Hometown: Lehighton, PA
Genre: Rock
Dream Artist to Open For: St. Paul and the Broken Bones
Current Favorite Original Song: “So Long”
What we’re hoping to gain: We’re just hoping to gain the opportunity to play more gigs and to keep performing in front of more people.
If you ask the members of Vodou what they want people to walk away feeling after a show, the answer is simple: a good time. But spend a little while getting to know them, and it becomes clear that “a good time” for this group of Lehighton, PA high schoolers requires a lot more work than the phrase lets on.
This August, they’ll take that standard to one of the biggest stages of their young careers — the inaugural Musikfest Music Industry Conference Band Showcase, where ten emerging acts perform for and receive live feedback directly from working talent buyers, booking agents, and producers.
The band’s origin story has a second-act quality to it. Drummer Kian, percussionist Adam, bassist Zane, and guitarist Jed had already been playing together in a previous band called Quantum Trebuchet before Vodou ever existed. When they came back together — this time joined by vocalist Rowan and keys player Aiden — something new clicked into place. “We all have a shared love of music,” they say, “and we knew this was something we wanted to take seriously and be our best at.” That recommitment to each other turned out to be the beginning of something worth paying attention to.
Vodou has only existed since last June, which makes them one of the younger acts in the Band Showcase — not just in age, but in time spent playing together. Their starting point was a fairly straight-ahead 1970s rock sound, the kind of thing you might expect from a group of teenagers who grew up loving classic rock. But Vodou was never content to stay in one place for long. The recent addition of a full horn section — Nolan Strauss on trombone, Carson Hauser on trumpet, and Elijah Pagotto on tenor saxophone, with Christian Hunsicker stepping in on sax for Musikfest — wasn’t a dramatic pivot so much as an inevitable evolution. “We always knew this was the next step,” they explain. The horns were available because the players were already right there: bandmates and close friends from the Lehighton Area High School band program. Sometimes the best additions to a band are the people already in the room.
The result is a sound that’s harder to pin down than it first appears. Their influences stretch from soul to psychedelic rock to, perhaps most surprisingly, musical theater — a thread that runs directly through keys player Aiden, whose deep knowledge of theatrical scores shapes everything from his chord voicings to the way he phrases a melody. It gives Vodou an unusual harmonic sophistication for a band their age, a quality that sneaks up on you between the bigger, more obvious rock moments.
Keeping all of that together — the horns, the keys, the rock backbone, the improvisation — is a discipline the band traces back to one phrase they heard over and over again in the Lehighton band program: never accept mediocrity. Their director, Mr. Buffington, preached it constantly, and it stuck. You hear it in how they approach rehearsal — running songs again and again, not moving on until something is as close to right as they can get it. It’s unglamorous work, the kind that doesn’t make for great content, but it’s what actually makes a band.
A year into playing together, they’ve also learned something more nuanced than technique: they’ve learned each other. “You learn what the other members are comfortable with playing or singing,” they reflect. “You learn how to improvise and really go off the path — while still staying connected with everyone else.” That balance between individual freedom and collective cohesion is something most bands spend years chasing. Vodou is figuring it out at 16.
At the center of everything is “Time” by Pink Floyd — the first song they ever played together as Vodou, and one that has appeared on the setlist of every single gig since. There’s something fitting about that. It’s a song about growing up, about feeling like you’re running out of time before you’ve figured out what to do with it. For a band that is, by any measure, just getting started, it turns out to be the perfect anthem.
They’re heading to the Musikfest Music Industry Conference with open minds and the ethos Mr. Buffington gave them. They’re hoping to gain experience, absorb professional feedback, and see where this thing goes.
The sound is still evolving. The horns are new. The band is young. But they have never accepted mediocrity, and they’re not about to start now.