Greyhaven
There are at least three bands with the name 'Greyhaven':
1) An American progressive rock/metal band from Eugene, Oregon/Boston, Massachusetts, formed in 1996
2) A British alternative rock band from London, formed in 2014.
3) American progressive metalcore/mathcore/chotic hardcore band from Louisville, Kentucky.
1) Greyhaven began in November 1996 when Ethan Matthews and Nate Howard began meeting and trading musical ideas. Nate had answered a call for musicians posted by Ethan at a local music shop, and a few weeks later brought in his friend and drummer, Nick Cipriano. Nick helped to develop the core unit of the group in their early years, taking over much of the engineering duties while Ethan, along with Nate wrote much of the music. All the members were just of 17 and 18 years old, being a young group that quickly established themselves internationally with their signing to Angular Records / Musea. Incidentally the three also attended the same high school, as Ethan had recently started attending public school in Eugene, OR just before meeting Nate. The trio began some serious jamming and writing sessions and took on the name "Greyhaven", penned by Nate, which is an alteration of “The Grey Havens” from the famous Tolkien trilogy.
By June of 1997, Greyhaven had enough material to record a half hour instrumental demo. The demo was completed that summer and contained two tracks, "Downfall" and the 21-minute long epic "Vessel". By this time, Greyhaven had cemented their trademark sound with Ethan moving to keyboards and Nate performing the vast majority of live guitars. The demo received rave reviews in the small but growing progressive metal community around the world, which led to Ethan’s contact with a number of European labels. This very encouraging response helped to inspire another six months of writing for Greyhaven's debut album. However, the band was not yet complete.
The band desired to have a vocalist, and most compositions were arranged for vocals with from the beginning, with some melodies already written by Ethan and Nate. Recording for the album began in February of 1998 and lasted through the end of the summer. It was most certainly a risk to move forward without having confirmed a singer, but the band moved into the recording process nonetheless. During all this time, Greyhaven searched for a vocalist with a broad range to complete their lineup. After many auditions of local singers, the band was introduced to a vocalist from Chico, California by the name of Brian Francis, due in part through the recommendation by Matt Guillory of Dali's Dilemma. After hearing the demo tapes of Brian's previous work, Brian was immediately added to Greyhaven's lineup. His voice fit just well right on top of the material without re-recording anything or making key changes or other alterations. Brian wrote more melodies on top of what Ethan supplied via tape trading and Brian came to Eugene to record his tracks in August of 1998.
The new four-piece group finished all the basic tracks for the new album by the end of the Summer '98, working with Brian for the first time in their hometown of Eugene, Oregon. Over the next year, the group took a hiatus from rehearsing, and effectively moved to the Northeast United States. Nick moved to New York, and the rest of the band to Boston, MA where both Nate and Ethan attended Berklee College of Music. Nick finished the mixing of the debut intermittently over the Fall and Winter and eventually mastered the album in New York before it’s release. During 1999 Greyhaven began work on their next album while gathering the interest of Angular Records, a subdivision of the Musea label noted for it’s involvement with a number of bands including Sylvan and Eternity X. A very successful summer resulted in over and hour and a half of new music, for which basic synthesizer tracking was completed, and rehearsal demos were recorded. Also during this time, guitarist Nate Howard left Greyhaven over creative differences.
A trio once more, Greyhaven continued writing new material through the Fall of 1999. The band also secured the deal with Angular to release their first album. Greyhaven’s self-titled debut was released in March 2000. The album had stunningly positive reviews – a notable feat considering the members were still in high school when it was written and recorded without label financing. Heavy Oder Was Magazine (Germany) wrote: "A debut album like this is only published once in a decade”. Greyhaven planned to enter the studio again in late 2000 to record the second album, but before this, the band promoted their first album with some summer live dates including Baltimore, Maryland’s Powermad Festival.
The summer live shows saw the inclusion of Matthew Cahoon on keyboards, and it was a successful time for the band, gaining a lot of new fans due to enthusiastically received Powermad set on top of the buzz about the debut’s release. There were efforts to secure a record contract in the states for future albums, as well as continued acclaim from fans all over the world. At the same time things were changing artistically and geographically for the members of Greyhaven.
September of 2000 saw Ethan and Brian commencing work on their own solo projects, and Nick returned to New York to complete his college studies. There was still talk of doing more shows later on in the fall, but given the circumstances geographically as well as Ethan and Brian’s work on other projects, Ions and Echo Us respectively – Greyhaven went into a hiatus that meant the eventual desolvement of the group in 2001.
2) Formed in August 2014, Greyhaven are a group of young musicians from London, UK. Their debut EP, 'The Flood' was released March 16 2015 as a free download. Read more on Last.fm. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; additional terms may apply.
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