James Prosek began playing at seventeen, to help get over his first girlfriend. He made up songs to keep away dismal thoughts. The songs accumulated, and by the time he got to college he had a good many...

In his junior year at Yale, James and his roommate Etay Ziv started playing and singing in coffee houses around New Haven, under the name Troutband. Through a series of coincidences, James came to meet Joe Dochtermann, who was running a small recording studio. Joe listened skeptically to their mediocre playing, but found the tunes intriguing. Soon James and Joe began playing, and produced the first Troutband album together, "All Wet."

After "All Wet" Joe moved to Maine, and James and Joe continued forging music in an frigid attic space above a small garage. While feeding a wood stove with logs and chicken fat, and sipping absinthe, they put together a second album, titled "Love for a Dollar."

James Prosek makes his living as a painter and a writer, but finds making music to be perhaps the most enjoyable of his creative efforts. Jamming till the wee hours, tuning out the whole world, and just tapping into what his mother has always referred to as "the pipeline."

Joe Dochtermann is a guitarist/engineer/producer who learned his trade both on his own and by working with top players and producers. Absorbing guitar and production tricks from Danny Kortchmar, Charlie Karp and other top players in the NY/CT area cut his guitar playing and engineering chops, and gave him the confidence to start producing records. In 1998, Joe began working with James Prosek on what would become the first "Troutband" album, leading him to adopt the project as a labor of love.

In the summer of 2007, James introduced Joe to Rick Richter. During an afternoon of guitar playing and song-trading, it became clear that Rick was the right man to bring into the floundering Troutband. The latest album, "Monkey's Wedding" is a return to the basics of good record production; solid songwriting, lots of guitar, and judicious experimentation with sounds and effects. The title track showcases the symbiosis of Rick, James & Joe - solid melodies, succinct arranging, subtle synth textures, jangly guitars, and feverish background effects dotting the soundscape. The folk/blues "It ain't me" presents Rick's honest vocal delivery, a foot-stomping groove, greasy guitar and dobro licks, and has the trio howling background vocals in an Easton, CT barn.

Joe has also written several guitar and recording technique learning methods, available on Amazon, eBay, Google and via his website joedocmusic.com. He lives in Hamburg, Germany, and has also written for Guitar Magazine while living there. He is now returning to the USA to continue writing, recording and playing with Troutband and other projects.

Rick Richter’s musical career shapes up like almost every other folk geek you knew in college. As a budding musician he perfected an ability to clear out bars with the depressive nature of his music and the severe nature of his personal pain. After getting his degree in music, he spent most of the next 25 years ashamed of himself, listening to music rather than making it in between seemingly important meetings. He hummed quietly and occasionally tapped his foot.

He did not, however, forget an innate ability to write songs that drive suicidal thinking. It was only when he met James Prosek and began their friendship that Rick had a sort of awakening (midlife crisis) and began to play his long shelved songs to James, and then to the other Troutband member, Joe Dochtermann. To his shock, they liked them. One song begat another. New songs came out of cracks in his life.

These days Rick believes you can be many things. He believes that being defined so narrowly by your profession, or your role in a family, or by anything you thought explained yourself is actually suffocating and a result of small thinking. This might have something to do with the fact he recently lost his job and his dog is getting old.

His influences are Beethoven, and Tiny Tim, almost exclusively.