The rehearsal room is small. It's actually a rented room in an office building in Orem.
A mirror ball hangs in another corner, its light beams dotting Pink Floyd and Beatles posters that have been tacked to the walls.Grain members - vocalist/guitarist Jack Donaldson, 26, guitarist Bryan Hall, 23, bassist Matt Western, 24, drummer Shane Fillmore, 24, and keyboardist Winston Lee, 25 - sit in a semicircle telling tales of why they decided to play music together.
"There had been different people that sifted through this band," Hall said. "But when the five of us got together, we felt this was the combination."
The band members favor the classic rock sounds of Pink Floyd, the Who, Rush, the Beatles and U2 - with a little Grateful Dead, Neil Young and Mozart thrown in for good measure.
In fact, Grain's style is more closely connected to rock sounds from the early '70s. Its self-titled debut album lead-off track, "Amity," has been mistakenly identified as a new Pink Floyd by more than a few listeners.
But rather than being a retro band, Grain's works are honest, creative and deep. Western studied music at Berkelee College of Music in Boston; Fillmore is a music major at BYU; and Lee, who teaches piano professionally, is also a music major.
As for the other two, Donaldson recently graduated from BYU with a degree in botany and anthropology, while Hall, who engineered the band's album, keeps himself busy with his interest in recording technology.
The band recently put on one of its most ambitious projects to date - a rock opera, based on the true experiences of a family that once lived in Pleasant Grove whose life was torn apart by a book of so-called memoirs of their troubled son, who committed suicide in 1971.
"We knew the family personally," Hall said. "The nephew of the deceased. He was a close friend. He shared with us the story."
The story was of a 16-year-old boy who was diagnosed as a genius and a manic-depressive. Finding it difficult to express himself verbally, the boy turned to poetry. Through the rough teenage years, the boy withdrew from his friends and family and ultimately took his own life.
Six years later, a book, labeled "nonfiction," contained excerpts of the boy's writings. However, among the actual poetry, the book's editor or abridger allegedly spiced the pages with implications of satanic worship and the occult, which, according to Grain, were all untrue. As a result, the boy's grave was continually desecrated, and his family members, who had finally learned to cope with the suicide, succumbed to the renewed stress. The parents ended up divorced.
"That story was tossed around in our minds for a while," Hall said. "We decided to set the record straight. These were real people involved. The emotion was high, and the story started to affect our songwriting."
"We had obtained the boy's poetry and interview notes from his family," said Donaldson. "We decided to put the story to music."
"We had some songs written before we decided to make an opera," Western said. "In fact, like a lot of bands, we didn't consciously realize how many of our songs fit into a single flowing story. So we added them to the list."
"The songs that make up the opera are not any different than what we had been writing all along," Donaldson said. "They're all about normal everyday emotions."
"We just went where the music took us," Lee said. "The music drives us to its own destination. Although we try to drive it, it always ends up taking the lead."
GRAIN; "Grain" (Grain Productions). * * *
Where has this band been for the past two decades?
Its members little kids growing up.
While Grain is comprised of five young musicians in their early 20s, their sound reaches back to the early 1970s, when the tunes of Pink Floyd, Steve Miller Band and the Beatles were predominant.
And that's a good thing. Especially when most of the album is based on a saga that began in 1971 and didn't let up until the early 1980s.
The album is basically a rock opera based on the writings of Alden N. Barrett, a young man from Pleasant Grove who at 16 committed suicide in 1971.
Rumor had it, thanks to a fiction-laden book called "Jay's Journal," published in 1978, that the Pleasant Grove high school student - who was a member of the school's legislative council and the National Thespian Club - was involved in the occult, which eventually led him to take his own life.
This insightful, thoughtful, beautiful album is filled with visions of hope, insecurity and redemption - something that every teenage life should contain.
There are dreamy Pink Floydish tunes, rocking Beatlesque rolls and folksy ballads. Tight vocal harmonies and narrative lyrics bring the music and the era back to life.
Although some of the music, namely "Amity," "A Place In the Sun" and "Days Go By," do come a little too close to some of the Floyd and Beatles' licks, the musicality is superb.
"Grain" is an unobtrusive album that, unlike a lot of local releases out there, tries to have its own style with clean, emotional, rocking and melodic tunes.
The album is available, for the time being, only in Utah County at Crandall Audio, CD Warehouse and Rock's Records in American Fork. Purchases can also be made through the band's e-mail address: (grain@itsnet.com), or by writing P.O Box 73, American Fork, Utah, 84003.
*****
Additional Information
Three nights
Grain will present its rock opera June 26-28, at the Nelke Theatre of the Harris Fine Arts Center at Brigham Young University, Provo. Curtain is 7:30 p.m. Tickets are available at the box office for $6 general admission and $5 for students. For reservations, call 801-378-4322.