Seven Mary Three is still going strong

Life has been anything but cumbersome lately for Orlando's Seven Mary Three. The foursome have gone from just another promising, hard working college band to having the number one single in America almost overnight. The band, which consists of vocalist/guitarist Jason Ross, guitarist Jason Pollock, bassist Casey Daniel, and drummer Giti Khalsa, recently played at the Grenada in Lawrence, KS in what was a bit of a homecoming for Ross. "My parents were both born in Kansas (Atchison and Great Bend) and went to The University of Kansas. Plus all my cousins live in Lawrence," said Ross in a recent telephone interview with Brainchild from Atlantic Record's offices in Atlanta. "It will be good to see them all again."

A lot of people are coming out to see Seven Mary Three these days. The band's road to success began in 1992 when the two Jasons met at The College of William & Mary in Virginia. The two found that they had more in common than just a name, and began to write songs together, with Pollock teaching Ross to play guitar. While still just a two man acoustic act, they recruited drummer Khalsa into the mix, with Ross's high school friend Daniel coming on board playing bass. The only thing needed was a name. "We were watching TV one day and were fed up with trying to with trying to think of a band name," recalled Ross. "Then the show `Chips' came on, and 7 Mary 3 is the CB handle of the blond haired guy. It really doesn't have any significance at all except for being kind of funny," laughed Ross.

With the group formed and named, the band began playing all around the southeast, growing an especially large fan base in Florida and Virginia. Taking a road trip to Florida once a month to Florida for a few shows, the band quickly became popular in the Sunshine state. The band pooled together money to start their own record label, putting out an independant CD, "Churn." The album sold out of it's pressing of 5,000 almost immediately. Those sales were aided by the band's manager giving a copy to Orlando radio giant WJRR, who incidentally was the same station that first began airing Collective Soul's "Shine" off of a demo tape. The song WJRR picked to play, the hard rocking "Cumbersome," was met with huge success and almost immediately the band were superstars in Florida.

As well as fullfilling the dreams of the band, the first album helped Ross get through some college classes as well. "I've been writing for a while. When I decided I was going to get an English degree and started taking classes that dealt with creative writing, I had already written a lot of poetry and short stories on my own so they didn't really put a lot of pressure on me to write," explained Ross. "So I got college credit for this album." Although Ross wouldn't reveal what grade the album's songs got, saying only that, "I did pretty well in college, we'll leave it at that," he doesn't shy away from discussing he thinks the album is all about. "I think on the album there's really two themes," noted Ross. "One deals with the themes of guilt and forgiveness. Probably the most important theme on the album though is that sort of underdog or phoenix quality of rising above your circumstance to overcome obstacles, which I think is a really positive message." He continued, saying, "I think there are a lot of stories about strength and resiliance to be written yet as opposed to all the negativeness. We get a really good feeling of being able to connect with so many different types of people. We have mothers bringing their kids to shows."

The band's second single, "Water's Edge," is an example of that theme. "It's a true story, maybe, of someone being taken advantage of and how quick we are to overlook it when an authority figure victimizes someone. It's the whole state of see no evil, hear no evil that exists in America where we tend to overlook things that are happening instead of taking action." Ross is particularly proud of the song's video, which the band was able put a lot of time into. "With `Cumbersome,' we wanted to let people know that we're just regular guys who play guitar and sing songs and that's pretty much what the video shows.  `Water's Edge' isn't as much of a blatant commercial for the band as `Cumbersome,'" said Ross.

The band is on tour all summer promoting their latest effort. "We could have recorded the new album  earlier. We have the songs," said Ross, "but we wanted to take our time with things." Ths goes back to the band's core philosophy. "We're going to continue to write songs for us, whether they're hits or not," said Ross. "We have a lot to live up to now because of the success `Cumbersome' and `Water's Edge,' but we're just going to keep writing music that means something to us. The fans are our top priority other than the music though. We do it for them too."