Live music and touring have been on lockdown and fans as well as artists are going through withdrawals. We wanted to come up with something fun to help bridge that distance between fans and artists right now. What we came up with is something called The Lockdown Lowdown and it’s a Q&A session with fun questions for artists to answer. They’re not your typical interview questions, so it gives you a peek inside of the artists themselves. We’re big music nerds here at I’m Music Magazine and we love learning things like this about the artists that we love. We’re pretty sure that you’ll get a kick out of these, so we hope you’ll take the time to read them. In this installment, we spoke with Daxton Page of Kirra.
5 Albums that Changed My Life:
•Blackbird – Alter Bridge
This album really influenced me as a musician. This is really a solid top to bottom rock record, the songs have got strong melodies and heavy riffs. I even have lyrics from the title-track “Blackbird” on my arm in memoriam of my grandmother. My mother also loves it when at little family get togethers, I play the song “Watch Over You” on acoustic.
•Avenged Sevenfold – Avenged Sevenfold
This was one of those records that opened me up to a more intense style of rock music. Songs like “Unbound” & “Critical Acclaim” we’re very eccentric and I loved it. You could tell that they were just experimenting with whatever they wanted and getting all kinds of interesting songs out. This is record really influenced me to be fearless when writing songs, and to pursue my creativity to see where it takes me.
•Sound Awake – Karnivool
This record was a great introduction into progressive hard rock music. This whole album is full of stuff that will bend your mind but also deliver insanely cool riffs and melodies. I really loved the idea of taking polyrhythmic or odd-time signature drum beats and making them sound not odd and just a unique listenable piece of music.
•Outlier – Twelve Foot Ninja
This album pushed the boundaries of what I thought could be done with hard rock music. There’s jazz, reggae, and Japanese traditional music all thrown into a fusion metal/hard rock record. This one is an absolute standard for me, as I believe it’s one of the most creative records to come out in rock in a while.
•Nothing More – Nothing More
This record introduced me to one of my favorite bands nowadays. It’s also full of just absolute blistering songwriting, the whole package from a rock perspective. All I can say is this album influenced me to be as authentic as I could be when writing, and write music that was honest and could touch people.
During the pandemic, we’ve been trying to be as pro-active as possible. We haven’t stopped writing since the new album dropped and this pandemic sort of gave us an opening to five back into writing head-on which has been really satisfying. To stay in touch with the fans, we did an 11-week live stream series where we played a song from the record each week, as well as took questions and played old tunes of ours and some covers too. We finished the series on a brand-new unreleased song that we’ve been messing with.
