Rival Sons

Another week has flown by. Every other week a blogger is chosen as the spotlight dancer by the hosts of Mondays Music Moves Me.  The spotlight dancer gets to choose a theme for us to use.  Today our spotlight dancer is Joyce from Catch My Words. Her daughter is celebrating her 25th birthday today.   I’d like to wish her a Very Happy Birthday.  And apologies to Joyce for not following suit with the theme today.


Instead, I wanted to share with you a new to me band. Every once in a while I like to check out the recommended videos from YouTube. Recently, there was a video that came up on the recommended list that I felt compelled to watch. I found myself really enjoying the music. Today, I’m going to introduce that band to you as well.

Rival Sons

The Rival Sons members are from the Long Beach music scene. Prior to the formation of Rival Sons, Jay Buchanan recorded as a solo artist, as well as with his band Buchanan, which had previously released ‘'All Understood’' in 2004 and True Love EP in 2006. Scott Holiday’s first success was in Human Lab who had recorded an album for Atlantic Records that was never released, then Black Summer Crush, (2005) where he was joined by Thomas Flowers (Oleander) and J. Harley Gilmore, (Ashes II Ashes, Weylon Krieger, Blu Cantrell) who later left the band in early 2006.

Gilmore was replaced by Michael Miley, a successful studio musician. Miley was also previously in Veruca Salt (2005) and the Carson Daly TV band, where he met Robin Everhart at Isaac Hayes' house when they both played a Hurricane Katrina benefit show.







Scott Holiday was searching for a new singer after the break up of Black Summer Crush and came upon Jay Buchanan on MySpace. Michael Miley had previously briefly played with Jay Buchanan in Buchanan.

Rival Sons was the first rock band Jay Buchanan had sung with and he was initially skeptical as a blues singer songwriter and looked at the band as a side project. He was surprised by the reaction and the success the band received with their debut self-released album Before the Fire (2009).

The band saw a bit of success, supporting other bands such as AC/DC, Alice Cooper, and Kid Rock and toured with bands such as Judas Priest, Queensrÿche and Evanescence.

In 2013, bass player Robin Everhart left the band and was replaced with Dave Beste.

Now that I’ve introduced the band to you, let me share with you a bit of their music.





Thank you all for your input on the questions I had last week. I'm still mulling over some of it, but have decided to go back to twice a month battle of the bands (for now, at least). So tell your friends and tell your family to keep an eye out for the upcoming battle February 1st.