Seth Haack
shaack@uwyo.edu
Buffy the Vampire Slayer, a popular show created by Joss Whedon, is set in a town in California known as Sunnydale and is based around a lead character named Buffy and her friends as they navigate slaying demons, monsters and vampires, while also attending high school at Sunnydale High.
This is the show that the post-punk band Sunnydale High drew and continues to draw its inspiration from. Sunnydale High is a Laramie-based band with four members: Seneca Flowers strumming on lead guitar and singing, Will Plumb rocking the drums, Fran Thrax tickling the ivories on keyboard and Will Hebert slapping the bass.
The band was formed because of a depression lead singer and primary songwriter Flowers fell into one summer, leading him to binge-watch Buffy.
“So, basically, the idea of Buffy concepts which I drew upon for the band were, ‘Let’s have a band that the lyrics are personal, but they’re also Buffy-inspired,’” Flowers, who works at Laramie Live, said. “The idea is about personal challenges and life challenges, because life will constantly hand you, like, a pile of crap and will be constantly shoving it down your throat.”
Flowers said that you have two choices when given this “crap,” you can either give up or fight.
“The Sunnydale idea is it’s about fighting,” Flowers said. “You have to fight your personal demons, you have to fight your internal and external demons in order to survive and move forward.”
The songwriting for Sunnydale High is primarily done by Flowers and bass-player Hebert, however, once the basics are written it moves onto the whole band to contribute and collaborate.
“There’s a lot of collaboration that goes into our songs,” Plumb, a social studies teacher at Laramie High School and Sunnydale drummer for 2 years, said. “I wouldn’t say a lot, I would say all of the genesis for our songs comes from Seneca (Flowers) and Will (Hebert).”
This collaboration gives each band member an opportunity to contribute and put their own mark on a song.
“Everyone in the band has input,” Plumb said. “We all work them out pretty well together.”
An example of one of the songs written by Flowers is “Welcome to Sunnydale,” and it is about his time at UW as compared to the pilot episode of Buffy.
“Lyrically, I took it from the approach where I took something deeply personal, and, which was at the time I was going to UW and I had a lot of opportunities going on, and basically, what I was doing was getting trashed and going to bars and getting in trouble and jeopardizing everything I had,” Flowers said. “So, I decided to write a song as a challenge that would be reflective of the first episode of Buffy, but yet encapsulate all the crap I was going through.”
These personal songs with a connection to a popular TV show help the band reach out to its desired audience, the “people in the back.”
“We play for the geeks and the nerds and the rejects, we play for the people in the back of the room,” Flowers said. “We encourage them to come up front and they can be themselves.”
This desire to play to and for these people shows through some of the shows that the band has played. Sunnydale High has gotten the opportunity to play at the Denver Comic Con twice, a workout gym once and the WyColo lodge right on the Wyoming and Colorado border, however, the Comic Con show sticks out as one of Flowers’s favorites.
“We somehow got on one year, kind of by luck and then they welcomed us back the second year,” Flowers said.
Sunnydale High continues to play shows in the Laramie region, having played a show Jan. 26 in the Gardens of the Union, and it will be having a show in Fort Collins on Feb. 9, and possibly a quick California weekend tour that is yet to be announced and determined. The band will also be dropping its first EP sometime in March once it is fully mastered, and this will be the first real mix put together through a studio called The Blasting Room.
“One thing about this band is like, it is a people-first band. Like I care about everyone in the band as an individual and vise versa,” Flowers said. “We try to work together, it’s like a mini family.”
