Republic Tigers Yearn to Make Music for Movies

When Jankowksi gets back home to Kansas City, he won't be too far from Republic, Missouri, where he went to Republic High School. It was that school's mascot, the Tigers, that inspired the band's moniker. As a student at Republic, Jankowski sported a ponytail on top of his head and played sousaphone in the school's marching band. As the assistant drum major, he tried to be like Bram Stoker's Dracula as he directed the marching band.

It was in high school that Jankowksi got his first guitar; he also got a karaoke machine for his seventeenth birthday. Instead of using it for singing along to backup tracks, he figured how to overdub with two tapes and began using the machine to record his own music.

Writing lyrics didn't come until a while later. Jankowski says the lyrics for the songs on Keep Color are like different short stories. Each is a part of its own world with specific rules, but never the same rules. "They all mean something. They're put in a mysterious way; they could mean different things to different listeners, so I try not to go into too many specifics on my personal meaning," he explains. "I'm going to leave that to the listener, at least for now. 'Fight Song' means three different things to me, and they all make sense, so that was a really tough one to do. I had to change a few words just so that one story would completely make sense while the other two did."

And if he ever hits a writer's block? He's got a lot more written about his ex-wife.