There used to be a website I spent way too much time at, it was actually a message board, for AMJ Concerts. Whenever I would load the site, the blue background would show up first for a minute or so because I had a really slow computer. So I would spend a lot of time staring at a blank blue screen, and one day I thought something to myself like "here's the familiar blue screen" because i am psychotic and i talk to myself. anyway, i wish there was a better story to our name than that, but what did you expect?

we don't play live anymore. we broke up. we used to play live. every once in a while we'd have a really cool live show, but most of the time our equipment sounded bad, our instruments were out of tune, and nobody moved around. i guess that's why people were so stoked on coming to see us play.

who cares? this is about our band you jerks.

even though we're broken up, if a record label called up right now and asked a familiar blue to sign, i would get the band back together (or at least as many of us as possible) and sign. for sure.

A Familiar Blue started when I (Justin) wrote Living in Memories (before it was called that) in California (see living in memories story for more details) in early October of 2001. I would come home from California every couple of weekends and practice. Eventually, Darin and I wrote a few more songs because Living in Memories inspired us to do an entire band based around that one song for whatever reason. We began practicing in my parent's basement, just darin on drums and me on guitar. At first we stuck to the format of semi-technical pop punk emo, but eventually we began writing these weird metal mixed with punk emo type of stuff that was kind of original but really bizarre at points. Around this time we (as in me) thought Merrily Strain would be a good band name (it's actually somebody's first and last name, which is why I thought that was weird enough to make it a band name).
After Darin and I had been writing songs for a while, we decided we had better get a bassist and second guitarist. We went over to the Wendy's down the street one night and decided we would ask our old friend Ryan Miller. Ryan was definitely down with the idea. We now had a trio.
Right around this time we changed our name to The Brinstar Depths, based off of the video game Smash Brothers (Metroid). I never really liked the name that much, but that was our name for a while. It seems to have fit the weird metal punk emo style we were playing.
The Brinstar Depths included a period of trying out a million different guitarists. Andrew Youn and Stormy Logan were two that stick out in my mind and stuck around the longest. Storm almost made it to play our first show but it didn't end up working out on both ends, so suddenly we were in a bind.
Our first show was with Finch at the Nile Theater. It seemed like it would be a good deal, considering that it is Finch and people would probably show up. This was before I knew there were 9234897324 bands on the show (one of those upstairs/downstairs shows) and we ended up playing on the big stage upstairs. We got our friend Alex Kling to fill in on guitar, and played our first show. The show went terribly of course, and The Brinstar Depths played their first and last show that night.
Soon after, two big and very important changes happened to the Brinstar Depths. The first change was Nate Lovelady. He joined the band and seemed to have great chemistry with everybody, so we welcomed him with open arms loving tenderness. The second change was the name change: we were now to be called A Familiar Blue.
A Familiar Blue played our first show under that name at Chadfest, but it was a huge mess and we played on bails of hay so I will count our first real show as with A Static Lullaby in the Nile Basement.
After these first few shows, we got a decent reception (at least to the second one that wasn't on bails of hay) and everything felt right. From there on, we decided to start going strong with the band, playing shows and writing as many songs as we could.
But, as any loyal A Familiar Blue fan knows, we didn't write that many songs at all. in fact, in three years we wrote less than ten songs. Pathetic? Headfirst might think so. They were pumpin' out as many in about a week. We just didn't develop very quickly, what can we say?
Toward the end of our run as a crappy local arizona band, one more big change occurred: Ryan Miller left us for Mourning Maxwell (formerly Slowpoke). Say it ain't so Ryan! It was ok, we could feel toward the end that he wasn't feeling it, none of us really were. It was definitely a smart move on his part.
We weren't sure whether to just give in to our boredom with the band at that point, or keep moving on. We had a lot of those points in the history of A Familiar Blue surprisingly, but as usual the answer was a resounding: Onward Ho! We decided to get my then current roommate, Nasty D, to play the bass guitar. Nasty D (Derrick) had about 2 weeks to learn a full set of songs to play a show in Prescott and Phoenix in one weekend. He pulled it off, and we had a lot of fun. Things seemed like they were going to work out ok.
The thing about a familiar blue is, things could have been ok. We had a few catchy songs, we all knew what we were doing. But there were two big reasons the band came to it's incredibly timely demise.
1) The Fans
We had plenty of people from all over the place, even outside of Arizona, that claimed to be great followers of A Familiar Blue. But when the time came for us to play a show, there was a general loyal following of about 15 people (which were all Nate the guitarist and his brother's friends) who came to our shows. That's if we were lucky. At many of our shows, nobody came out! They all claimed to support us, but nobody really did. That's ok though. We didn't really put on a stellar live show. We really do appreciate the few of you who came to our shows (I know there were a few others that weren't associated with the band that came out to our shows as well, thank you). It just gave us that much harder of a time to get into the band, when we didn't have very much physical evidence that anyone else really cared about the band either. Which brings me to the next point.
2) We just weren't feeling it anymore
Mark from Blink 182 is feeling it. Listen to their newest hit. He's guaranteed to tell you he's feeling it about 20 times in the song. But we, however, were not feeling it. Primarily, I, the songwriter, was getting out of touch with the pop punk emo thing. I could hardly write a new song and be satisfied with it. Darin was pretty busy with his own things. The person who got the raw end of the deal was Derrick. He had just joined the band, and was excited to get things started, when he realized he had joined a band with three dudes who were on their way out the door.
I'd say one more small reason to be added onto these two were the bad luck we had with shows. Our last show when some whiny band from California (The Goodwill) cried so that we had to play at 11pm instead of 8, causing everyone that came to see us except for 3 people to leave and go home and not watch us play, we decided we had had enough. People didn't care about us, we didn't care about us either. It worked out.
As far as whether we will ever get back together, I doubt it. Unless somebody wants to sign us, or we all get really bored. Even if we do, we would probably have a different line up, different songs, etc. It's for the best. I just thought I'd write this whole history out and put these songs on the site for the few fans who really liked our music as a sign of appreciation. Thank you so much, this is for you guys.

taking back sunday, brandtson, fairweather, the get up kids, jimmy eat world

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i just wanted to say hi to my mama and my baby girl sharice.