Martriden Bio

Once upon a landscape dreary, with the cold wind blowing fiercely… Martriden was born!
I grew up with music. Not the kind of music that I make now, but all the same it was real. When I was three years old, I was drumming on anything I could find. I begged my Mom for a guitar when I was seven, and settled for piano lessons instead. From that point on I have played piano and keyboards, even took a year of piano major in college. In sixth grade I started playing trumpet and eventually finished college with a music ed degree in trumpet.

As I was growing up my taste expanded. But music was always on the mind. Back in the day, choices were limited, Janet Jackson or Megadeth. I chose Megadeth. When I swam for the high school swim team, Metallica in my mind helped me through the 1500 meter races. By the time I was a junior in high school I got myself a guitar and taught myself to play. Now I play mostly keyboard for Martriden but do some guitar as well.


My little brother, five years younger, is probably responsible for bringing the original band together. Shane always thought he could exceed my abilities in whatever I chose to do. When I started playing guitar, he took my guitar to the middle school and learned in guitar class. When he was a freshman and I went off to college, he started searching for someone to play with. He found Will Thackeray after auditioning many lousy guitarists. Will was worth spending time with and they hit it off. Will convinced John Harrison to buy a bass guitar and learn to play. But it was at this time that our problems finding a drummer began. And our obsession with the metal genre became much more fierce and broad, discovering bands such as Death, At The Gates, and Carcass along with the "Gothenburg Sound" phenomenon of In Flames, Dark Tranquility and Soilwork. This would only inspire us to search further and find the gems of black metal Emperor and the majesty of Opeth along with a plethora of others. Our true affinity for this music and a vision of our future began to take shape.


In 2004, a band called Pale Horse made its debut in Havre, Montana, at the high school talent show where the fans appeared to respond the way they should. I was playing with them whenever possible but could not take part in the talent show. During this time the band was playing mostly covers and Shane handled the vocals and the guitar. Montana is not exactly a haven for heavy metal, so finding our niche has been an on going struggle. Over the next couple of years Shane, Will, and myself all took on the job of writing our own music. John Harrison moved away and left the band. We decided we needed a guy on vocals. The requirements were that he had to love our music and be able to pull off what we needed. The guy turned out to be a strange hermit by the name of Michael Cook. With some discussion we decided to change the name of the band to Martriden. A name inspired by nightmares and sleep paralysis.

This summer we traveled to Denver, Colorado, where we recorded our first demo with Flatline Audio. That was an interesting bonding experience with four of us sharing one Motel 6 room. The resulting recording turned out to be exactly what we had hoped for. Now we have reached the negotiations stage... and we have a lot of music left to make.