Zachary Vacek

I come from so many different places musically that it's hard to put a finger on anything that I'm not influenced by. As a little kid, my idea of music was exclusively limited to country music because that's all that my dad cared much for, and country is all that ever got played on the radio at home. When I was finally old enough to buy my own cd player, I rebelled against my country roots and started listening to any punk rock that I could sneak past my parents. When high school came around, my best friend and I started recruiting members for a third-wave ska band, horns and all. We played all over Texas for the next four years and our following in Houston slowly grew over time and after a ton of hard work. After doing the ska thing for a long time, I decided to try something new, so I teamed up with another friend of mine and started an electro-pop band, which lasted a good two years before we called it quits. After my high school days ended, I decided to take a break from music to explore the things I really loved about it in the first place. I realized that what I love about music isn't where music can take me, but where I can take music. It's creation and expression, experience stripped down to its most basic form. Music is something I have to do for myself. It isn't who I am, but it is necessary in learning who I am.