You’ve got to love a band named “The Stupid Reasons.”
That’s the duo that features Gus Carrington, 29, on guitar and Daniel Wasmund, 29, on drums. They’re working on a new album, Through to You, at Easley McCain Recording.
The band name comes from one of Carrington’s old journal entries: “Well, you need to do whatever it is that makes you happy. Whether playing video games or watching stupid movies, you have to find stupid reasons to be happy.”
Carrington used the stage name The Stupid Reasons when he played solo gigs at singer-songwriter nights.
It’s always been music for Carrington. “My parents have footage of me standing at point-blank range staring at the TV screen at the Beatles movie, Yellow Submarine,” Carrington says. “I think I had hair in that footage, so maybe [I was] 4 or 5.”
Wasmund was about 10 when his parents got him his first guitar. “And, as cheesy as it is, I think I heard Jimi Hendrix play once and I was like, ‘I want to be like that. I want to make those sounds,’” Wasmund says.
Carrington met Wasmund at an eighth grade dance. Wasmund and his friend, Kyle Owens, brought their guitars and amps to the dance, but they weren’t allowed to bring them inside. “They found two outlets in front of the school,” Carrington says. “Plugged it up. It sounded like there were some elephants here. Some loud animals running around White Station Middle School.”
Rather, it was Wasmund and Owens “riffing through ‘Stranglehold.’”
They began jamming together when Wasmund discovered Carrington played bass. “I honestly thought I wanted to play bass and scream in a thrash metal band at the time,” Carrington says. “They were very much more bluesy Hendrix licks. We tried to run through ‘Seek & Destroy’ by Metallica with no drums. That’s how that one went. And then Kyle started doing ‘Voodoo Child.’ And I hopped on the drums. And Wasmund started riffing the solo.”
He and Carrington have been in numerous bands together, including a current one, Bigger Fish, Wasmund says. “It started with What’s in a Name, evolved into The Jetpack Crew a couple of years later, and then pretty much after that started The Stupid Reasons.”
(Petunias) was the title of The Stupid Reasons’ first album, which they recorded with a slew of other musicians from 2019 to 2022. Carrington’s song, “Petunias (The Break Room Song),” was inspired by the giraffe keeper at Memphis Zoo, where he worked as a tram driver. He was talking to her about how he was frustrated because he was stuck at work and he couldn’t play bass for the recording of Blvck Hippie’s self-titled EP that day. “She hit me with this phrase I had never heard before. She said, ‘Well, you must feel like a petunia in an onion patch.’ I said, ‘You know, Shirley, that’s exactly how I feel.’ And I had that song drop out of me.
“I wrote all about feeling like a petunia in an onion patch. And then I modernized it: ‘I feel like a Ferrari in a used car lot.’”
Carrington describes (Petunias) as “a collection of songs written over different time periods in my life.”
“We were wrapping up (Petunias) when me and Daniel decided, ‘Hey, it kind of works for us to play as a two piece. Let’s just jam.’ All the songs on the second album are from us just jamming together.”
The new record will be a “full concept album,” Carrington says. “Inspired by post-punk and ’80s.”
Songs include “Passing Through,” which is “about somebody passing through your life romantically. And being at peace with that for a change. Instead of holding onto it and being bitter, but appreciating that experience and that chapter in your life even though it’s done.”
Lyrics include, “Passing through my life like a harmony I can’t return to. That’s you.”
For the new album, he and Wasmund are fleshing out some ideas on how to take the music to “new sonic places,” Carrington says.
The Stupid Reasons will perform July 26th at the Hi Tone Cafe at 282-284 North Cleveland Street; (901) 490-0335.