Darrow Montgomery
ARTS
Members of the pop-rock band Merci
Merci Merci Me For the D.C.-area pop-rock quintet, it’s just like Penny Lane says: “It’s all happening.” By Christina Smart Contributing Writer It is a late Tuesday afternoon and the members of Merci are looking slightly stunned, having just returned from their photo shoot for this paper—their first for a media outlet. “It was awesome!” lead singer Seth Coggeshall exclaims. “It was our first ‘Oh, we’re going to send somebody. Oh, the photographer will meet you.’” They’re hoping this shoot will be the first of many firsts as the D.C.-area quintet puts the finishing touches on their yet-to-be titled debut album, which will be released by Rise Records. With the way things are plugging along, one half expects Penny Lane from Almost Famous to enter the Zoom room and utter “It’s all happening.” Of course, like most bands, all of this happening took a while. The synth-pop rock band’s journey included singing Broadway tunes, performing in concession stands, and a total musical overhaul. Initially, though, it was prompted by a
coast-to-coast move and a meeting on a basketball court. After leaving the Seattle area for Fairfax in 2008, Coggeshall (who looks like Justin Bieber and Ryan Phillippe have somehow bred) found a musical mate in keyboardist Colby Witko, spotting him in gym class at Cooper Middle School. “I was trying to find somebody to make music with, desperately,” says Coggeshall. “And he was singing with his Osiris shoes on playing b-ball.” Given their disparate musical influences, it’s surprising that they teamed up at all. “I grew up with a lot of pop stuff,” recalls Witko, even admitting that the band listened to Britney Spears’ “...Baby One More Time” on the way back from the photo shoot. “I grew up with Backstreet Boys and *NSYNC and all that stuff. Dancing around in front of my TV with my little VHS tape.” “I was trying to mold you,” remembers Coggeshall. “I was trying to get you into My Chemical Romance, which is what I was really into.” Coggeshall won, and their early material
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is very much in the vein of Fall Out Boy and Panic! at the Disco, which might surprise listeners, since Merci’s gone from sounding like MCR to sounding like Phoenix. In their high school years, at Langley High School in McLean, another chance meeting in gym class brought drummer Jack Dunigan to Coggeshall’s attention. “I met Jack through a mutual friend who was starting a metal band,” recalls Coggeshall. “He introduced me to Jack as we were waiting for the period to end. I remember showing up to practice and being blown away by his playing.” Meanwhile, at Oakton High School, lead guitarist Nick Jones—whose inf luences fall more in line with the Rolling Stones and Jeff Beck—was playing in his own band and became aware of Coggeshall thanks to a Fairfax County Public Schools event. “I played at a Langley battle of the bands,” says Jones. “I saw [Seth] perform and thought ‘This guy’s really talented!’ So, when the band that I started needed another singer, I called
him up on a last-minute thing.” The whole group ended up working together. After graduating high school in 2013 and eventually adding bassist Justin Mason in 2015, the five-piece, like others before them, decided to pursue their musical dreams. They even managed to make the classic baby band mistake: coming up with a god-awful first band name. (In this case, it was His Dream of Lions). As His Dream of Lions, they did the usual things baby bands do—playing shows at local venues, including Jammin’ Java, releasing EPs, and picking up regional shows wherever they could, which led to an unusual Broadway turn (of sorts) for some of its members in 2015. Lexis Yelis, Jones’ former classmate, was producing ‘Punk Goes Below’ shows at 54 Below in New York City, where musical theatre performers would sing songs by pop-punk bands like Paramore and Fall Out Boy—and pop-punk performers would, in turn, do Broadway classics. Knowing the band and their style of music, Yelis would often recruit Coggeshall and Witko to perform in New York. “It started as me convincing them to do it,” laughs Yelis. “It wasn’t necessarily they wanted to do it, per se.” The relationship with Yelis would prove beneficial; she later became director of sustainability for Warped Tour and provided one of the band’s first breaks in 2017. “There was this new thing for Warped Tour. They called it the Transform stage,” says Yelis. She knew of an opening at the Merriweather Post Pavilion tour date (and the guy who ran Transform), so Yelis asked a simple question: “Hey, tomorrow, can my friends come play?” She got a ‘yes’ and informed the band. “It was hot and very humid. We parked our cars by the mall adjacent to the venue and made our way to the festival, acoustic guitars in hand,” Coggeshall recalls. “When we got to the Transform Tent, we discovered that they were set up in one of the amphitheater concession stands for the day.” After playing a 20-minute set for family, friends, and whoever happened to be waiting in line for food or the bathroom, the band seized the opportunity by asking a total shot-in-the-dark question of Warped’s staff after their set. “We walk up to the guy who runs the tent,” explains Coggeshall. “We just said, ‘Can we just keep playing?’ And he’s like ‘Yeah, sure. If you can get yourselves to every date, sure.’ So we’re like ‘OK!’ So we got in my parents’ car and drove…” “All the way to Texas and back,” adds Jones, smiling at the memory. “[We did] two weeks of the tour and it worked really well,” says Coggeshall. “So, we were like ‘This is awesome. If we can do this again, let’s do this again.’ So, in 2018 we went back having established the relationship and did the entire tour.” As a barnacle band (a term lovingly applied to unknown artists who attach themselves to a larger entity), they got firsthand experience of the grind of the road. They weren’t an official act on the tour, so the gigs were unpaid, but
