EHS student takes love of music to the stage with rock band

Think of what your most likely reaction would be to your teen coming up to you and telling you they were forming a rock band.

If you’re anything like what the media portrays as the parents of teenaged rock-and-rollers, you’d probably be a bit apprehensive, envisioning loud practices in the garage or basement and an uptick in the typical teenaged rebellion.

Not so for the parents of the members of Unfinished Sentence, a band made up of area 14- and 15-year-olds, including Washington County resident Noah McGinnis. They’re encouraging it.

When asked, McGinnis, 14, a freshman at Eastern High School, said he likes to clean cars and play bass, but his bent toward performing is relatively new.

“I walked into my seventh grade teacher’s homeroom and he’s a guitar player and I saw the stage and a bunch of guitars and I thought it would be pretty cool to do,” said McGinnis.

That teacher is Troy Smith, who was instrumental (no pun intended) in starting the East Washington Middle School rock band, 2 Infinity, of which McGinnis ended up becoming a charter member after being a part of the school’s guitar club.

“I heard about Guitar Club and wanted to try that out,” said McGinnis. “I went there and tried out. I tried guitar first and that didn’t really stick out to me. Then I saw the bass and started playing it.”

He loved it. He began saving up the money he made detailing cars and helping out on an aunt’s farm and bought his first bass. He bought a second guitar in 2018 and then another this past summer.

“In the mornings, we’d play in the morning jams at school and as I got better and better, Mr. Smith let me be on the stage a couple times to play,” he said. “After a while I was up there a lot.”

He took private lessons at Maxwell’s House of Music in Jeffersonville. From there, he enrolled in the Rock School program at Maxwells and was introduced to other students interested in forming a band.

McGinnis’s mother, Christina McGinnis, a board member at East Washington School Corporation, said it took some arranging to get a band that would work together.

“We met a couple other people and tried to form a band, but it never really worked out there,” she said. “Some of the parents worked it on our own and located all of these students … The parents have scheduled a debut show for them.”

Thus, with the additions of Melea Mason, 14, Reese Osborne, 15, Owen Ferguson, 15, Cash Crump, 14, and Lilly Gilland, 14, Unfinished Sentence was born. Their first concert is coming up this weekend.

On Saturday, Oct. 19, they will perform at the Moose Lodge shelter house in Sellersburg, from 5 to 10 p.m. A flyer promises free food (not concessions — homemade chili, hot dogs, chips, taco soup, a mashed potato bar, desserts and drinks), magic and karaoke along with the free concert. Their set will last about an hour.

The band members are all freshman at area high schools — two attend Charlestown, two more, Floyd Central, another goes to Silver Creek and, of course, Noah goes to Eastern.

Noah said the band gets together at the drummer’s house in Borden to practice, mostly covers from bands like The White Stripes, the Beatles, the Eagles, Radio Head, 3 Doors Down, Stevie Wonder and more.

“We mostly do covers, but I like to play a lot of other stuff at home,” said Noah.

You can follow the band on Facebook at “Unfinished Sentence.” The page has more than 500 followers, even before their first concert.

“The parents have all been out there sharing it,” said Christina. “We’ve supported them. We’re doing the leg work!”

Christina said the group started out with three members — bassist Noah, drummer Crump and guitarist Ferguson. Then Crump’s parents attended a karaoke night where they heard Mason sing.

“This girl’s a powerhouse,” said Christina. “She’s like a sultry Janis Joplin. When she starts to sing, you won’t believe how she sounds.”

Then Osborne, another guitarist and singer, joined, followed by Gilland, who also plays guitar.

Noah said his favorite part is being able to be a part of the band itself.

“Just being in the band and playing and being in front of people you don’t know,” said Noah. “I used to be pretty shy.”

“He’s still shy, but when he gets on that stage, he’s a different person,” said Christina.

“I still get nervous, but I just keep telling myself, ‘You can do this, you can do this!’” said Noah.

“When he started out, he’d just stand there and play,” said Christina. “He wouldn’t look out, but then he started looking out and then he started moving and now he even back-up sings. I have a picture from Maxwell’s where he jumped about four feet off the stage in the air. I took it and blew it up as a poster. We have a stage in our basement and we put the poster up down there.”

More than giving Noah something to do, Christina said the gift of music, sparked by a social studies teacher, has changed her son’s life.

“The great thing about this is Noah was never into sports and through Mr. Smith, this really changed Noah,” said Christina. “Noah didn’t really like school because he struggles, but when he found Mr. Smith and Guitar Club, it was all, ‘Mom, we’ve got to get to school so I can play!’ It really impacted him from that aspect as well and gave him the motivation to do better at school. It’s just made a huge change and helped mature him. Mr. Smith does not know how he’s impacted Noah. This has been truly a blessing for Noah. He sets a goal in the summer and the one he wanted was almost a $1,000 guitar.”

Noah’s parents said if he raised the money, they would take him all the way up to Fort Wayne to buy it. He paid for the bass in cash.

“The lady’s eyes got about this big,” said Christina, using her hands to show the wide-eyed shock on the clerk’s face. “We wanted him to pay for it because we wanted him to get that experience of, ‘I worked for this; here it is.’”

She said she put a post on Facebook about Noah wanting to clean cars and do things to earn money and a woman insisted on giving Noah more than $100 because she was impressed he was working toward his goal.

“She reached out to me and said, ‘I don’t want him to clean my car; I just want to donate to his cause,’” said Christina. “I replied he wasn’t looking for a hand-out; he’s willing to work for it, but she said, ‘I know, but his story really touched me because you don’t see kids out there doing this.’ … She told him to pay it forward when he can.”