The members of Nimbus can’t sufficiently describe their music, but the four Lakewood teens all agree on one thing: “We can bring in a good crowd and rock their socks off.”
The young band is doing just that, performing at Trees, Across the Street Bar, Jay’s Café, Milam Art Gallery and an Earth Day park performance in University Park.
Fellow Nimbus members say guitarist Domenik Schiera, 16, is the group’s youngest and most talented musician.
“A lot of people are surprised by the amazing licks he can pull,” says band member Neal Andreason, 19.
Schiera had an internship this summer with Reel to Reel, a Dallas recording studio.
Duke Barnes, a 1995 graduate of Woodrow Wilson High School, writes many of the band’s songs and says Nimbus has a message for its fans.
“It’s really more like a novel,” Barnes says. “It’s more like something you read. I don’t want to sound like a library, but the music is informational and is full of life-healing messages.”
The band plays very few cover songs – almost all of the music they play is their own.
For the most part, Nimbus looks to bands from the ‘60s and ‘70s for inspiration rather than to music recorded during the past 15 years, says drummer Mark Griffin.
“It’s not what people are doing today,” Andreason says. “It’s more like what people were doing yesterday.”
Rush, Santana, Pink Floyd, Elvis and Led Zeppelin are a few of the artists that have influenced Nimbus, along with Metallica and James Brown.
Their influences vary greatly, along with the band members themselves.
Clean-cut drummer Griffin juggles practicing with the band at least three times a week and playing on Woodrow’s varsity baseball team, all while keeping his grades up to attend college.
Andreason is a high school drop-out who works at Rudolph’s Meat Market in East Dallas. Barnes writes poetry and songs and could pass for a James Dean impersonator, and Schiera can be found in a tie-dye T-shirt, with his long, blond hair tied in a pony-tail, and noodling on his guitar whenever he’s not in school.
The difference in character among band members and their musical sounds are symbolized in the band’s name. When they were looking for a name, Barnes and Andreason were searching for something that would represent more than one thing.
“The dictionary and other literary sources have different meanings for ‘Nimbus,’” Barnes says.
“It can be the dark cloud that signifies a storm, but it can also be the halo that surrounds a saint.”
