Friendship is the force behind Wichita band Sometimes on Sunday

The story of the Wichita band Sometimes on Sunday isn’t about five guys gnawing their way to make it to the top of the music business.

It’s about a five-sided friendship, where music broke out.

“All five of us, we’re all in our 40s and 50s, have all been through some things in our lives, some things pretty tragic,” drummer Travis Heying said. “That influences our music in the sense that I think we’re pretty positive people and we want to spread positivity. I don’t think we’re the typical group of guys who get together and toast beers. We say ‘I love you.’ We’re great friends first. We’ve lifted one another up through some very tough times.”

Some of those challenges are reflected in the band’s second album in 15 months, “Stories We Tell Ourselves,” which will have its album release party Saturday night at Social Tap.

“I think we were a lot better,” guitarist Matt Creasman said of the follow-up to “Starting from the Middle,” released last July. “We played together longer, pushed each other harder.”

From the beginning the band considered itself a roots-rock band with a sound comparable to Toad the Wet Sprocket or Gin Blossoms. This one has a harder edge, Creasman said, it has moments where there’s a bit of a Foo Fighters sound.

“Dynamically there’s quite a bit of difference,” Heying said. “There’s some real bangers on the new one, more up-tempo, little harder rock than the first album, but also some flavors from the first album too.”

“We got better,” Heying added. “Nobody’s gonna hear us and say, ‘Whoa, what a bunch of virtuosos.’ It’s more about the song and I think our songs are pretty good, but it’s the enjoyment the five of us get playing together. It’s not based on five guys who are amazing talents at their instruments. We’re good enough to get the job done, we write good songs, and that’s good enough.”

While bass player Chad Cushenbery, Heying and Creasman played together for a couple of years, singer Jon Albers joined later, and Toby Tyner early in 2020.

Sometimes on Sunday — named for the reality that the second half of the weekend was about the only time they could get together to rehearse — debuted at Northeast Magnet High School, during a National Honors Society talent show, while votes were being counted for the talent show winners, in early 2020. Three of the five band members worked at the school at the time; Heying is a photojournalist for The Wichita Eagle.

“We got a good reaction from everybody,” said Creasman, principal of the school at the time and now an English teacher and resource expert at Chester Lewis Academy.

“They were screaming like we were the Beatles, even if they were only just pretending,” said Heying.

Tyner is an assistant principal at Stucky Middle School, Cushenbery is the principal at Hamilton Middle School, and Albers is a history teacher at Northeast Magnet. Albers was unavailable for a band interview at the Sometimes on Sunday rehearsal space in Creasman’s basement, as his wife had just delivered a baby two days before.

Their talent show debut gave the band incentive to continue, which was almost doused by COVID-19.

“The pandemic stopped us,” Heying said.

USD 259 gave their good graces, and three of the band members produced a video of the group’s first original song, a tribute to student’s endurance during the pandemic.

While Tyner writes most of the lyrics, each of the band members works out their own musical parts, with the promise that the rest must be brutally honest.

“It’s a good internal process,” Tyner said. “We have to be honest; we have to be vulnerable. We have to have a thick skin or get past things quickly. Something you like may not work out, or someone else may not feel the same thing about it.”

“Music has been something that’s allowed us to express that life goes on, and it can be pretty good,” Heying said. “That’s a big part of who we are.”

“That friendship helps us be vulnerable when we’re writing and it helps us be vulnerable when we’re playing,” Creasman added.

Only one song on the 11-cut album began with the lyrics, band members say. The rest start with the music first.

“Either Toby has a complete idea or Matt has a chord progression or a riff and Toby forms something from it,” Heying said.

The final result, Cushenbery said, reflects the influences of all the band members.

“We all grew up listening to different things. They’re a bunch of old guys,” he said. “We all came from different places, and this kind of combines those.”

Both of the band’s albums were recorded at Greenjeans Studio in Wellington, by engineer Carter Green (husband of Eagle visuals editor Jaime Green).

Band members, in a constant barrage of verbal teasing with each other during the interview, said their feet are grounded enough to know they won’t be selling out stadiums nor hanging gold records on their walls.

“The thing that is the coolest and the most realistic would be to sell a song or two, that someone would take a song that we wrote and record it,” said Tyner, who has been writing music for the past 20 years. “That would be pretty neat. Nobody’s trying to quit their day job — but we are accepting offers.”

Sometimes on Sunday is getting more gigs in its schedule. A week after the album release, it’s headlining the Saturday night party of the Tallgrass Film Festival.

Each member of the band is in charge of a different behind-the-scenes aspect of the group to make it all run smoothly.

“It’s turning out to be a lot of work,” Heying said. “A lot of fun work, but it’s become very demanding of our time. That’s not a complaint, it’s a good thing.”

Creasman said the novelty of a band where four of the five members work in schools wore off pretty quickly, and that they don’t look at the group as a way to blow off steam nor forget their work day.

“All four of us who are educators love being educators,” he said. “This is my 28th year and I still look forward to going to work. This is just something else we get to do that’s really cool.”

Tyner said being an educator is a performance in itself.

“You’re on all the time, whether you’re a teacher or an administrator,” he said. “You’re on, you’re responding to peoples’ needs and you’re giving. There’s a little bit of that same wheelhouse as far as what we’re doing at this.”

“We would like this to be a hobby that we spend a lot of time on and that we care about doing very well,” he added.

“And I think we’re there,” Creasman continued.

SOMETIMES ON SUNDAY ALBUM RELEASE PARTY

When: 8 p.m. Saturday, Sept. 30

Where: Social Tap, 4519 E. 19th St. North

Admission: Free