Many high school bands start with a group of friends deciding to get together and learn how to play instruments, usually in their parents’ garage. But the members of the band Modern Day Warrior were already experienced musicians when they first started out, so after getting to know one another, they were quickly able to become successful.
Modern Day Warrior is a Virginia Beach-based band made up of several teenagers, many of whom are high schoolers in VBCPS: Anna Kain-Kuzniewski is a senior at Ocean Lakes who sings and plays guitar, Billy Helps is a junior at First Colonial and plays the electric guitar, Merrill Schmidt is a junior here at PA and plays bass guitar, Luke Rawls plays acoustic guitar and sings, Thomas Moore is a recent Cox graduate and plays drums, and Megan Bogaard is a senior at Cox, who also sings.
Helps explains the band was formed by Robert Smith, a teacher at the music school Music Makers, who pulled together “the best of the best” of his students. Helps, Rawls and Moore had all taken lessons at the school before, while Schmidt, a good friend of Helps, had been playing music for a while before that. The four made up the original Modern Day Warrior, with Bogaard and Kain-Kuzniewski joining later.
The band started playing gigs regularly by the end of 2021, with sets usually around an hour long, featuring covers of alternative rock. Around the past year though, the band has had a steady stream of gigs between Norfolk and Virginia Beach with longer sets and a wider variety of songs. In September 2023, they played at the Sandler Center, opening for Evil Woman, an Electric Light Orchestra cover band.
Schmidt explained the band usually meets around once a week to practice, and if a gig is coming up, they’ll meet a few times in the week leading up to it. Although Kain-Kuzniewski and Helps joke a lot of “blood, sweat and tears” goes into the process of creating a setlist for their gigs, Schmidt explains that the band does have a process to be able to play for a few hours straight. They usually begin by determining what song to open with and what song they want to close with, and then choose the others based on the songs’ energy, according to Schmidt.
“Basically, the way we decide we want to learn a song [is] we’ll start playing a bunch of songs in practice and be like ‘oh, we should do that one,’” said Kain-Kuzniewski. “Then we’ll all learn our parts and come together and play them.”
Recently, Modern Day Warrior opened a mini-festival in Norfolk hosted by LAVA Presents, where they played two original songs titled “Wolf” and “Run.” Helps described their process coming up with their own songs: “Luke will come in with either a riff or something he wants to write about, or in the case of the last song, running from the cops…and then Thomas and Merrill will figure out their parts, and Anna and I will figure out the guitar parts and it all kind of comes together,” he described.
Schmidt and Helps have been able to grow their musical skills even further this past year as both also attend the Governor’s School for the Arts (GSA), Helps for electric guitar and Schmidt for bass guitar. Although the two study jazz while at GSA, much different from the alternative rock in their gigs, Helps explains the program helps while performing in the band. “All of our technical skills we have learned…have come from Gov. School,” said Helps. “Merrill and I have improved so much through Governor’s School. Even when we’re up there [playing] and writing songs, the language that we’re learning from jazz is coming out through the basslines and stuff.”
Kain-Kuzniewski also discussed the benefits of being able to play and perform music while in high school: “Finding people that love music like you and getting to share it with each other, and then playing on stage and watching all of your hard work fall into place, is really rewarding.”
Modern Day Warrior will be performing again on Thursday, May 2, from 8 p.m. to 11 p.m. at South Beach Grill. All of their information and videos of their past gigs can be found on the band’s website and their Instagram @m0derndaywarrior.
