Old Liners

he Old Liners sound like good old American music, like Creedence or Otis Redding or Johnny Cash.
Yeah, their influences range from punk to jazz to bluegrass to rock -- but what's spun from that background is a rootsy, honest rock, a punchy, driving ruckus of energy and fresh lyrics... what you might imagine to hear from four musicians in their early 20s, trying to create something meaningful.

The band formed in September 2009, first as a duo of Ryan Nicholson on rhythm guitar and vocals and Paul Winzer on lead. They later added Chris Morris on drumset and most recently Brian Weakly on bass.

They'll play Cafe Nola tonight, and if it's anything like the last several times they've performed there, expect a big crowd. They've also played venues in Baltimore and next month will take New Jersey.

They all contribute to the songwriting, and it's all original material.

"So far, Ryan's written most of the lyrics," Winzer said, sitting at Cafe Nola last week for lunch.

"Mostly because I talk the most," Nicholson responded.

Nicholson, 25, basically fronts the band on lead vocals and rhythm guitar. Self-taught, he started writing songs when he was 15 and played in a punk band in high school with Morris until he became a "huge fan" of Radiohead.

"When I started listening to Radiohead, I really branched out musically," he said.

He focused on solo stuff while serving in the military for four years. He moved back to the states in 2009, into a house with Morris, and started the Old Liners project shortly thereafter.

"It's a real collective effort in terms of the structure," Weakly said, a few weeks back.

The plan is to release their first EP soon and then record a full-length album from there.

Winzer, 24, who attended Middletown High School with Nicholson and Morris, played in a cover band in college, he mentioned. He started playing guitar about 10 years ago and is mostly self-taught, besides the year he spent taking lessons. Like Nicholson, he started on punk, saying it was easy to play, until he got into the Red Hot Chili Peppers for a good five years.

"I sort of always wanted to be a jazz player, but rock music is more immediately satisfying," Winzer said.

"That's what we're going for," Morris said.

"It's a cheap fix," Nicholson joked.

Winzer was accepted into UC Irvine for guitar but attended UC Berkeley instead (his family moved to California when he was 16), majoring in history. In California he was in a band that played "emo thrash core screamo stuff," he said. "We had, like, a Rastafarian bassist, some really flashy singer..."

Morris "just kind of figured out" drums and started out playing with an indie rock band. He's toured the country but Old Liners became his primary focus recently.

Weakly, however, keeps up with a handful of bands. In high school, he was a marching band guy and went to Berklee College of Music to study tuba but dropped out a year later and picked up bass.

An Urbana High School grad, he's their third bassist and, they hope, their last. He came to his first rehearsal on New Years Day and was performing with them a few weeks later.

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www.myspace.com/oldliners - The Frederick News Post