Guest Post #3: Alyssa Mendoza

Here’s some musical insight from the queen of McKean on her birthday.

Since Jacob’s post on The Canals was so popular and in his picture he was wearing my coat, clearly I should be soon to follow. It’s not gonna be good at all, but hey it’s my birthday so they let me become the canals first lady.

I’m a big fan of Maryland. GBURG rep! So I want to spend some time loving what I love. I mean it’s a good state, we got beaches, mountains, big cities, farmlands, annoyingly rich people, DC but we don’t have to live there, I mean we have it all. Three bands that I can think right now have come from Maryland; Good Charlotte, OAR, and Ballyhoo! Since Good Charlotte and OAR have become oh so corporate, let’s focus on Ballyhoo! Ok I really like Maryland and the band a lot. But not that much, they actually have an exclamation point in their name, and their album, Do it for the Money!

I was first introduced to the lovely sounds of Ballyhoo! by my buddy Sam. They are Maryland-grown just like me and so naturally Sam knew Ballyhoo!’s lead singer’s brother’s teacher’s boyfriend’s pledgebrother’s niece’s camp counselor, loosely. Clearly Sam was really excited about this special connection and told us to come see them perform in the sketchy part of our town. At the time I was only 17 and since it was at a bar type place I thought I would have to use my older sisters ID to get in (The second time ever- the first was to get into chucky cheese- more on that later). Sam assured me that it wasn’t 18 and over. So I went to see this crazy exclamation-pointed Ballyhoo! concert and hoped they wouldn’t mind that I wasn’t 18 quite yet. When we got there the extremely scary and extremely tattooed bouncer asked for IDs. I said fuck and went behind my friends; the jerks kept going in without me so me and bouncer could hang out during the concert. They proudly flashed their IDs and got promptly yelled at for trying to get into a 21 and over bar. This is why I like Ballyhoo! – they made my jerk friends feel stupid. And they are really really good. Listen. Do it.

And a little shout out to my boy Benjy with my Maryland boys OAR talking about Benjy’s Columbus, Ohio home.

Ballyhoo! – Cerveza
Ballyhoo! – Cali Girl
OAR – Road Outside Columbus

-Alyssa Mendoza