Get to Know: The Season
Nashville isn’t all tractors and whiskey. There’s some music there too.
The Season’s main members Kurtis Parks and Josh Kim have made music their top priority early on in their careers. From an early age Kim studied classical music and the piano and slowly moved to the guitar when he was fourteen. Parks’s talent for songwriting and singing gained him national recognition, even a spot in American Idol’s top 50 finalists. It was only time that these two musical powerhouses met while attending Virginia Tech. The union was made and the idea of starting a band soon followed with the Season was conceived in 2002. Shortly after graduation Parks and Kim packed up their lives and made the move to the music hub of the Midwest – Nashville, Tennessee. Their talented did not go unrecognized for long and the duo recorded their first album The Season in 2005.
The Season may be a
tad overproduced, but beyond that is the Season’s signature compositions
and Parks’s strong, soulful voice. Parks’s piano adds a solid
backbone to each arrangement and his training as a musician is apparent
in each song. Though The Season may be a pop rock album,
Kim’s piano and guitar make it more sophisticated than the low standards
set by other artists within the genre. It’s an album that grabs
the attention of all who listen to it and goes above and beyond a cranked-out
pop album. Their latest demo simply called [album title],
which you can receive for free when you order their full-length release,
is a better representation of what the Season is today. The demo
overall is less pop rock than their self-titled album and its sound
is more representative of each member’s talents. The addition
of a live rhythm section, Jason Jolly on drums and Jordan Metzger on
bass, adds fullness to the duo that makes their songs even stronger.
The track “Somewhere I Should Be” shows that the Season has grown
since their 2005 release and still has a lot of offer.
Their single “One in a Million” off of The Season is Parks’s best vocal track on the album. There’s a certain strength behind his voice that makes him sound older beyond his years. It’s the perfect pop rock ballad, something high school kids should be dancing to at Homecoming instead of bad rap music and corny pop songs. Or at the very least, that one song you blast in your car when no one’s looking and sing along to.
Posted by Amy Dittmeier on Feb 18, 2009 @ 7:32 am
