This reminds me of the band I was in a few years ago. (Part of this story, I told Linda at the Fairbanks show.) We were doing the local do-covers-in-bars thing for a while, and finally started compiling ideas for original tracks. The singer we had did well with the covers we did, which included tunes from Iron Maiden, Judas Priest, AC/DC, MegaDeth, Kiss, Led Zepplin, Black Sabbath....
But.. when we started writing he couldn't come up with anything. No lyrics on paper, and couldn't seem to sing in key if he wasn't mimicking the tunes he sang in his car. After a few months, we'd had enough.
We hired on a new singer, and he started contributing right away. 2 weeks later, we had 5 songs. We took them to an open mic night, and got great reactions. (This is where the similarity ends.) At this point, I said we had our demo tracks. The others were not satisfied. They wanted to have 12 in the can before we sent anything out. It seemed to work out, because we had only a few solos to clean up before mixing. Then it happened.... The 24 track digital system we were using had a hardware failure. Three data recovery companies (and no luck) later, we were back to square one.
