College Sound: The Nouns not just a play on words

The name The Nouns may sound like a declaration of love for a part of speech, but in actuality, it's a play on the common theme of some current band names.

"We were walking home from a Black Keys show," said Nick Stout, drummer for the Nouns. "I said have you noticed there's a lot of bands called the white nouns or the black nouns or the colored nouns? [Travis Beall] said how about just The Nouns? That would be cool because that is like every band ever. The Stones. The Who."

But before that conversation, the guys didn't know what they were going to call the band.

"We were the American Rabbit Breeders Association at the time. We thought about the Centaur Cowboys, but we felt like that would be misconstrued as cowboys that were riding on centaurs," said Beall, vocalist/guitarist.

"When we really wanted centaurs who were cowboys," said Stout, who is also an English major at Austin Community College.

Stout and Beall have been playing in a band together since they were 13 years old. They first met at a rock band camp with the Austin School of Music.

"We were in this really crappy emo band," said Stout.

After that emo band and Beall's screamo band Goonies Never Say Die, they ran across a DVD that inspired a new sound for the band.

"We found a DVD of The Who Live at the Isle of Wight in my closet in my old house, and we watched that. We were like oh, this a genre where you can be aggressive yet melodic at the same time, because we were looking for that. It is a genre that everyone likes, but you can still have anger in it," said Stout.

Bassist Chris Rodriguez recently joined after he met Beall and Stout at a party in August, and talked about similar music.

"Travis asked him if he could play bass. And he was like yeah, I know how to play a little bit of the bass. I'm not very good. We're like that's exactly what we're looking for. Because most of the times when you find a bassist per say, it's such a niche thing that they're really into," said Stout. "So he fit perfectly in the band."

That conversation sparked the guys to invite Rodriguez to a practice with the band.

"We originally talked about playing harmonica, but that didn't work out too well. A guitar, drums, and a harmonica was the plan," said Rodriguez. "I was two hours late to our first practice."

While the songs do have actual titles, the band has their own way of naming the songs between them. They classify themselves with genres such as surf songs, country songs, and indie songs.

"Before [Chris was] in the band, back when we used to play metal, we had a song in our metal band called Indie Song that wasn't even indie at all. It was just a metal song. But for some reason, it was called Indie Song which never made sense to me still to this day, but... yeah, we've been doing that forever," said Stout.

But the actual song titles themselves have back stories of their own. The song they call the country song is actually called "The Amazing Tale of Mr. Herbert and His Fabulous Alpine Cowboys Baseball Club."

"Which is a title of a book Nick's father wrote," said Rodriguez.

"It's about a small West Texas baseball team that my grandpa was on," said Stout.

Because the band plays intensely live, it's becoming a common thing for The Nouns at their live shows.

There is a photo on The Noun's Facebook page of Stout's blistered and bleeding hands from drumming. Beall has also made himself bleed at shows as well.

"Travis bled at the New Year's show on the bridge," said Rodriguez.

"I've hurt myself in some way at every show we've ever played," said Beall. "The hurting myself isn't on purpose."

"When you rip the strings off your guitar, that always seems to do it," said Stout.

Even though the band isn't a year old, they've already recorded a three-song EP, named Warehouse Sessions. They used a borrowed portable recorder and recorded their songs at Texas Coffee Traders in East Austin.

"They came out a lot better than we thought they would," said Beall.

"We were like wow. We recorded 10 tracks. Those came out the best," said Rodriguez.

Now, the band is thinking about the next album. While they don't have any set plans, they have a few ideas of how to record it.

"We want to record to tape like magnetic tape for sure... but we're just weighing our options," said Beall.

"We want it to be really good," said Stout.