“We’re proud of the album we’ve been able to put together. It’s been a long time in the making;” Matthew Gast discussing In Orbit’s first album, entitled ‘Shadows Two Shades Lighter’.   “The album definitely has a theme, a feel to it.   At first it may seem a bit eclectic, but the songs work well with one another, and pretty much every track on it helps define the theme.   You can catch a glimpse of our mindset through the album; live a life you can be proud of, and never forget that life is nothing to fear.”

   That central theme, which pulses through the entire album, is evident even in the album’s title, which was pulled from a line in one of the band’s favorite tracks, ‘Drift.’   It is the depth of those poetic lyrics – woven through the ever changing music – that gives the album its strength.

   “One of our goals on the first album was to write songs that sounded nothing like one another, but fit together,” Luke Wetterlind said.  “That, and we wanted every song to be able to stand on its own.   We wanted an album that had what we refer to as playability; in other words, throw it in your car or your stereo at home and let it play from start to finish without wanting to skip any songs.  I don’t know if anyone will agree, but that’s what we think we’ve done.”

   And they do fit well together, from the very first track, ‘Locked At Home,’ – an aggressive song about holding true to your values – to ‘Going,’ the first song on the album to predominately feature acoustic guitar.  The middle of the album has such songs as the traveling song ‘Sojourner’ and the haunting music and lyrics of ‘The Scare.’   The album finishes in a flurry with songs like ‘Influence,’ ‘Drift,’ ‘Seven Trees,’ – a song dedicated to fallen heroes – and ‘Floating on Two.’

The album arose over time; eight years, in fact.  Luke Wetterlind and Matthew Gast met in the winter of 1996 at the University of Minnesota.  Both were employed in a dorm cafeteria, washing pots and pans.   Luke was from Duluth, Minnesota and Matthew was from a town in central Wisconsin called Wausau .  Luke was studying Chemical Engineering; Matthew was studying Aerospace Engineering.  And even though both were from the Midwest, and their fields of study were not vastly different, their common bond was music.

   “I think it took all of one day for us to discover that the other played a musical instrument,” Luke recalled.  “There was a small boom-box in the wash room, and I had the local alternative station on.  We were talking about music and I told him I played drums.”

   Matthew had been playing with a few friends for months prior to that point, but none of them played drums.  “When Luke said he played drums, I though maybe it was fate.  My dorm had soundproof practice rooms in the basement, and a drum kit was set up in one of the rooms.  We liked the same music, and we were influenced by a lot of the same bands, so I jumped at the chance to get Luke to come play.  I’d had a few guitar players and bass players come and go, and I wasn’t even sure that this guy I just met would show up.  He did, though, and something clicked.”  

   The two of them started to write together.  After their first song was done, they decided they needed a name.  “We’d already been kicking around some names, but none of them felt right.  I’ve discovered that it can take a long time to come up with a name everyone is comfortable with,” Matthew said.   “But then one day in an Astronomy class I was taking with Luke, it hit us; what felt right was a moon around Jupiter.”

   The moon was Io, and the reason it seemed fitting was because their professor, Dr. Terry Jones, had been one of the principle investigators who discovered that Io was a volcanic moon.   “What’s more symbolic of rock music than a volcanic moon?”

   From there, Io set out to write music.  Like most college bands, however, it didn’t take long before the pressures of school and personality conflicts took its toll on the members of the band, and one by one they shed off.  They lost a bass player, found another, lost a guitar player, and then lost their newest bass player.  In the end, just Luke and Matthew were left, but it didn’t slow them down; they kept writing.

   “We worked on a lot of original stuff in those couple years at college, considering how much time we spent studying!  Creating new original music was a rush,” Luke said.

   They recorded a demo, but school became too much to pursue music as more than a creative outlet.   In ’98, Luke graduated and took a job in Houston, Texas.  Matthew spent one more year at the University of Minnesota, but in ’99 he graduated and, as if by fate or kismet or whatever cliché it could be called, he got a job in Houston .  They had not played together for over a year, but once Matthew was down south, it didn’t take long for them to start up again.  And this time, they had not only the few songs that survived from college (Low Tide, The Scare and Influence), but a couple new songs Matthew had written over the previous year (Sojourner and Restless).  They took those songs and refined them, having some fun with them, but only playing when they had time.  It wasn’t until a year later that their level of commitment grew.

   “We’d met a few people through work that were musicians and we put a little band together.   Luke and I still wanted to call the band Io, but no one else liked it, and the more we thought about it, that name didn’t fit the skin we were wearing at the time.  So through committee, we went with the name Fringe.  We worked up a respectable set-list of cover tunes, but Luke and I never had any interest in being a cover band,” Matthew explained.  “We had always been about writing our own stuff, and playing our own stuff, whether it was good or not, whether anyone liked it or not.   Luke and I didn’t play music for the sake of playing; we played for the sake of creating.”

   Other members of Fringe, however, had little interest in writing music or playing any original music.   The friction this caused could only lead in one direction, and a year after Fringe had been assembled, it was dismantled from within. But still Luke and Matthew stood together.   “We’d lost a bass player and a couple guitar players, but that really wasn’t anything new for us,” Luke said.  “We’d been on our own for so long that it was sort of a relief.  If you listen to ‘Floating on Two,’ I think you can hear the relief in my lyrics.  Not that it wasn’t fun playing with other people; it’s just funny the way things work out.”

   With no obstacles standing in their way, and a renewed drive to create, they began to write again.  Between the two of them, no realm, no instrument is off limits; both wrote lyrics and music.  “Creativity drives the songs; nothing is ever forced.   We don’t like to pigeonhole ourselves by saying I write all the guitar parts and Luke writes all the drums.  If one of us has an idea for a song, no matter what the idea is, we pursue it to fruition.  For example, I wrote the guitar riff for ‘Locked At Home’ in college, but we could never find suitable lyrics,” Matthew said.  “Then one day Luke called me during lunch and said he’d written the lyrics.   Just like that, the song was done.”  

And after years of playing together, the songs began to write themselves in similar bursts of creativity.   “ Midnight in January’ was written in one day, as was ‘Floating on Two.’   The intricacy of ‘Drift’ took Matthew just two days to write, and ‘Going’ did not take much longer.  ‘Seven Trees’ was the most difficult to write, but ironically, Matthew wrote it in one night on an airplane, without any instruments.

   “Once we were alone again, our focus turned to making an album,” Luke said. They recorded the songs one at a time, laying drum tracks, then rhythm guitar tracks, vocals, bass guitar, leads and percussion. And as completed songs began piling up, they turned more and more effort toward getting the CD made.  “The logistics of writing, recording, mixing, designing the artwork, getting it made, it was all so time consuming.  I’m grateful I didn’t know what we were getting into.”   In all, it took the two of them almost two years from the time they recorded their first track until the CDs were ready to be produced.

After Fringe had dissipated, Luke and Matthew contemplated whether they should resume calling themselves Io, or if they should pick a new name for their fresh start.   ‘Sojourner’ solved that issue for them (see The Story of Sojourner), and when the album artwork went to the production company, their new name, In Orbit, adorned the cover.

   “We don’t really have any idea what will come from this CD.  Our expectations are high, but we’re realistic as well,” both agreed.  “But we’re already hard at work on the second album, and with any luck, we’ll be able to recapture the magic we found on the first album without repeating ourselves.  Only time will tell.”