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I just had to make sure it sounded good with the band.” I know the material like the back of my hand. The night is a bit of a blur in his head, but he thinks it took place in Idaho. It’s such an inspiring city for songwriters.”Ībout a year into his Nashville journey, Cheap Trick asked him to play piano at a semi-acoustic charity gig, after he’d watched countless shows over the years from the wings. In that sense, it hardened me as a musician, but I also learned a lot. “If you want to go play the bars off Broadway, it’s like, ‘Get in line’ - because there’s thousands of other musicians that want to do the same thing you’re doing. “There’s a lot of healthy competition in Nashville for live music,” he says. He only knew two people in the entire city. In 2015, once he felt he had gained enough knowledge to write and record music on his own, he moved to Nashville to find work as a songwriter and performer. “I enjoyed sports, but I was usually in my room playing along to CDs and records that my dad had in his collection.”Īfter high school, he took classes at Florida State, the Berklee College of Music, and Full Sail University. “I was an introverted music nerd at a pretty early age,” he says. That quickly led to guitar, drums, piano, and even ukulele. He grew up in a house packed with instruments, and was initially drawn to the bass since he found it easy to pick out a single note and play, rather than learning chords. People pay to come and see my dad, as opposed to him merely just liking to sing around the house.’” “When I was about six I realized, ‘Oh, this isn’t normal. “He used to come into school to play guitar and talk to the kids about touring,” he says. Growing up in Safety Harbor, Florida, Zander initially didn’t understand that his dad was different than the other parents around him. “That said, I definitely have something to prove. “I can’t control if if someone says, ‘He’s just someone’s son,’” he says. It’s inevitable that some fans will resent seeing the frontman’s kid join the band - a knock that’s familiar to second-generation performers from Nic Collins to Wolfgang Van Halen, fairly or not - but Zander has come to terms with that. “It’s all just been mind-blowing to me, and it’s shown me what I can do under pressure. “If you asked me five years ago if all this stuff would happen, I would have said you were crazy,” says Zander, 28. He’s also filled in for lead guitarist Rick Nielsen a handful of times when health issues forced him off the road, meaning he has now played every single role in Cheap Trick besides his dad’s lead singer gig. Those handful of shows led to a full-time position in the band as a rhythm guitarist and background singer, and it placed him in position to sub in for bassist Tom Petersson in 2021 when Petersson was sidelined by heart surgery. It’s another thing to play for thousands of people and hold down the beat.” “It’s one thing to play with your friends on the weekend when you’re in high school. Cheap Trick flew the younger Zander in as a last-minute sub despite his relative inexperience. He got the chance in 2016 when Daxx Nielsen, who replaced Carlos as the band’s drummer in 2010, had to take time off for the birth of his child. “All I wanted to do was go up there,” he says. At night, he’d snuggle up next to his dad, lead singer Robin Wayne Zander, on the tour bus, and when they performed he’d watch every show from the side of the stage. When Robin Taylor Zander was a little kid, he loved spending his summers on the road with his father’s band, Cheap Trick.
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