Change. It’s inevitable. Times change. Styles change. Tastes change. You grow older. You grow wiser (sometimes).  I am the bass player and the founder of the LA rock band Strangely Attractive. We’ve been out and about playing our version of rock music for about 9 years. When I say we, I mean me and the seemingly, ever-changing line-up that the band has seen throughout the years. We’ve had four drummers, three guitar players, five singers, and a keyboardist thrown in there at some point as well. The current Strangely Attractive crew is Bella Luna on vocals, Carlos Felipe Flores on guitar, and David Rodgers on drums.

Why the band begun to what we are doing now is a pretty big change in my opinion. I guess a decade will do that. I originally started this group because I wanted to create a live dance rock band. Plus, I love playing with a band onstage. I wanted the guitar to do all of the keyboard and synthy parts of a dance song. I knew the guitar parts were gonna be difficult so I waited until I found a guitar player that had the skills to recreate those parts.

When I finally found the guy, I started to find other players that would round out the first incarnation of the band. We immediately recorded a 10-song album and started playing all over town. The sound that I originally had in my head changed and that was totally fine with me. We were able to do a few cool things and people that saw and heard us seemed to like us but keeping the band together was freaking hard.

Musicians would come and go. Personalities, time, different goals, outside forces, and many other complications got in the way. Three years ago, the current line-up emerged and just like before, we started to play around the city. After all these years of playing out and putting out work, I noticed that it was very difficult to get people out to shows. I was racking my brain, trying to figure out what we could do to stand out.

After our last show in 2016, I sent a thank you follow-up email to the club that booked us. I got an email back that was basically a scolding. The message was about how disappointed the club was at the number of people we brought. They were going to give us one last shot, because they liked us, to prove ourselves, and if we didn’t, we wouldn’t be invited back. That one email triggered the biggest change that the band has gone through thus far.

We decided we were gonna put on our own night where live music lovers and great local acts could come together to have a stress-free, creative, and just all around fun evening where awesome bands could get together, play, and hang out and hopefully make their way into new ears and make some new fans. We were lucky enough to find some truly amazing people at Mal’s Bar in LA who welcomed the evening with an open mind and open arms. We couldn’t do it without them. Our monthly residency (every third Thursday of the month) wasn’t the big change though.

We decided to make the band into more of a show. Actually more like a circus. A rock and roll circus. I come from the world of magic and Bella comes from the world of burlesque and variety. We decided to mesh all of our creative passions into one live experience.

Instead of just seeing a band play, you will see world-class entertainers coming in and out of our set, performing their routines to live music by Strangely Attractive. We’ve already had award-winning magicians, well-known artists, world-renown burlesque dancers, accomplished jugglers, and so many different variety acts joining our night. Every show is different and the responses we receive after every performance lets us know that sometimes change is a very good thing! ­