The End of A Horrible Night to Have a Curse

Since April of 2006 I have been the vocalist in a band that started out as Tragedy of Tomorrow. Before we even had any songs written, we changed to Dying Rest Theory due to the huge amounts of bands with the same name.

We played our first show ever on April 9th 2006 at the Comedy Circuit in Little Mexico Midvale to a crowd of about 40 people. We were so naive and horrible. Ha ha, looking at one of the videos, i cant believe we even made it through the first month. Our stage presence was non existent, we had no idea how to move up there, and even worse, we all had no idea how to write interesting music. The night was so very fun and nerve wracking. We became good friends with a band called Last of the Bloodline (their first show also) that at the time we thought were so much better than us. Which they were for the first several months of our respective local careers.

We booked soooo many shows after that, I have lost count. We played nearly every venue available to us:

Addicted Cafe Halloween (dressed as chicks)

Redlight Books (Our first show there, the second show has no pics, but there were at least 100 kids packed into the basement.) Holy cow, it was soooo hot and stuffy.

Half Circle in Wyoming (played with Poolside at the Flamingo from Ohio and Die to Yourself from Oklahoma)

Our first promo pictures

We played As Dying Rest Theory, briefly adding a member, Jeff Hain, to replace Ryan Heidt while he worked in Philadelphia for the summer. Jeff annoyed us so much, it was the biggest relief when Ryan came back (plus Ryan and I became friends after that, previously we had been pretty aggressive arguers). Shortly after that, we started writing more aggressive music based largely on metal and hardcore influences. We released a self titled demo in early 2007.

That's Ryan on the cover

Shortly after, we changed our name to A Horrible Night to Have a Curse based off the text that pops up on the screen when you die in the old Nintendo game Castlevania. We changed our name because we had been changing so much in style and skill. We had just started to write some truly ferocious songs named Just to Make it Worse, and Skeleton Frame, and had more in the works.

We played some awesome shows and the new style was very well received. Our networking and booking skills increased and we got booked on a ton of shows with some amazing bands such as: Winds of Plague, Vanna, Whitechapel, Throwdown, War of Ages, Soilwork, Destroy the Runner, Dead to Fall, Impending Doom, The Chariot, Poison the Well, Three, With Dead Hands Rising, etc. These are all bands that, in my musical world, are the equivalent of playing a show with John Mayer or Josh Groban.

Our amazing drummer Marshall got married and left the band to pursue a job in Wyoming and we found a seemingly perfect replacement in a guy named Brian Dugger. That didn't work out, due to personal problems and stylistic differences, and after everything getting to a boiling point, an inability to tour broke the camel's back and I left the band for several months. Brian eventually quit and Marshall and I rejoined. That first practice back together after not having the original members in the same room for almost 6 months was one of the best feelings ever.