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By Shana Dines

DAILY BRUIN REPORTER

sdines@media.ucla.edu

Being both a college student and a rock star is not the easiest combination to pull off. Entering their fourth, and hopefully last year as English majors at UCLA, Ryan Wilson and Kevin Lenhart of Division Day are attempting the impossible.

Wilson and Lenhart joined forces with Sebastian Bailey and Rohner Segnitz last summer, living together in Santa Cruz and honing their sounds as a group. After a whirlwind year of balancing schoolwork with concerts and touring, the band is staying based out of Westwood this summer. It hopes to break into the Los Angeles small club scene with its rough-around-the-edges indie rock sounds.

Despite the difficulty of balancing two alter-ego lifestyles, the members all know that this dream they are pursuing is real.

“Being in a band is quite literally always what we’ve wanted to do,” said Bailey. “Kevin and I have had ‘Rock God Fantasy’ syndrome for as long as we can remember.”

There have been some difficult situations and tough decisions that Wilson and Lenhart have had to make concerning their classes and the band. During ninth week of this past winter quarter, the band members went on tour. With their classwork in hand, they were spending every free second they had on the tour reading to keep up with their classes. Returning in time for tenth week classes and finals, the quarter ended fine, but Wilson recalls the stress of trying to maintain both his grades and his band.

Wilson also has to juggle his commitments to UCLA as an elected official in USAC and on the Campus Events Commission.

“When you’re trying to do something seriously, like when you’re trying to pursue music as a career and also have school, which is supposed to be your first priority, you can get pretty stressed out,” Wilson said. “You definitely get into a situation where your priorities are called into question.”

Being a student and musician is not always a struggle, though. Wilson knows that there are also positive effects from staying in school while simultaneously working with the band. He feels a great deal of support from the student body, having seen numerous surveys in which Division Day was named as a favorite band. Local shows are also typically hot-spots for students.

It is a two-way road, however, and while Wilson is adding to the flavor of the UCLA community with his band, he also takes something away from his collegiate experiences.

“I get a lot of inspiration from being at school because this is a place where a lot of diverse ideas are shared back and forth and proposed to me in the classroom that kind of jog my imagination,” Wilson said. “I guess I probably wouldn’t say the same if I was an economics major or something, but English just does that for me, I guess.”

Having established itself in Northern California last summer, the indie-rock band is working to break into the So-Cal scene. Division Day’s sound is dominated by Segnitz’s powerful keyboard and guided by Lenhart’s defined rhythms. Wilson and Bailey’s guitar and bass add scratchy edges and piercing counter-melodies to their songs like “A Home at the End of the World,” which also features Segnitz’s whispery vocals.

Like many bands, Bailey cites Michael Jackson and The Beatles as some of the group’s main influences. However, the band members’ interests range from post-rock to Brit-pop. Most of their music has a political undertone, which fits into the indie-rock scene well.

“I think our message is definitely a revolution of the mind that we’re shooting for,” Bailey said. “I think it’s a critique of consciousness and human interaction as it exists today. I think if we have a political agenda, it’s starting with that and self awareness and self discovery, and making that the basis for community.”

With such a defined idea of what the band believes in, it can sometimes be difficult to refrain from preaching and to continue enjoying the music and the creative experience of it. Thanks to Lenhart’s antics, however, Bailey assures that the tension between being serious and having fun is often forgotten.

The four friends work on their songwriting as a group. Segnitz will usually start an idea and let the other members take over to complete each song. Songs are rarely predetermined, as Bailey says they usually figure out what a song is going to be after it is already finished. The dynamic of having started as friends before forming a band keeps the work atmosphere between the four very positive.

With only one year to go, Wilson and Lenhart have almost finished their runs at UCLA. They have worked hard and, it seems, been successful at balancing both roles of the student and the touring musician. Although it has been a struggle and will most likely not get any easier in the year to come, they are ready and willing to neither give up on their dream nor lose sight of the goal of graduation.

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