Uncommon Ground ^ your little ponies

your little ponies
YOUR LITTLE PONIES is the hardest working comedy rock band in Chicago. Since their conception in 2002, the band members have been greedily playing bars, clubs, variety shows, and theaters at every and any opportunity, selling nearly 1000 units of their two self-produced CD’s of original comedy rock, Saddle Up! (2003) and Get On and Get Off (2004), and reaching nearly 13,000 web downloads from people across the nation and beyond the sea, Your Little Ponies has a white hot cult following that stretches far beyond their humble Midwest headquarters in Bucktown.

Brad Norman and Joey Tilton founded Your Little Ponies with a simple mission: Create some funny rock that’s worth a damn. Many artists keep their more irreverent numbers hidden deep in their repertoire to make more room for heartfelt sentiment and deeply personal narratives that have both confounded and outright bored many audiences to the point where a night of acoustic music bears the stigma of mediocre to just plain embarrassing entertainment. Your Little Ponies has chosen to battle the groans of anticipated acoustic boredom with a large and growing songbook filled with addictive hooks, driving rhythms, clever lyricism, and rich musicality.
All the while staying true to their belief that funny music doesn’t have to suck.

While writing and performing the music they love, bandwagonism became rampant. In 2003, Matthew Van Etten joined the band, bringing his wunderkind talent on the bass guitar to the sound of Your Little Ponies. More good people followed, and soon the founding members of Your Little Ponies were spearheading a collective of musicians, singers, and rappers getting in on the fun of their original comedy rock music.

A Your Little Ponies live show is a spectacle of simplicity. There are no towers of speakers or rows of effects-inducing stomp boxes, just three men, with guests, possessed by their own fervor for live performance. Their stage energy is nuclear. Norman’s pitch-perfect wail compliments Tilton’s gritty, bravado-charged tones. The boys strum in tight rhythmic progressions that inspire infectious head-nodding, while their lyrical trickery and unrepentant commitment to their material will leave you breathless from laughter. All of this is backed by the bass playing of Matthew Van Etten, who manages to simultaneously anchor the tunes, and complete acrobatic feats of musical precision on an instrument he has truly mastered. Add in special guests like Mr. Pippen, local rap and freestyle artist, with his hyper-savant rhyme skills, and you’ve got an act
that boils over with talent, energy, audience participation, and most of all, fun.

Your Little Ponies songs contain adult language and situations for comedic effect, but they’ve walked the line without falling into a pit of sexism and hatefulness. There’s nary a negative note in the canon of Your Little Ponies material, in fact, quite the opposite. Each song is a celebration of self-discovery whether it’s about fried chicken, a theoretical super-continent, or the potential ravages of casual sex. Some have called Your Little Ponies “Sleazy Listening”, others “Deranged Genius”, but all agree that you’re in for a good laugh when experiencing Your Little Ponies.

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