Drop Forge Official Biography
This bio was sent to me exclusively for this blog by band founder Paul Schedlich. I doubt I could have written a better one on this fantastic midwest emo band from Pickering, Ontario. I don’t find many Canadian bands with this specific midwest sound (Shoulder did it quite well), but I would love some suggestions of more bands from here in these veins.
“Right after we got home from that ill-fated 2 Line Filler tour in June of 1994 it was obvious that this incarnation of Two Line Filler was finished. We were getting offers to do other tours and shows and eventually were offered a deal with New Red Archives but Matt and Kevin HATED each other. I had always been the diplomatic middle in that band but I was more willing to side with Kevin. Matt was just too unpredictable. Kevin and I had talked about starting something new when we were on the road, something not so poppy. I had been writing some stuff on guitar over the past few months and I wanted to try playing guitar in a band.
A few weeks after tour we all started talking again and we eventually jammed. Wasn’t sure if Al Shaw wanted to be on board or not after that tour but he came around and him and I started writing guitar parts. Rasool was an old friend who had played in a band called Just Another and had played with Kevin and Matt before. Ras and Kevin had a really interesting rhythmic dynamic. The songs we were writing got slower and we started playing with volume and dynamics, Song writing seemed a little labored yet it was democratic. It could be frustrating. I always felt like I was playing catch up to the other guys in terms of my playing ability.
I think we played our first shows in September of 1994. We probably only played 20 shows at the most, mostly within the Southern Ontario, Toronto, Ottawa corridor. We recorded a demo with Simon Head in November 1994. He had a mobile recording set up and he was a friend we knew from the Pickering area. I think we were one of the first bands he recorded with his set up.
We started writing better material after that demo but things were starting to get strained between us, especially Al and I. In retrospect, it was really stupid; I can’t remember the exact reasons. I’d bet that I was largely at fault though. One issue was that we wanted to do a tour in 1995 and said he wouldn’t be able to get the time off of his job unless the tour was “good”, which is a totally reasonable stance today but at the time felt really divisive and defeating. He’s a great musician but hated practicing. Again, I felt like I was always playing catch up and it turned into this passive-aggressive snowball of a problem. Eventually, he was out of the band. We tried playing with another guitar player named Jeremy Madsen, who played with Al and Kevin in the Eight Pound Test, and eventually played with Hacksaw and the Deadly Snakes. We wrote some interesting stuff but it just wasn’t the same. Kevin and Al had and still have this unspoken musical connection, Kevin was first to point out that it just wasn’t working and we stopped playing together.”