ten years ago, in a town very, very similar to every town in the united states, we started a band. it was 1994 and joel, clark and i (todd), and our friend conor (oberst) were sitting around on the cement outside of a slowdown virginia show. still glowing from the experience, we decided to start our own group. a couple of days later conor told us that we had a show in two weeks at kilgore's (the folky songwriter coffee shop where he usually played). of course at this time, we had still never played any music together. but by show time we had accumulated the 9 songs we thought we needed in order to perform. with those songs we continued to play coffee shops and basements, punk clubs and bars while we tried to figure out what we wanted our band to sound like. we loved slowdown virginia and a couple of other local omaha bands, but we wanted to find a sound that was our own. a lot of what we listened to in those days was quite aggressive, so, in a heavy handed attempt at being different, we chose "lite rock" (not the cool kind). we wanted to put ourselves in a genre that we thought was ehrrr. . .whack. i guess we were hoping that something interesting might happen. a couple of years went by, and conor quit/got kicked out of the band. lots of other people also joined and left over the following few years.