Blood Arm

Nathaniel Fregoso, lead vocalist, is a born climber—this is what his mother says. Third birthed in a litter of three (triplets!), Nathaniel was the only of his siblings capable of scaling his mother while she was standing erect, helping himself to full meals at her teat whilst his brothers looked on jealously from her ankles. She eventually took to wearing hoop skirts made of chicken wire to deter the tot’s ravenous appetite, but discontinued the practice when Nathaniel nearly amputated his right arm clawing through the accessory. “This one is nothing if not goal-oriented,” the woman told herself, clutching the wounded climber to her breast.

The early exercise and frequent nourishment accelerated the boy’s development at an almost alarming rate. By his fourth year of elementary schooling, not only had Nathaniel climbed to the top of his class, but to the top of the school’s flagpole as well. The fire department was alerted when his repeated yelps of “do I have your attention now?” rattled the windows of the school’s surrounding homes. It took them nearly four hours to pull him down. Perhaps it is this early adventure that led the singer to realize that his voice could lead him to heights higher than he could ever climb with his arms and legs alone. Undoubtedly, the next day’s newspaper reports of a ghost with a beautiful tenor haunting Los Angeles’ Hollywood Hills homeowners with requests for their attention bolstered Nathaniel’s epiphany; the neighborhood was located fifteen miles away from his school.

Zebastian Carlisle, lead guitarist, heard the yelps as well, and recognized the voice immediately upon hearing it—feeling it—emerging from the young man climbing atop his table at a karaoke bar almost twenty years later. Zebastian normally keeps to himself, but recognizes when assertiveness is necessary. “I can play guitar,” Zebastian told Nathaniel after the performance. Nathaniel, admiring the boy’s extraordinarily elegant hands, realized that the addition of a guitar could push his voice to even further reaches of the atmosphere.

“We will start a band,” Nathaniel said. He thought of the chicken wire, the fire department, and every other institution that tried to keep him on the ground. “We will call ourselves the Blood Arm.”

Now, a rapturous voice and an electric guitar in the nimblest pair of hands are nice, and those things combined with a zealous education in—and reverence for—the history of Good Rock Music (read: the Stones, Love, Van Morrison, etc.) is nicer, but the twosome knew something was missing. They wanted someone to play piano. This is where Dyan Valdès fits into the picture. As Shakespeare once wrote, “a classically-trained piano player is fine, but a beautiful woman who is also a classically-trained piano player—that is divine!” And with her left-hand playing bass and right hand harmonizing with and providing rhythm and melody for Zebastian’s guitar licks, she established a base for Nathaniel to climb even higher.

Blood Arm Biog – courtesy of www.thebloodarm.com