Laconia Corporation is Daniel Lewis and Benjamin Hatfield. We have been making music together in various forms since 1983. We started in high school in Massachusetts, and though we have moved all over the country in the intervening years (Virginia, Louisiana, Texas, Illinois, Kansas, New Mexico, and Arizona), we have continued to play and record together through it all.
Daniel is the creative heart of the band. Musically, he defines Laconia Corporation - his style gives us our sound. Those cool rhythms you hear in our songs? That's him. Daniel has been playing guitar for over 25 years, which is kinda scary when we think about it, and has been writing music for almost as long. Along the way, he added bass and keyboards to his repertoire.
Benjamin is responsible for vocals, most of the lyrics, this website, counting the money, and keeping Daniel's songs shorter than 10 minutes long. Daniel needs to be reminded periodically that this is rock n' roll, not an opera, not even a rock opera (and Benjamin sometimes needs to be reminded that not every second of a song needs lyrics and it's OK to repeat a phrase now and then - it's supposed to be poetry, not a novel).
We've recorded a lot of music together over the years, releasing somewhere between 8 and 13 albums (depending on how you count), and mostly sharing them with family and friends, plus the occasional public performance. But the release of our album Petroglyph seemed perfectly timed with the rise of the internet music scene. So starting with that album, we decided to make our music more widely available. This web site was born then and we began to sell Petroglyph off the site.
Next, we released Still Life with Llamas, revamped the web site (again), widened our distribution to include some popular music download sites, and arranged to sell physical albums through cdbaby.com (allowing us to take credit card orders, which really helped sales).
Our latest offering is Emotional Philosophy, released in early 2008. We think it's our best album, yet (not that we would be biased or anything). If you have never heard us before, we recommend you start with EP.
If you've read this far, you owe it to yourself to listen to at least one song, and we've posted snippets of a bunch of them for you to try. If you like 'em, consider buying an album or some individual tracks. If we're not to your taste, you're out nothing. Give it a shot.
