About the Music - Rocketscience

It doesn’t take a Cape Canaveral engineer to compute Rocketscience’s formula for lift off. With Bud Light as their fuel, the Boston-born pop-rock quartet propels Beatles-inspired melodies with lovelorn hooks that would make Lennon and McCartney proud—and, no doubt, make a few girls scream.
Their debut EP, A Girl’s Name Here, features six odes to Jane Doe with soaring choruses and energy climbing skyward. Radio stations, record labels, and booking agents are standing in line to hook up with the Billboard-bound foursome, consisting of singer Andrew Galdins, Jr., guitarist Jon Towne, bassist Aaron Stein, and drummer John D. Barber.

In a recent phone interview, I spoke with Andy Galdins to get his take on their ascent to join Boston’s buzzworthiest.

Andy says their Boston reception has been "unbelievable… We have all these record labels calling. Radio stations are putting us in their rotations. I’m waiting to get hit by a truck because all these good things are happening."

Armed with their shining 6-song EP and an expanding repertoire of other stage-tested, studio-ready tunes, Rocketscience is primed to be packing CDs into trucks, rather than getting hit by them.

The quartet has been friends since they were kids running around their old stomping grounds, Boston’s suburbs. "We all grew up in Weymouth," says Andy. "We’re really white trash… I’m talking Bud Light right out of the can." As I speak with Andy, his native accent surfaces often—the band doesn’t party, they "pawty" and they have a cat named "Bita," not Biter.

The foursome has been playing music since childhood. Andy, a pianist, singer, and drummer since grammar school, grew up with music in his home. "It’s just always been that way and it’s all I know how to do," says Andy.

Andy and the other Rocketscientists are as versatile as a Swiss Army knife; each could pick up each other’s instrument and play with the same mastery they exhibit on their own. "We are all pretty damn musical. And we can all sing a little bit, too," Andy says. "That’s the only thing we can be confident about. Toot toot, that’s my horn."

Andy trumpeted the band’s image, too, making them out to be quite a cast of characters. Drummer John Barber, known among the band as Bahba, is the "visual timekeeper"—and a hell of a break-dancer. "He’s devilishly handsome with piercing brown eyes," says Andy. "And Jon Towne is the wicked pisser guitar player, as we like to say here in Southy. He looks like the gay kid on Dawson’s Creek… Aaron looks just like Whoopi Goldberg and I look like Frankenstein."

The strength of Rocketscience isn’t just in their appearance; their heart and soul are in their songs. Their songwriting is a team effort. "Someone comes to the practice with a solid foundation and then we work it from there," says Andy. "Like for one song, I’ll write the chorus, Aaron will write the verses, or Jon will throw in a bridge… Everybody writes the lyrics. Everyone writes the words."

All of the songs on A Girl’s Name Here are love songs, which led me to ask Andy if maybe a particular girl’s name should have been inserted into the title.

"Oh certainly not. That’s the point. There are many, many girls that any of those songs could apply to," Andy assures me. "I mean, I could give you specific names of girls for specific songs but I think you should protect the innocent."

After their very first gig, performed at T.T. The Bear’s in Cambridge (note to those of you outside of Boston: T.T.'s has hosted a who's who of 90s rock artists), a girl approached Andy and demanded, "All right, what’s her name?" Andy said, "What are you talking about?" She said, "That girl you’re singing all those songs about."

"If I wrote a whole record’s worth of songs about one girl then I’m just one big loser," Andy says.

The opening track on the EP, "Killjoy," is, however, an actual reference to an ex-girlfriend of Andy’s named Joy—"and she was very adorable, let me tell you," he adds. Through the imposing rock guitar chords, Andy sings, "She’s broken/ I’m broke/ She’s gone."

On each of the six tracks, Andy’s plush pipes—which could give The Commitments’ Andrew Strong a run for his money—spin tales reflective of frequent rides on the romantic rollercoaster. The songs echo the ups—as in, "she could be the most lovable girl" on "Killjoy"—and the downs—as in, "It’s over/ But nothing’s really changed" on "Sun."

"Seriously, when we fall for a girl it’s pathetic. We’re just suckers," Andy says. "So we put these women up on pedestals like you can’t believe, you know, high enough so we can see up their skirts. And we just love ‘em too much."

The song Andy is referring to specifically is "Pedastool," a pop rock hit-waiting-to-hit-your-ears that sends the love rollercoaster climbing into the clouds again. At first listen, it’s a sweet love song about how it feels to be walking on air in love, and then the devilishly authored chorus comes in, "I’m on top of the world/ When I’m on top of this girl."

"When I wrote that song, there was in fact a girl under me," says Andy. "My brother and his girlfriend were downstairs when I was upstairs writing that song, and I could hear them going at it. I thought, hey, there’s a girl under me."

The song’s title seems like a clever play on the word pedestal, but as Andy explains it, "When I wrote that, being white trash, I spelled it pedastool… Bahba said, ‘Naw, it’s poetic. Just keep it.’ So we kept the wrong spelling."

The track "Bitter Pill" is another pop hymn in worship of the goddess. Soft acoustic guitar fuses with Andy’s sad puppy lullaby about a woman leaving him, and then at the chorus, Jon’s guitar and Andy’s voice growl and bite together in a distortion laced rant of his weakness, "I can’t come down, I’m way too high on you."

"Sun," a slower, twangy guitar ballad with tinges of the Beatles’ "Something," is the only song on the EP where Rocketscience refuses to be too smitten by a certain woman’s allure. The song is one of Bahba and Andy’s favorites "because we wrote it in the back of a pickup truck on the way to Las Vegas and that’s very rock and roll."

Andy is most flattered by the Beatles connection, and says their sound has also been compared with Redd Kross, Teenage Fanclub, Foo Fighters, and Nirvana. Their influences are as diverse as they are unexpected.

"When we’re in the van going to a gig and we have a crappy radio, we’ll always find the oldies station in that town. We’re big fans of oldies music like Elvis Presley," says Andy. "We all really like hip-hop: Cypress Hill, Beastie Boys, Run-D.M.C. But, then our influences are so wide that it almost doesn’t tie in with the band… You wouldn’t listen to us and go, ‘Oh, obviously the drummer is into Black Sabbath and Frank Sinatra.’ But we are. We like everything except country music."

Some say the group has "it"—if "it" means charisma, star power, and energy. It would be impossible for a band that fills clubs on every tour date to ignore the fact that they are rocking the house and making girls swoon. Funny thing is, these four neighborhood guys from Southy are taking it all in stride. They still practice in Andy’s parents’ house, and a couple of them are busting their tails 9 to 5.

"We drink Bud Light out of the can. We pick our noses. We don’t smile pretty for the camera. We’re so anti-Backstreet Boys… We’ve definitely got charisma, I ain’t gonna lie to you. But we’re all going through our fat Elvis stage right now. We’re not pretty. We just don’t have it."

Earth to Andy, many would beg to differ. Kevin French, Rocketscience’s manager, expects great things to come. French says, "Since the record A Girl’s Name Here has come out in September there has been outstanding response from all music reviews to label interest."

Rocketscience’s EP, A Girl’s Name Here, and a listing of tour dates are available on the band’s web site, www.rocketsciencemusic.com.