“We were young and we played everywhere. Church lock-ins, crappy bars, and we gave it 110 percent. We wanted people to leave our shows and go tell their friends that they missed out.”
the past Any longtime Lakelander is familiar with the setting of Collins’ UFO story. Carpenter’s Home Church provided the backdrop for many an older Christian millennial’s or Generation X’s first music experience — an experience that shaped a lot of Collins’ future. But Carpenter’s Home wasn’t the only piece of Lakeland’s music history he frequented. “Lakeland’s had a music scene forever,” Collins reminisces fondly. “If you haven’t been to the Mad Hatter in one of its forms, you can’t talk about Lakeland music.” The Mad Hatter was a Lakeland venue that moved multiple times and was a staple of Lakeland teenage life between 1995 and the mid-2000s. It hosted everything from local musical acts to larger touring bands like the Christian hardcore band, Zao, that played at the Mad Hatter when it occupied space off of Combee Road, just one of its many locations all over Lakeland. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, places like Carpenter’s Home, the Mad Hatter, and the Belfry were all music venues that have come and gone, and fostered the music scene for Collins and other prominent Lakeland musicians like Aaron Marsh. It also saw the rise of bands such as Anberlin and Copeland, as well as Collins’ first and most ambitious band, Denison Marrs. Growing up in Central Florida, Collins’ parents encouraged music as much as possible. His father was a Southern Baptist music minister who bought him guitar chord charts. But his mother took an entirely different approach.
52
“I had this little drum set, and before naptime, my mom and I would play music together, her playing guitar and me banging on the drums. When I got interested in guitar, she said, ‘Pick a song and I’ll teach you how to play it.’ So I decided I wanted to learn ‘Cherub Rock’ by the Smashing Pumpkins, and she taught me on that guitar.” As he talks, Collins points to a well-loved guitar hanging on the wall in the room. He now owns his mother’s guitar from his childhood and hopes to teach his kids how to play on the exact same one. “Almost every song I’ve ever written I wrote on that guitar,” he says. Growing up, Collins wasn’t influenced by just his parent’s music. On Friday nights he would go to friends’ houses to play video games. He remembers listening to the radio and being blown away by what he heard. Popular radio stations would live stream DJs, and Collins couldn’t get over the way they would mix popular songs together seamlessly.
TH E L A K E L A N D E R