Amber Sadiq, Arts & Tech Editor
@asadiqcourant
Hobbies and extracurricular activities are typical for a progressing highschool student, and in a community very dominated by athletics, it’s very common for students to use their time outside of school aligning with such. Despite sports playing a substantial role, the school’s musical community is also incredibly vast, and many students decide to harness their musical abilities both inside and outside of the classroom
In his freshman year, Senior Charlie Lampen began keyboard lessons and started attending New Canaan’s School of Rock. He later went on to join Mind The Gap, a band formed by his father,“My father and a couple of his friends founded the band in 2018 or 2019, and I remember going to almost all of their shows,” Charlie said.
The band began this year with a gig at The Heat, a local music event, drawing a crowd of around 300 people. “Recently we got invited to do the Waveny FireWorks show, which is going to be a pretty big show with around 6000 to 8000 people,” Charlie said.
The future of the band involves collaborations with other musicians and further expansion, particularly in the form of a record label. “There are a lot of upcoming collaborations to come,” Charlie said, “We have a lot of music friends who know us now and I’m sure to be sticking with music in the future.”
Since its formation, Mind the Gap has been a cover band, focusing their repertoire more on 80s rock and roll. “It was really heavy on The Beatles, The Rolling Stones and David Bowie. Since I joined we’ve sort of shifted towards newer bands and music while still keeping the classics,” Charlie said.
Recently, Mind The Gap participated in the Gates Battle of the Bands, an annual event that takes place at Gates Restaurant. The event raises money for the Meals on Wheels charity organization and is hosted by radio presenter Jon Kamal. The group successfully made it to finals and took home the winning title.
Not very long before the formation of Mind the Gap, a trio of students at Saxe Middle School, now sophomores at the high school, had a musical conception of their own.“The idea came to us during quarantine,” said sophomore Bennett Gropper. “We just said, ‘we should make an album’ as a joke, and a year later, we actually did it. From there we’d meet weekly and spend the entire night having recording sessions. It was an experience—all part of learning how to get better at what we do.”
According to Bennett, his band Strangers on the Street, or Strangers for short, comprises Bennett as lead vocalist, Henry Tate on keyboard, and Daniel Yoo on lead guitar and principal songwriter. “Pretty much all night long we’d have recording sessions,” said Bennett. “A lot of the things that we did we never even ended up publishing.”
This past fall, the school held its annual bonfire with Strangers as the headlining act. This was the band’s second time playing at the event, and well outside of New Canaan, the band has done street performances in Nantucket. “Street performing has become a huge thing over there in the past few years,” Bennett said. “We all played on this bench together in one of the shopping areas. Ultimately that bench became the cover picture for our album.”
For the beginning part of their musical voyage, the band remained nameless, unable to publish their original music without a name. However, an interaction with a spectator during one of their street performances gave the band members inspiration for the name the band currently holds. “Bennett was telling me this story about when he was playing on the street and this random stranger just came up to him and told him he had no sense of rhythm,” said Henry. “As a joke I told him, ‘Yeah, you should just listen to strangers on the street’ and then there was a moment of gasps all around.” And thus was the beginning of Strangers on the Street.
In 2021, the group released their EP, titled “Waitin’ For a Spot” featuring the titular bench from their street performing days. This year, they released a single titled Summer Tide, a smooth Billy-Joel-esque ballad written by Daniel Yoo.
At school, Charlie is known to be more reserved and quiet, but on stage, he finds himself taking on a completely different persona. “My confidence skyrockets when I get on stage, and I’m a completely different person,” he said. “I’ll often have people in town recognize me from prior gigs. It’s nice to get that recognition. It definitely adds to the confidence.”
Making music and performing serves as an outlet for many. The disconnection from school allows for a broader creative medium—students have more of a choice to play what they want and how they want to. “We don’t really have influences. We just try our best,” said Daniel.
There is a sense of bonding when being a part of a musical community, especially one with your peers. “We’ve managed to be part of a little community of musicians,” Charlie said.
Bennett also has formed bonds with his fellow musicians. “It’s a way for us to just get together as friends and as musicians. It’s a cool networking thing, just being in a group” said Bennett.
