How I met your band

Fighting the Future formed out of the former band of two members. As the previous group fell apart, Dylan Fuson and Austin Aguera, both 18, moved on by recruiting new members for a punk/pop/alternative group.

After Aguera, Fuson and Aguera’s stepbrother, Craig Schrader, 21, decided they wanted to form a band they stumbled across an ad Alonzo Vasquez put on Craigslist looking for people serious about creating music.

After several conversations, and many questions from a skeptical Vasquez, he eventually became the final member of the four-piece band made up of guitarists Fuson and Vasquez, drummer Schrader, and bass player Aguera.

The group says their pop punk sound is reminiscent of the music they grew up on—a sound Schrader describes as “California.”

The group strives to mix the nostalgia of music that has already been done and songs that have already been written with a new twist that makes them their own.

While Fuson and Vasquez write most of the group’s original songs, Schrader says they all contribute to the creative process.

“We’ll have sit down sessions,” Schrader says. “We’ll sit down and try and come up with some lines [and] different lyrics for songs … we don’t have a very structured song writing process.”

The band members run into a bit of a problem when it comes to writing lyrics, given their age. Because they are so young, writing about life experiences sometimes proves difficult to the group, but they improvise by using other means of inspiration.

For example, the TV show How I Met Your Mother has inspired more than one of the group’s songs, according to Fuson.

With titles like “Architects,” “Sorry Bro,” and “Her Favorite Band is Glee”—all How I Met Your Mother references—Fuson says they strive to make their songs relatable for everybody as opposed to being specific to one person’s situation.

Using forms of creative inspiration other than their own life for their lyrics helps Fighting the Future reach their goal of writing songs that aren’t “cookie-cutter,” as Schrader describes it.

“I try to write a lot of more meaningful lyrics,” Fuson explains, adding he wants to write about more than just high school and girls.

So who does Fighting the Future sound like? Fall Out Boy, The Wonder Years and Blink 182, the members agree.

In fact, Aguera and Fuson even call their cover of “Sugar We’re Going Down” their anthem because they’ve played it together so many times. But don’t ask the group to play it at their next gig because they recently retired the song after playing it together too many times.

The group, which obviously looks to some of their favorite bands for inspiration, even took its name from a song by Motion City Soundtrack called “Everything is All Right.”

Aguera explains the name came to them when they were just messing around playing a cover of the popular song when the lyric “I’m getting better at fighting the future,” came on and suddenly clicked. From that point on, they were known as Fighting the Future, a name they welcomed after several failed attempts that never quite stuck.

The band has been together less than a year and are still navigating the Reno music scene.

“We haven’t made a whole lot of waves yet in the local scene,” Schrader says. “We’re still working on it.”

But being new hasn’t stopped them from moving forward and trying to find where they fit in.