In the complex taxonomy that is the music industry, Bombadil is one of those bands to which it is hard to assign a genus.
"Songwriting, I think, is really the No. 1 goal of the band, more than a sound," bassist Daniel Michalak said in an interview with The Eagle. "I think any genre of music can have a great song. ... It's the song that comes first, then depending on ... what the lyrics are about or what we're trying to say, it kind of [influences] what instruments or sounds we'll try to create."
Michalak said the stories in the band's songs are ones that are important to its members or people they know, and they try to be true to those stories as much as they can. The stories can come from anywhere; the band doesn't cite one specific genre, or even one experience, as inspiration.
"I think influences are just the things that happened to me, I guess - people I run into, trips that I take, or foods that I like to eat, or good conversations I had or books that I read," he said. "I don't know how much I'm inspired by a specific musician or genre of music. People always want to know, well, what kind of music you listen to? I don't know. I listen to everything that you listen to. I listened to Third Eye Blind in middle school, and my parents maybe listened to Motown and Jimmy Buffet ... I like everything."
Music is not Michalak's biggest influence, and that's evident in his view of the band.
"I'm not sure what the big picture is," Michalak said. "But I know it's not really the style that we play; it's more like the way we play."
The way Bombadil plays, like the members themselves, is unique. Michalak said he met his brother, original drummer John Michalak, first of the members of the band. In addition to being family, the two played together in high school.
Michalak said he met keyboardist Stuart Robinson on the first day of college.
"He had on this really cool shirt with animals playing jazz," he said. "We started playing music together, just the two of us ... Somehow we got on this Eastern European jazz-like folk thing. We would jam together on the piano."
Michalak then met guitarist Bryan Rahija while studying abroad in Bolivia. The two began writing songs together while they were there that emulated folk music.
Upon returning, Michalak decided he'd like to make music with the three of them together, and the band was formed over Chinese food.
Michalak left the band to attend medical school, and the remaining members needed to replace him.
"We put an ad on Craigslist looking for someone who likes burritos," Michalak said. "This guy named James [Phillips] responded, and he has a big, red beard, and he's been playing with us since then, and it's worked out really well."
Replacing a member of a band where the character of the individuals is so important could prove difficult, but the band seemed to have taken it in stride. The band seems to possess the "joie de vivre" of its namesake, "Lord of the Rings" character Tom Bombadil. Michalak cited the trait as a point of commonality between the character and the band. Though things may not always be going right, the character and the members of Bombadil are happy to be alive and doing what they're doing.
Tom Bombadil appears only once in the books and was completely omitted from the movies. He lives in the woods with his wife and is seemingly unaffected by the forces of the ring.
"We're sort of this unknown entity," he said. "I think in one sense, that's kind of like Tom Bombadil,. You don't really know how to describe the guy. What's he doing in this book with hobbits and dark lords? He's kind of just playing with squirrels"
