By Quentin Yarolem
What began with three middle-school students starting a Blink 182 cover band has since turned into “7.5 scrawny boys” going on a four-week, 26-stop tour across the country.
Fairhaven — a ska band from the Quad Cities — is ready to go on its third tour, starting on July 6 with a show in Moline and ending Aug. 14 with a final show in Minneapolis.
The group has been around for six years but has only been a ska band for the past four.
“Fairhaven started in its real Fairhaven form, probably my freshman year of high school, with Nathan Lane and some other people we went to high school with,” lead singer Landon Kuhlmann said. “We finally became the full Fairhaven with the horns and everything my sophomore year, and that was like our final form.”
The band is comprised of its three founding members, Kuhlmann (singer/guitar player), Nathan Lane (bass), and Sage Weeber (drums), as well as a horn section made up of Matt Smith, Caleb Koch, Nick Lawton, Van Mielenhausen, and Luke Giovanine.
While there may be eight members in the band, not all tour at once.
“We have it split up in two legs. [On] one leg [of the tour], three horn players are coming, and on the other one, another three horn players are coming,” Kuhlmann said, “That’d be a lot of people to fit in one van. It’d get really sweaty.”
In the summer of 2014, Kuhlmann and Smith left the Quad Cities area to start their first year of college at the University of Iowa, a speedbump that many high-school bands face. Despite the students’ course loads, Fairhaven kept going and managed to sustain its productivity with the releases of Fairhaven Goes to Skallege, an album, and a self-titled split EP with fellow ska band Max Either. Both projects were independently released and are available for streaming on the band’s Facebook page or available for purchase on BandCamp.
Now, nearly two years after Kuhlmann and Smith left for school, the band members are in a similar situation; Weeber is set to move away to Hollywood, California, to attend school at a music conservatory, specializing in drum performance.
“I think we’ll stay together even though [Weeber] is moving away,” Smith said.
To prepare for Weeber’s leaving, the band is working on a new full-length album that it plans to release after the tour is over. Thus far, it has released two singles for the album: “Floating” and “Sunrise.”
“We self-record everything, and each time we record it gets better,” Kuhlmann said. “These two songs are the best we’ve sounded, so we decided to write a new record,”
From playing Blink 182 songs in a basement to opening for Reel Big Fish, Fairhaven has grown a lot, and it’s not stopping anytime soon. Its next tour will be the largest tour so far, and — yet again, refusing to stop — the members plan to release a new album shortly after.