’ Just very joyful and excited. “
The jam was a success and Heck joined the band. “It worked out phenomenally. It felt like there was a lot of magic going on in that room.”
“I had heard about them on social media,” says Heck, who also goes to Crosstown High School. “Some of my friends had seen them already.”
He was impressed when he saw the band perform at a house show. “It was just different. It was new to me. Joseph was someone I hadn’t really talked to much at school in the year and a half I had been going to school with him. I didn’t realize he had written all these cool songs. And some of them he had even sent me a couple of months before and I blew them off a little bit.”
He didn’t have time to listen to them at the time. “I didn’t realize what they were.”
The jam session went great, he says. “It was really easy to play bass to the other guitar parts Joseph wrote.”
And he found he was compatible playing bass to Eddins’ drumming.
Heck also writes songs for Lavendear. His song, “Older,” will be released December 10th. “It’s kind of a personal song about being cast out of someone’s life for wronging them. And thinking you’ve changed over time. But you haven’t done anything to actually make that change. You’ve just gotten older.”
Eddins, the youngest member of the band, likes the fact Lavendear plays to a wider audience than some other young bands. “All the bands we’re friends with are older,” he says. “They’re all in college. We’re all in high school. I’m 16. A junior in high school. Christian Brothers High School. That brings a whole different audience, which I think is really cool.”
And, he says, “I love the music we make. We make a variety of music. So, we have some faster songs to some slower songs. A ton of different music.”
Lavendear currently is working on a full-length album. The group has released three singles, including “Pitch Perfect Penguin Mirror,” which Baker describes as “a catchy little power pop song about I guess, not to sound cliche, but just standing up for yourself and not letting whatever people say get to you.”
Making music was something Baker never had to justify to anybody. “Everyone was just very excited. Whatever negativity there was I never listened to.”
Listen to “Pitch Perfect Penguin Mirror” and “Shadow Man” on Spotify.
Lavendear will perform at an all ages show December 6th at Hi Tone at 282-284 North Cleveland Street. Doors open at 7 p.m. Cover is $10. Also performing are $2030M and Beneviolence. Public Strain is headlining.
Lavendear also will perform at an all ages show December 10th at Society Skatepark & Coffee at 583 Scott Street. Doors open at 7 p.m. Show starts at 8 p.m. Also performing are Hotel Fiction and headliner Arlie.
