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Bio

Ingersoll, Dixon and Hamilton had grown up together in southern Indiana, playing together in different bands with various line-ups through high school. Feeling that they had exhausted all options for growth in the Bloomington, Indiana music scene, they decided a move was in order and settled on Chicago, Illinois. In late 2004 two of the bands members left, leaving the core three to weigh their options. They decided to track an album of songs with Chicago producer C.S. Gladfelter, formerly of Dovetail Joint. The album would be named “To All That Buy In”, and generated a buzz almost as soon as the first copies were distributed. Marshall Hanbury Jr. and Noel Arnim were recruited to complete the line-up. Two weeks later, after settling on the name Absentstar, the band made it’s debut performance as a showcase in front of A&R scouts for Epic and Universal. Their next show was the following week at the SXSW Music Festival in Austin, Texas. Absentstar continued to record and play throughout the year and were signed by A&R veteran Steve Ralbovsky then of RCA records in 2006. Later that year, Ralbovsky was offered his own imprint at Columbia Records and took Absentstar with him to be his flagship project on the newly formed Canvasback Music. The band tracked the songs for their debut album Sea Trials in Minneapolis with producer Dan Wilson, formerly the front man of Semisonic, and engineer Jacquire King. They tracked live, all members in the same room together for an organic “real” sound. The album was released in April 2008.

On the name Absentstar – “Well, a couple of reasons. One, yeah it sounds cool. Two, it kind of fits the bands overall philosophy about how we feel about music. We want our songs to define who we are rather than our name or the things that we do other than play music. The name was born from a mash-up of some Ken Andrews lyrics, and we just felt like it worked for many reasons.”

"We love melodies and lyrics," says Derek Ingersoll, lead singer of Chicago-based Absentstar. "We're not that interested in gimmicks.We're not playing for a specific demographic, but to anyone and everyone. I don't really understand the desire to limit your audience," he adds. "I love pop music and I love indie music, as long as it's got a melody and it means something."

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