The seeds of the band were planted in the summer of 2004, when me and Scott Williams decided we wanted to form a band.
All summer long we looked for people who wanted to join, but couldn't find all the pieces we needed, so eventually
we decided not to form the band after all. Flash forward a couple of months to late October. Me and Scott were at a concert
at Shorebirds Stadium in Salisbury called X-Fest. There were some bands that really sounded horrible that night(the opening
acts), and while in a slightly drunkened state, Scott said to me "You know, we could sound better than THAT." Of course
I agreed. We talked about forming a band again, but I wasn't sure if it would happen. A couple weeks later, while at
school, I was talking to a friend of mine named Alex, who introduced me to a few of his friends, including Patrick Willey
and Eugene Redshirt. I talked to them for a few minutes, until Patrick had to go to class. Well, I had 2 hours before
my next class, and Eugene never went to class, so I ended up talking to him for that whole 2 hours. He really impressed
me with his vast knowledge of music, and it turned out we liked a lot of the same bands, including Alice in Chains,
Soundgarden, Days of the New, Sevendust, and many others. Somehow during the conversation it came up that
he was a guitarist, and that him and Patrick were looking for a band to join. I told him that me and Scott had been trying
to form a band for a while, and asked if him and Patrick would be interested in joining with us. Eventually, I got Scott
to come to the school one day and hang out with us, and the group clicked immediately. The band was born. Next,
we needed a name, so me, Patrick, and Eugene sat down and made a few lists of brainstormed names, and we ended
up with about 80 or so names. The 4 of us ended up narrowing the list down to just our 4 favorite names, 3 of which
were names I came up with: Artistic Integrity(to poke fun at those people who like to overuse the phrase "selling out"),
End of Days, Striking Midnight, and Discretion of the Damned(Patrick came up with that one). We decided to then take
votes from random people around campus for a few days, and obviously the name with the most votes being the winner.
After a few days, there was a 3-way tie between Striking Midnight, Artisitic Integrity, and End of Days. We then agreed
that we would take one more vote to be the sudden death tie-breaker. At that moment, we just happened to run into
Alex, and he voted for Striking Midnight. We had a name!!! Now all we had to do was start practicing. Our original
drummer was some guy named Tim, and he was never around when we were deciding on things, so we quickly kicked
him out, and replaced him with Ksenia, another person we met through Alex. Things were off to a weird start, we
had to kick out Tim before we even had 1 practice, and he wouldn't be the only one. During all this time, we started
noticing signs that Eugene was, well....a psycho...
CLICK HERE FOR PART 2 OF THE HISTORY