Halfway Down has a great pop punk meets metal ages a little sound. The music is catchy and the songs have an air of nostalgia. And you can catch them at Big Turn Fest in Red Wing on the weekend of February 20!
Please introduce the bandmembers.
The band members are me Blake Deneweth (guitar/lead vocals), and brothers Shawn (guitar/bass/vocals) and Cameron Kraft (drums).
How did you get started playing together?
I (Blake) actually auditioned to be the lead singer in a band that the Kraft brothers were in, but apparently the head of that project didn’t like me and I was ultimately turned down. There were internal arguments because everyone else wanted me, so Shawn and I decided to hang out and jam one day. I brought over a demo that we messed around with and that demo became our first song “Fool’s Gold”.
Where do you draw inspiration? (It seems like relationships have a strong influence with songs such as Dream Girl and Make it Up.)
Yeah! For lyrics, we are all in our 30s and work full time jobs and all that, so a lot of our songs tend to be about feeling nostalgic, learning to live in regret, managing stress, mental health, and the ups and downs of relationships. Musically, my favorite era of poppunk and emo is the early 2000s and my favorite band is Blink 182, so you can hear a lot of those influences bleeding through. The Kraft bros are more into 2010s metalcore I’d say, but they love The Wonder Years, Four Year Strong, and Enter Shikari, so we get a lot of our heavy and electronic influences between those bands as well.
Tell me about the song Nostalgic. (It’s one of my favorites because I think we all have those moments/experiences of nostalgia.)
Ohhh yeah, we are all very nostalgic. One night I was sitting in my teeny tiny basement studio which is just the space under a staircase (Harry Potter style) and I have an Xbox in there. I turned it on and I couldn’t find a game that I wanted to play. I endlessly browsed the store and it all looked terrible. In the top left corner of my screen it said “0 Friends Online”. I turned off my xbox, turned on GarageBand and wrote/recorded “Nostalgic” in 2 hours. The underlying theme of that song is being so sad about “the good times” that you can’t even think about it. For a little easter egg, I put the intro melody of our first song ever “Fool’s Gold” as the piano part during the bridge.
Please tell us about upcoming shows.
We are playing Big Turn Fest in Red Wing on the weekend of Feb. 20th, and then we have an ever growing list of shows coming every month from March until October-ish
Mostly Minnesota 