The Bendays

WHAT'S WITH YOUR TERRIBLE, TERRIBLE BAND NAME?
...is a question I am asked whenever I meet someone new and tell them I play in the Bendays. "BAND-AIDS? BEN-GAYS?" No, no, you heard it right the first time, Bendays.

It's not a real word, so it's confusing to people, I get it.

Look, it all started on a cool March day in New York City - March 7, 1838 to be exact. Benjamin Henry Day Jr. was born to newspaper publisher Benjamin Day, founder of the New York Sun. Benjamin Day Jr., Ben Day, if you will, became an illustrator, and eventually invented a method for printing and photoengraving that used patterns of dots to create shading patterns. To us contemporary folks, we know these dots by their employ in comic-book art of the mid-twentieth century, and, later, their elevation to pantheon of fine art when artists, like Roy Lichtenstein, reproduced them in large scale paintings.

In 2011 I graduated from college with a fairly useless degree in studio art, specifically photography, specifically "film" photography. My final project was a contemplation on photography itself - as I would often scan my negatives and then print using an ink jet printer, rather than printing in a traditional photographic dark room, I started to feel that my prints were not really photographs, but mechanically produced illustrations of what my photographs MIGHT look like had they been printed using light and photo chemistry in a proper darkoom. So, after graduation, I began experimenting with alternate methods of "printing" my images, specifically hand plotting the pixels onto canvas or paper and coloring them with either paint markers or oil paint. Because of the limitation of my human scale, I couldn't "print" my images with the microscopic precision of an ink-jet printer. I had to render the images in a "low resolution," after they were scanned, so that the resulting "print" was a large, "pixelated," aproximation of the original negative, which I had so carefully exposed, developed and scanned only to be oblitered by digital artifact and human artiface.

Visually, the result was similar, and no doubt informed by, the pop artists of the mid-twentieth century, especially Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein. Being a person whose childhood was in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the low-resolution images were naturally were steeped in a fair dose of nostalgia for the early days of home computing.

2012: I decided to start a new musical project, the name Pixels.

2013-2017: I wrote a couple of "country" songs that didn't fit the theme of Pixels songs, so when I recorded the demos I wanted a different name for the project. I began thinking of things related to Pixels, and I remembered Lichtenstein and his dots, and learned their proper name, Ben Day dots. I thought "the Bendays" as a name had an old-timey pop-rock (like 1950s/early 1960s) sound to it, and thus the original recordings of "So Gone (Away)" and "I Made a Career (of Losing You)" were labeled "The Bendays," and thus each time I recorded a demo that wasn't Pixels, I called it the Bendays. Whenever a show came up that Pixels couldn't do it, I would play alone as "The Bendays." Sometimes I would ask firneds to fill in. Over the next few years I quietly made some cassette and CDr compilations to hand out under the name Bendays

2018-2019: I was booked for a Bendays show at The News Café in Pawtucket, Rhode Island and didn't feel up to playing solo. I called an old friend, Scott Macreading, and a new friend, Shawn Faber, and asked if they would learn a couple of my songs for the show. They agreed and I guess it was a pretty good time because we kept getting together after the show, and soon my former-Pixels band-mate, Lawrence Stumpf, joined us. By fall we put out a little EP called "Dots." We spent the following year finishing songs to add to Dots, and then we got hit with this pandemic thing which slowed the release of that record (A Special Day). By the time it finally "came out" it was December 2020 and we had gotten deep into a new record! That record is the one that we're finishing up now. Jessica Texeira, who had sang a bit on "A Special Day," and started singing more songs and playing drums.

2020-2021: Unfortunately, the release of a "A Special Day" was a very hard time. Scott's father unexpectly died on the day we released the record. Less than two weeks later, Scott also unexpectedly passed away.

We are now finishing the songs we started with Scott in 2020 and recording new songs. We had friends, including Tom "T-Bone" Austen and Ethan "Dangerous" Angel, contribute to Scott's recordings, and help with songs we hadn't gotten the chance to record with him. We hope to share this work with the world by early 2022.