Sceneazine.com
Aurin
A
by John Smithson
ll coming from backgrounds of mental illness
and disability, Aurin believes in writing emotionally heavy music to help show that you are never
alone. Our ultimate goal is to raise mental illness and
disability awareness by stepping forward and giving a
voice to the voiceless with the only thing we know, music. Our mental health system is designed to push us
downward rather than help us get back up during our
most difficult moments. Get behind us, show that you
aren’t alone, and fight together with us to show that each
and every one of us has a VOICE!!
So how long have you guys been together as a band?
Andrew began Aurin in 2002 with the goal to write
music which combined a heavy and emotional hard
rock style with beautiful melodies. Since its inception,
Aurin has seen a few changes in its original lineup. The
current lineup includes our drummer Linda Medina,
who Andrew found via a musicians networking website. Me, Aurin’s vocalist, who Andrew found through
the recommendation from Eddy at our rehearsal studio, Hellhound Studios, in Rahway, NJ. And, finally,
our newest member is our bassist Joe. He has only been
in the band a short while, but is a solid bassist and has
learned our complicated material with ease. We have
great confidence in his future with Aurin and find him
to be a great fit with us personality-wise.
Who in the band came up with
your name? What, if any, reason did
you guys choose your name?
Andrew came up with the name
when he started Aurin. Aurin is another name for rosallic acid which is
a reddish semi-poisonous dye that is
derived from a crystal called phenol.
He thought that it had an interesting
contrast to it; such as getting something evil through something beautiful. The name stuck and grew close
to Andrew so much so that he kept it
through all these years.
What are the members names and
what instrument do they each play?
Sarah Anderson – Vocals (Audix and Lampifier Microphones)
Andrew Wayne – Guitar/Background Vocals (Gibson Guitars)
Linda Medina – Drums (Tama)
Joe Palamara – Bass (MusicMan)
Who are some of you guys influences? Would you
say that’s where you get your sound from?
Our influences are fairly vast; from classic rock to
grunge to post grunge to hard rock/alternative metal
to progressive to funk to
blues to jazz and even folk.
As far as where we get our
sound from: Andrew always says he comes from
a “play what you feel”
mindset. We seem to follow that pretty heavily. If
we cannot connect and
derive meaning from our
own material, we scrap
it. There are a number of
bands that we love and
grew up with that we are
sure influenced us, but we
try to tune our sound in
on how we are feeling at
that particular time.
At what age did you
guys decide you wanted
to be in a band? Is that
the same time you become interested in Music?
We all started at different ages between 5
and 13 really. But, once
we were hooked, we were
hooked. We knew we had
to do something with it,
whether that meant being
in a band or some sort of recording artist.
When it comes to creating Is there one person who
writes all the songs? Or do you guys write them as a
band?
We do a bit of everything. Sometimes we will jam as
a band, record it, and take the parts we like and develop
them. Sometimes Sarah or Andrew will write the song
or come up with an idea for a song before taking it to
the band.
Where do you usually gather songwriting inspiration? What is your usual songwriting process?
We definitely draw our inspiration from our own life
experiences. Seeing that our music has heavy thematic
elements dealing with mental illness, losing people, bullying, poverty, and society’s stigma that is attached, we
like to write music that we hope can connect us to our
audience and show that they are not alone. As far as a
usual writing process, if not begun as a full band jam,
Andrew and Sarah will sit and write songs acoustically
and transpose it before bringing it to the band. We like
to portray a lot of emotions in our songs, and it’s great if
a song can be played and transposed into different styles
and moods, such as transposing a very heavy song into
something almost “morphined” out and acoustic.
Do you guys have any favorite local or regional
bands that you really like? Have you ever shared a
stage with them?
One of the other bands under our management (Stu
Rosenstein of Mojo 6) is Audio Empire. They are absolutely phenomenal and talented musicians. Also, our
friends in Beyond Visible are fantastic at what t