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As effective as Deaf Pedestrians serious songs are, it’s their barbed, humorous material that has really struck a nerve, whether it’s 15 Beers Ago,“ an anthem for drunken misadventure or „Splatter,“ a song about killing and burying an unfaithful girlfriend in an shallow grave...


„A lot of our songs have humor, but it’s not joke music,“ Parker says. „Music is a medium where people will sometimes not take you seriously if you use humor. And I just think that’s ridiculous. You just get tired of the Mad At Your Dad kind of stuff after a while.“


Deaf Pedestrians formed in 2001. At the time, guitarist Garrin Walker and drummer Russ Dignam were in a band called Loop 12 and Parker was in an unknown two-man group. Eager to build his audience, Parker asked Walker, who had a recording studio, if he and Dignam would help him record some new demos. When the four musicians got together and started jamming, it became clear that their chemistry was strong and the new songs they were laying were a quantum leap from their older stuff. So, they joined forces and, after days of debate, decided to call themselves Deaf Pedestrians.


„It was the strongest name we could come up with,“ Walker says. „There was a school for the deaf in Austin, and we saw a crossing walk sign there that kind of stuck in our minds.“


With a name chosen, Deaf Pedestrians recorded over 15 tracks and sent them to radio stations and various industry folk. After hearing songs like „Seatbelt,“ „Super Nice Guy“ and „We the Sheeple,“ Rock veteran, Binky Philips,


signed


the band to his start-up indie label, Dotpointperiod. After Deaf Pedestrians spent much of the next year writing new songs and fine-tuning the ones they already had, they entered the Hurricane Sound studio with producer Mike Gage to record DEAF PEDESTRIANS. The album came out in late 2005, and the band supported it with gigs across the country opening for Staind, Papa Roach, Saliva, Shinedown and Sevendust.


„We were grinding away,“ Parker says. „We were playing the clubs and going on tour, but we were still poor. We made all the mistakes and experienced all the horrible things that you can think of for a smallish band trying to make it. Eventually, it got to the point where Russ and I pretty much gave up on the idea of getting a major label deal. We figured we would just do the cult status thing and be happy with that.“


Then came „Hail to the Geek.“ Parker wrote the song one night as a joke about his nerdy hobbies and awkwardness with girls, and had no intention to record it. But when his bandmates heard the tune, they convinced him to play it with them. Within a few hours, Deaf Pedestrians had put together a funny, self-deprecating and catchy- as-hell song as powerfully resonant as Beck’s „Loser“ or Radiohead’s „Creep.“ „That was the easiest song to write because it was pretty much how I grew up,“ Parker says. „It’s really just taking


little bits from my experience. And I thought, ‘What would tickle people that have the same interests as me?’ and apparently there’s a lot more people than I thought.“


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