Sauk Valley band makes sweet music – and will release an album – amid the pandemic

For a lot of college students, spring 2020 was a trying time as the COVID-19 pandemic shut down campuses and sent them packing for home.

For Gabe Zeigler and his Monarch bandmates, it provided an opportunity. The result will be an EP album slated to be released Feb. 1.

Zeigler is a senior at Augustana College in Rock Island. He plays guitar in the band that also includes lead singer Luke Steinke, guitarist Devin Lott and drummer Ben Vanderlaan.

Zeigler, Steinke and Lott are from Sterling, Vanderlaan is from Morrison.

Steinke and Vanderlaan are seniors at Belmont University in Nashville, Tennessee, while Lott is a graduate of the Madison Recording Institute.

They formed Monarch about 3 years ago, and have played at different events in the Sauk Valley, including the Petunia Festival and Gardenstock.

They played a gig at Champs Bar in Sterling on March 14, just as COVID-19 was taking hold. Shortly after that, college students were being sent home from all across the country.

The members of Monarch decided that was the right time to piece together an album.

“That gave us a really big window of time that we could work with,” Zeigler said. “Essentially, we met mid-to-late March and developed a plan for this, and over the next month and a half, we put together fragments of old songs that we had worked on, but never really finished.”

That writing process resulted in six songs.

“It was entirely fresh,” Zeigler said. “We wrote all of the songs over Zoom. We flushed them out to the point where we knew we had something good. Then it led to 3- to 4-hour rehearsal sessions while getting baked on by the sun. It was really, really tough and required a lot of effort and coordination from the group. It was a totally different approach, and it really shows.”

In May and June, the group got together at Jordan Creek Recording Co., a facility operated by Zeigler about 5 miles north of Sterling. They would rehearse in the driveway, while staying socially distanced from one another.

Douglas Ganster, a Braidwood native who graduated from Augustana a few years ago and whom Zeigler got to know during their time together there, was brought in to play bass, allowing Steinke to concentrate on vocals.

“It was a really intense and different process,” Zeigler said.

The Jordan Creek Recording Co. is an old barn on property that has been in Zeigler’s family for a long time. He’s had other bands work there in the past.

“It’s just a fantastic acoustic chamber,” he said. “It brings out a warm and powerful sound, for drums especially.”

The six-song album is called “The Sunroom EP” and is a sign of the times in two ways – the world in which we all live in now, as well as the evolution of the band Monarch.

“The reason we called it The Sunroom EP is because it really felt like we were looking at the whole world through a window, both as a band and a society, at the time of writing it,” Zeigler said. “We still kind of are. People were staying inside for weeks. They weren’t seeing their friends. They weren’t seeing their family. It kind of felt like we were watching and waiting for something to happen.

“Also, the sunroom metaphor alludes to what it’s like to be a small-town local band, where you’re got 8 to 10 years of musical experience, you’re working hard and you’ve made some really cool connections. You know at the point in your life where you’ve made it so far, but there’s so many people out there that haven’t met you or your musical personality yet. It’s kind of like a bubble, and you’re trying to break out of that bubble.”

The Sunroom EP will be available on Spotify, Apple Music, Prime Music and YouTube. It is the second album for the band, following “Mask” in 2018. They also released four singles in 2019.

With the band members all in their early 20s and either fresh out of college or getting ready to graduate, the future is up in their air. They could find their own paths in music, or collaborate on something else down the road.

“If we’re playing together and we’re gigging, I think we’re going to have a great time, and you can definitely expect a few albums in the next decade,” Zeigler said.

“Whether that means we’re going to be touring the world or taking the world by storm from our own basements, that’s to be determined.”