pete

i'm the newest member of barrit so i thought i should address what barrit was to me and the effects of barrit on my life.
i've known zach, lou, steve, and nate for a while now. my first band, platform, used to play with relm at the esspresso bar and i was always very impressed. for some reason their music was always better than ours. we used to hang out at the platform practice space and just jam for hours. zach would play guitar and steve or brian(platform) would play drums or sing. i would be amazed at how well they could just sit back and write music. Once when relm had a booked show and lou couldn't make it so i filled in on bass but we only played four relm songs. then we switched the band around and, with steve on drums and nate and mike beshaw on vocals, we played four songs that we had written in a week. The Mike Beshaw Experience’s first and last show. i had a great time.
platform broke up then relm broke up and worcester had all these good musicians with no bands. it was stagnant for a while.
people started going to college and then i tried out for bane and that worked out really well and i was pysched. i couldn't believe i was in a band with aaron and damon from converge. I had not stopped listening to halo in a haystack for about two years and now i was in a band with people that helped write it. i was really intimidated and nervous. Zach would come to our shows and sing along and really support us. that's when he was starting to do barrit. and the stuff they were writing was awesome. then bane asked zach to play second guitar for them. I was so thrilled because i had someone familiar with me now. All the bane kids were a couple of years older than me so sometimes i felt sort of like the tag-along little brother. but that all changed when zach joined the band. he's more outgoing than me and he gives me courage. i felt like i could be myself and everything fell into place. Now bane is like family to me and i credit alot of that to zach.
things didn't work out for me at the school i was at so i decided to transfer to Umass Amherst. Zach and i agreed to be roommates. we weren't sure if that was a good idea at first because, sometimes you end up hating a person after you live with them, that wasn't the case with us though.
barrit was playing shows, destroying stuff, and collecting a hefty following of angry fans, all at the same time. the band strike3 actually coined the the term "to barrit"-verb. the act of destroying an instrument on stage or to utterly destroy everthing.
Barrit would practice and write a great song then they would play it live and just go so crazy they would break strings and guitars and just about everything they had. This usually resulted in, although a great visual performance, a lack in the quality of sound. Slowly they got better at playing a live set. They played a couple great shows here and there. And people started respecting them again. Then lou left the band and zach asked me to fill in for a show or two. i was excited because i liked barrit alot and always wanted to be in a metal band with zach. The shows went well, at least i thought, but zach would always talk about how he was still looking for a new bassist. I wanted to say, "I'm right here, pick me." but i didn't want to make zach feel obliged to ask me if i wasn't what he was looking for. So i kept my mouth shut.
I started practicing with them and i helped write some of the songs and i felt like i was in the band but no one ever said anything about it. When people would ask me if i was in barrit i would say i was just filling in. Finally at practice one day the band kind of nonchalantly asked me if would stay. "yes," i said.
Someone asked me once which band i liked better, bane or barrit. For me though, i can't decide. bane is fun and i have the time of my life when we tour and we are lucky enough to have a large following so it makes it easy to almost always have a good show. Barrit from my perspective is just starting, shows go wrong a lot easier but it's challenging for me to play the music. When i write for bane i'm in a totally different mindset than when i write for barrit. I could never choose one over the other because to me they are such different creative outlets.
Now barrit is such a part of my life that i can't imagine it not being in it.

I want to thank zach, andy, steve, and nate for giving me the chance.


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