“The rush of it was a great experience, though,” concluded Bishop.

“Definitely a rush. I remember when we were going — if we’d had more songs, we could have come back and done an encore,” offered Connell. “It definitely fueled my fire. I want to keep going!”

While the guys are having fun and enjoying the rush of getting to play music with a bunch of friends, they know that success won’t come overnight. Their solution to getting bogged down with worries over the future is just to keep lots of little goals up there to let them know they are on the right path.

Playing Vino’s was such a goal.

“We’re enjoying it,” offers Bishop. “If we get rich tomorrow, well, I won’t complain. But, I want to enjoy this — getting to play small venues and building up a fan base. Being in this band is definitely more fun than work.”

Eventually, the fun that makes up the work of being in a band, will lead to them being able to have enough original songs to allow them to set about the process of recording an EP or demo CD.

“We have four original songs, right now. We’re about at the point where we just take those songs and burn people a copy and write our names on it,” says Bishop. “We want to get to where we are played on local radio, where we can play more gigs and people could hear our name and want to come see us play. If we could go ahead and get together a couple more songs, then we would try and do our own small album.”

There.

It’s rough and in no way as polished as it would have been had I written it when the memory was still fresh in my mind, but I think it still makes a nice introduction to five guys just trying to get along and play some good music in Arkansas.

Sitting before me on my desk is one of the burned CDs mentioned above, containing the four original songs that The Harlequin’s Interlude have to their name. So far.

“Turn Away” has this lovely little opening guitar driven groove that explodes — with the help of a nice howl from Bishop — into a fairly heavy song that is just jammed tight with melody. From the first moment I gave these guys, and this song in particular, a spin, I loved it. Holy Moly, can these guys play. And Bishop has just an amazingly solid voice that just howls with talent deserving to be heard.