Will and Ty met in
the fall of 2004 when their New Hampshire boarding school convened for
the beginning of the 2004-05 school year. The duo was placed in the
same dorm that year, and it wasn't long before they began playing music
together on occasion. Shortly thereafter, recording artist Patty
Larkin visited St. Paul's School as part
of the Conroy Visitor program and inspired Will and Ty to make an attempt
at writing music themselves. The night of the day on which the two
were introduced to Patty, their determination to create beautiful music
brought them to their favorite musical location: the dorm stairwell whose
reverberating acoustics leant themselves to singing and playing.
The pair then started work on their first song "Dingy Dingy", later to
become known as "In the Stairwell". They would go on to dabble in
recording and writing another song, "Icicle", with the aid of lyricist
Leigh Brunelle, and also to write "the Monk Monologue" and begin having
ideas about the song "Jasmine" before the end of the Fall Term of school.
The Winter Term proved to be an unproductive
term for Will & Ty as they proceeded to live 3 months together in the
house without playing music together but maybe two or three times. However,
the beautiful spring weather brought the duo outside and onto the campus
performing scene. While working on the song "The People of the World",
they began to consider recording a CD, as well as performing "Icicle" and,
as a voluntary, "Friend of the Devil" before the 700 students and teachers
of SPS. Later in the term, they organized a concert consisting of
essentially all of the songs on "Stairwell Tour...", including covers and
originals. This concert also served as the opener to an open mic
night, at which several SPS performing notables played. During this
experience, the duo met up with Italian vocalist Elena Casoni, a fellow
student at SPS. The group of sometimes two, sometimes three proceeded
to perform at other school-wide venue opportunities before Will and Ty
and sometimes Elena became hermits hiding in the basement of Nash house
for the final two and a half weeks of the Spring term after receiving the
generous donation by Ellen Marbut of recording equipment (a mic and cord,
a set of headphones, a mic stand, and the Fostex MR-8 8-track digital multitracker).
Finally, the group emerged from the dungeons of the dorm with their first
CD, "Will & Ty's Stairwell Tour 2004-05". The album title came
from the collective group dream that they might one day play songs in all
of the prominent school building stairwells and thereby experience a wide
range of acoustic effects.
...and then they had to study for finals.
Over the summer of
'05, Will travelled to Montana to join Ty for about a week and a half at
his home in Missoula, Montana. There they would be invited to perform for
several days on the 102.5 Mountain FM Stage at the Western Montana Fair.
They also played smaller-venue performances in various locations around
Missoula, including HammerJack's and some random park. At the convieniance
of St. Paul's Fall term, Will and Ty, now roommates, found it hard to find
the time for music. Both were quite involved in schoolwork, especially
Ty with the maximum number of classes in the hardest year at St. Paul's.
No significant new music was written during Fall term. However, Ty acquired
an acoustic bass guitar, and the duo did practice playing different instruments
at times, and doing more electric music after being inspired by a live
Dispatch DVD. Will and Ty hosted, and will continue to host, a radio show
on WSPS, the St. Paul's radio station,
every Wednesday evening from 7:30 to 8:30(EST), and did one complete show
of live music. This show is available for live streaming from the WSPS
website. At the end of the term, directly before Last Night Service, they
hosted another open mic night Freeman, the campus student center. This
2 1/2 hour event yielded no other performers except for one poet, so Will
and Ty entertained the significant crowd for essentially the full two and
a half hours, and repeated only 4 songs.
During Winter Term,
Ty will be traveling to Leipzig, Germany as part of an exchange program.
Will will remain at SPS while attempting to keep faith alive in the musical
vacuum of the duo's performing absence. However, something good has come
of this seperation for the group - in the several weeks between Thanksgiving
and Christmas of 2005, Ty was able to take the time, not being at school,
to develop some ideas he had for songs and put them together in a solo
album fittingly called "Alone in Montana". This album was created for the
austencible purpose of being a gift to his family and friends but was really,
of course, an excuse for new material for Will and Ty. The tracks from
this album are available for download from Ty's
personal page.
Will and Ty also
enjoy playing Frisbee together, harmonizing in the stairwell (a capella),
filmmaking, and saying mean things about people (one in particular) who
said bad things about our collective vocal ability.