Some bands are built. The Pollocks were inevitable.
It started, as the best Virginia stories often do, somewhere between the Blue Ridge and a gut feeling. Jason Pollock - the chief songwriter behind Seven Mary Three, the multi-platinum 90s rock outfit whose songs became a generation's shorthand for a certain kind of beautiful unrest - had already seen the world from a tour bus. He'd written "Cumbersome," "Water's Edge," "Rock Crown," and "Lucky." And then, at the turn of the century, he came home to Batesville, Virginia, married Maryline Meyer, and went quiet for a while.
In 2008, he started making noise again. He called it The Pollocks.
From the beginning, the engine room of the band was Jason and Nathan West, a drummer who plays like a man who has never once in his life been asked to turn it down, and who has never once complied. Nathan was there at the start, and he's still there, which tells you everything you need to know about the kind of gravity this band generates. To watch Nathan West behind a kit is to understand that some people don't play instruments so much as negotiate with them — and Nathan's terms are non-negotiable. Larger than life, unapologetic, and genuinely dangerous in the best possible sense, he is the reason the rest of the band feels free to go somewhere wild. When he's not behind the kit, he's running Mad Hatter Foods, which perhaps explains his complicated relationship with restraint.
Alongside Jason, guitarist Thomas Gunn co-pilots the band's creative engine with the ease of someone who's been doing this his whole life. One of central Virginia's most accomplished and prolific songwriters, Gunn makes the difficult look accidental. Pencil Storm said it plainly: "Thomas Gunn can shred when he wants to." What they didn't mention is that he also knows exactly when not to, which is the rarer skill. Together, Pollock and Gunn share the songwriting in a way that feels less like collaboration and more like a conversation between two people who've been agreeing on the important things for years.
Then there's Maryline Meyer-Pollock, Jason's wife, the band's third voice, and the piece that makes The Pollocks genuinely singular. Her harmonies push the band's arrangements into three-part territory that most regional acts can only aspire to. She plays tambourine with a conviction that makes you rethink the instrument entirely. And she brings something that cannot be replicated: a distinctly French cultural identity that allows The Pollocks to move into a repertoire of French songs no other band in the area is anywhere near touching. There is nothing quite like hearing The Pollocks in full three-part harmony drift into something sung in French, in a room in central Virginia, on a Friday night.
And then there's Randy. In 2016, Randy Mendicino was driving outside Charlottesville when a song came on the radio and made him pull over. He had to know who it was. It was The Pollocks from right outside his hometown and he had never heard of them. He started showing up to shows. He felt the pull immediately: the songs, the energy, the room. In May of 2017, they gave him a shot on bass, and he brought with him decades of East Coast stage experience earned one club at a time through a long run of bands that reads like a love letter to regional American music. Mendicino plays bass the way a great film score operates, you don't notice it until it's gone, and then everything unravels. He's been exactly right for this band since the night he walked in.
Their lead single “Summer of Love,” the first release from their upcoming full-length album Love You, is streaming everywhere now. Pencil Storm, which got an early listen to the full record, gave it ten out of ten stars and compared it to Tom Petty, Drive-By Truckers, and Wilco. The album is still to come, but the single offers a strong preview of what’s ahead.
The Pollocks have held a monthly residency at The Batesville Market for years, and if you want to understand what this band is… really understand it, that's the place. A room full of people who keep coming back, night after month after year, for original music played by five musicians who've earned every note.
Three albums are already streaming, Rock House, Set & Setting, and Johnny Sunshine & The Rainbows. A fourth, and by all accounts their best, is on its way.
The Pollocks are the rare thing: a band with history, with craft, with a room that loves them, and a record that might be the best thing any of them have ever made, and it isn't even out yet.