Profile: Some Kind of Jet Pilot
If you’re looking for original alternative music right here on Dartmouth’s campus, you should check out the new student band Some Kind of Jet Pilot.
The band, made up of Ted Owens ’16, Daniel Shanker ’16 and Josh Cetron ’16, started playing together informally this past fall. The three discovered each other after entering their names into a musicians’ database that was blitzed out over the summer.
“We each brought to the table some of the stuff we had written independently and it became a more cohesive thing as a result,” Cetron said.
The three members have combined their different musical backgrounds, which all generally fall within the rock genre. According to Owens, the band has its own style, “a blend of alternative and folk.”
Aside from a few covers that they play at live shows, the band writes all of its own music. With 16 original songs currently completed, the band hopes to finish another four tracks by the term’s end.
“We really enjoy the creative process,” Owens said. “It’s fun when one person brings an idea for a song to the other two. It’s a very collaborative process that I think we’ve benefited greatly from.”
The band’s name was inspired by a conversation with Chad Stokes from the band Dispatch, who Shanker and Cetron saw several times over the course of their freshman fall. After learning that Stokes had gotten his first band name from a Wes Anderson movie, the three decided to pick a random quote from a movie as well. They eventually decided on Some Kind of Jet Pilot from the movie “Bottle Rocket.”
“We furiously took notes as we watched the movie,” Cetron said.
So far, the band has received an extremely supportive reaction from campus audiences, Shanker said. While Some Kind of Jet Pilot has mostly performed at Collis After Dark, shows at Sig Ep and SAE have been lined up for the rest of the term.
“We’ve gotten a lot of great support from our friends who have helped spread us around,” Cetron said. “It’ll be really nice to get to play for people who might not have heard us yet.”
You can listen to Some Kind of Jet Pilot’s EP here.