ADABOY! • An Ongoing Odyssey of Creativity & Connection

Out of all the talented groups populating the Great Lakes Bay Region, the 4-piece musically creative dynamo known as ADABOY! is certainly one of the most engaging, critically acclaimed, and equally popular groups making waves big enough to carry them to the shoreline of national attention.

One of the most attractive qualities that makes ADABOY! such a compelling musical tour-de-force to reckon with is they are essentially genre-less and pride themselves on taking new musical ideas, from Flamenco to Reggae to Rock and Country, infusing them into a unique sound that stands on its own, making them hard to classify or categorize.

Apart from being the first band in the 39-year history of the REVIEW Music Awards to win ‘Best Variety Band’, ‘Best Original Band’, ‘Best Rock Band, and ‘Best Alternative Band’ last year’s 2024 RMA’s, their first single release Time (Voices Run) recorded down in Nashville last year with Grammy Award winning engineer Joe Baldridge also nailed several top honors, which is an amazing feat for a group who’s core incarnation is barely three-years old.

ADABOY! is a group who has sacrificed and dedicated itself to a high standard when it comes to releasing carefully crafted original music. The end result in a group who have cultivated a powerful sound that allows the listener to feel any weight being lifted. But more importantly, they are creating forward thinking, growth mindset music, colored by the textures of past eras with a heartfelt foundation

While they didn’t walk away with as many trophies at this year’s 2025 REVIEW Music Awards celebration, they did manage to win three of hardest fought for honors, securing top position as Best Original Band, Best Rock Band, and also their second trophy for Best New Single Release with the release Man I Am.

ADABOY! has been busy over the past year ratcheting their career to the next level, which nowadays means moving beyond the mere creation of music to dealing with the business side of life.

“We’re realizing how this group is turning into a real full time job similar to literally running a small time business, only your product is the music that you make,” reflects group co-founder Mike Richards. “We signed with a marketing management company called Red 39 Records who was accepting only three new artists, so put out our fishing pole and fortunately got snagged.”

“They really liked our music and the head of this label is Chip Latham, who worked with Rod Stewart, Prince, and the Rolling Stones back in the day and also helped break Hootie & the Blowfish. He developed this all-inclusive program I’m learning uses custom AI, and since getting signed I’ve been in school six months learning it. We’ll be using it to implement launching our new releases, handle our calendar, and promote our music.”

Since breaking ground with their debut award-winning single Time (Voices Run) last year, followed by this year’s win for Man I Am, the group has also spent much of the past year in the studio.  “We recorded five new songs at Oceanway Studios with Joe Baldridge and Tate Sablatura, who was the assistant engineer and is also with Deep Purple right now, who recorded our upcoming new single release titled New Strings that will be coming out around the middle of June, along with our  new album and music video,” explains lead guitarist Vince Modern.

“One of our new songs is titled Uncaged and is targeted to the Detroit Lions to hopefully get them to use as a kick-off song or anthem to cheer the team on,” adds Richards. “It’s a hard rock song that’s a little out of our lane and probably the heaviest song we’ve ever done, and was recorded exclusively at Pearl Studios.

One of the distinguishing factors that makes ADABOY’S original compositions so compelling is the amount of time the group invests into writing their songs. With their debut single Time the group revised and rewrote the song numerous times over a 3-month period to get it exactly right, so I’m curious if the group’s songwriting process is getting any easier.

“I wouldn’t say it’s getting easier, but I think it’s a quicker process now, because in working with these gifted producers we’ve been able to set up a creative template we can mentally harness to improve the songs,” reflects award-winning bassist & multi-instrumentalist Joe Balbaugh. “It’s cool because we’ll start going to our original approach when writing new material, and then another member will present a twist that makes the song more marketable, so it’s truly an outstanding form of collaborative teamwork that we have going on.”

“We record in four different studios now and every engineer is different and has his own way of doing things, so we’re finding that absorbing and learning all these different studio tricks and approaches is the best way to learn how to best write and record,” adds Vince.

“Over the winter we also learned a bunch of new cover songs and now we’re getting back to the business side, so we can more effectively get our music out there,” notes Mike. “We’ve been performing in the Tri-City and Flint area over the last six months, which is what enables us to realize the funding for our recording sessions down in Nashville.”

With the new album finished and ready for release, Richards says the group focus is now turning to assembling a release and marketing campaign designed to get their music in front of the right audiences.  “Right now the plan is to release a new song every six to eight weeks. Chip Latham understands that breaking a new band is now done primarily online through social media and YouTube, so we’re filming content to create videos for all these new songs and focusing on using this new software application to move us in the right direction.”

When I mention how the group’s live performances on local regional stages is as compelling professionally as that of any major artist gracing the stage of a large stadium, in a moment of humorous humility Mike laughs and says, “That’s very flattering, but you should have seen us last Saturday. We had to do this show but knew we couldn’t because our drummer Aaron had a lower back issue. We cover for each other and in another lifetime I was a drummer, so I put the acoustic guitar down and learned a bunch of cover songs on the spot so we could do the show as a three-piece. Singing lead vocals over intricate drum patterns was a little shaky, but who knows - we may be able to develop a dual drum solo out of it once we get on those big stages!”

With the crop of new material set to debut on their new album, it is apparent that ADABOY! continues to evolve both breadth and depth to their songwriting skills. “I feel musically we’re more intuitively attuned to what we’re capable of,” reflects newest member drummer Aaron Lenk. “The producers we’ve worked with have shown us our professionalism and how we’re able to adapt and be cooperative. In fact we’ve been approached by some local people to assist them with their own recordings and hope to have a studio one day for ourselves. Seeing as we’re focused on creating so much music, it would be a good investment.”

Historically, regardless of genre, the most popular songs resonating with audiences that endure the test of time center around things involving struggle and personal turmoil - topics such as losing love, not getting enough love, or loving too much, so do these new crop of songs vary much from that time-honored formula?

“We sing and have written a lot of songs on topics of struggle, redemption, and loss of love, yet it seems many people in the industry don’t want to talk about topics like redemption and standing up against struggle nowadays,” reflects Joe. “All the big Motown hits were about these topics but right now so much music is about the joys of drinking your pain away. I feel we’re capable of writing a song about any topic and also have a feeling we found an avenue to connect with audiences outside of that topical bias in the sense that redemption is always a topic we come back to in a way thematically.”

The biggest change with the group personnel-wise was the addition of drummer/vocalist Aaron Lenk, who replaced former percussionist Steve Bennett a little over a year ago. Lenk has threaded himself seamlessly into the fabric of the band and cemented his status within the group through the strength of his skills.

“When first joining the group I was given 30 songs to learn in six or seven days and 10 of them I played for the first time the day of our show,” he laughs. “I got a good tan by the end of that set, which was the band’s  first performance at the Aces & Eights Country Rock Music Festival down in Jackson, Michigan. We had an early afternoon slot so there were only about 600 people, but it was an exciting show and like going through a baptism by fire.”

With the group traveling frequently down to Nashville to record they have also made some pivotal inroads on the Nashville performance circuit.  “We were able to secure a gig at The Electric Jane, which exists in Downtown Nashville and is a venue made to showcase bands in the music industry for music publishers and studio executives,”  explains Vince. “We secured that gig through Bernard Porter of PCG International and made some important connections, because once you get into that club then you’re in the inner circle of Nashville and carry some presence.”

“We’re also scheduled to work with Jeri Lynn Burgdorf, who has coached more than 1500 corporate executives from Fortune 500 companies,” notes Mike. “She was a news anchor for decades and saw a need to create media for artists and singers who needed this guidance to advance their careers. She worked with Oprah and has a book she wrote back in 2011 called The Missing Element, so with all this equally important non-music related business occupying our attentions over the past year, that’s why we’ve had to divide our time between the performance and business side of life.”

“Fortunately, we’ve got our schedule booked out to the end of 2026,” he continues. “We’re not a record label band so this is all internal, It’s nice to be able to make your own schedule, because we all have families and need to devote time to them as well, so we’re excited about how things seem to be progressing in the right way.  We’re honored to be a band who has been part of The REVIEW for years and winning these honors from readers and fans means the world to us.”

“Receiving the honor for Best Original Band means a lot to me because there were 38 bands nominated in that category and every one of them were good,” concludes Joe. “That says a lot about what we’ve taken from all these different genres and woven into our sound - being able to jump genres and implement music that people remember that crosses generational boundaries - that’s our goal. To be genre specific I feel limits our potential.”

To learn more about ADABOY! and follow their music please visit www.adaboymusic.com.