Today we’d like to introduce you to Crainiac (Band).
Hi Crainiac, can you start by introducing yourself? We’d love to learn more about how you got to where you are today?
Since I’m the one filling this out, I can only really tell it from my perspective—but Crainiac has always been a collaborative project.
Crainiac started with a simple dream: to be in a real rock band. Before Crainiac, I’d spent years as a vocalist, including twice being selected nationally for the Great American Songbook Foundation’s Songbook Academy and eventually performing solo around Miami. But I wanted something heavier, more collaborative, and unpredictable. After moving to Central Florida, I started scouring open mics and eventually met our bassist, Jason, at The Alley in Sanford, a local live music hotspot. From there, the band came together through connections in the Orlando music scene.
For the next six to eight months, we experimented with different musicians, influences, and genres until it became the same four guys meeting every week in a hot suburban garage—like we were living out Zappa’s “Joe’s Garage.”
The guys introduced me to heavier music I’d never really explored—Misfits, Type O Negative, Ozzy—and that started changing my songwriting. I write all the lyrics for Crainiac, getting inspiration from The Twilight Zone/The Outer Limits, cheesy sci-fi B-movies, comic books, and philosophy. I’ve always loved stories that tackle some huge existential question only to undercut the seriousness with a guy in a silly rubber mask. Musically, though, Crainiac grew from four very different people bringing their own influences into the room. Thanks to everyone’s really different backgrounds, we’ve got influences in jazz, classic rock, hard rock, grunge, punk and metal.
Even the name was somewhat accidental. After booking our first gig and realizing we actually needed one, somebody threw out “Crainiac.” It sounded right, so we ran with it.
Since then, we’ve moved out of the garage and onto stages around Orlando and Daytona, including Will’s Pub, Punk Rock Pizza, Dino’s Bar & Grill, and Uncle Lou’s. On August 7, we released our debut single, “Lighthouse,” which received airplay on WZIG 104.1 and Surf 97.3 FM. We’re hoping to get the song on even more radio stations and added to playlists across streaming platforms. Now we’re recording our other originals in a more professional setting and expanding into new Florida cities with a goal of playing across the state.
Today, Crainiac is Jonathan Mitzenmacher on vocals, Jason Jump on bass, Jake Himmel on guitar, and Andres Alamos on drums.
I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
I wouldn’t say it’s been a rough road, but it certainly hasn’t always been easy. We’re four adults with jobs, families, and responsibilities outside the band, so making Crainiac a priority takes real commitment from everyone. But we love what we do, so we make it work.
If we could offer any advice, it might be learning to keep going when there’s a lot of time between successes. Breaking into a music scene means constantly putting yourself out there—sending emails, making connections, promoting yourself, and hearing plenty of “no,” or sometimes nothing at all, and after all that still possibly playing to an empty room. It can be difficult to know whether all that work is actually leading somewhere. But we figure if you can still just get up there and let everything fade away and just feel the music, you’ve got to be doing something right.
Every time we’ve had a real win, it’s truly felt like a win. Someone gives us a shot, we make the most of it, and suddenly that opportunity creates another one. Looking back, those moments weren’t random. They came because we did the legwork when there was no guarantee anything would come from it.
I think we’ve learned that progress doesn’t always arrive when or how you expect it to. Sometimes the opportunity you wanted doesn’t happen, but something else comes along that turns out to be exactly what the band needed at that moment.
As you know, we’re big fans of you and your work. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about what you do?
Lyrically, there’s often a double meaning to what we do. We like using the lens of something fantastical or absurd to talk about something completely relatable. I grew up on science fiction like Star Trek and Star Wars, and later became fascinated with philosophy, metaphysics, and absurdism. I love the way science fiction can take a very human problem, blow it up to some ridiculous scale, and somehow make the human part even easier to see.
Our debut single, “Lighthouse,” is a good example. It was inspired by the 2019 film *The Lighthouse* and the real Smalls Lighthouse tragedy that partly inspired it. On the surface, it’s a dark, heavy power ballad about isolation, survival, and being trapped in an almost nightmarish situation, plus a nice homage to its source material (both fictional and not). Underneath all of that, though, it’s really about loneliness and refusing to give up when it feels like the whole room is burning down around you. You don’t need to know anything about an old lighthouse tragedy or some scary movie to understand that feeling.
That’s something we love about science fiction and fantastical storytelling: the circumstances can be completely removed from ordinary life while the emotion underneath is universal. There’s definitely some Misfits DNA in that approach, but where they drew heavily from horror, we naturally gravitate more toward science fiction.
Musically, Crainiac is built around four people with very different backgrounds and influences, and we’ve learned to make those differences work together rather than smooth them out. The result is heavy, melodic, energetic, and electric, and everybody brings something unique to the songs.
How can people work with you, collaborate with you or support you?
The easiest way to support Crainiac is to find us online and follow along:
Everything Crainiac — music, social media, videos & more:
https://linktr.ee/crainiac.band
Listen to our debut single, “Lighthouse”:
https://distrokid.com/hyperfollow/crainiac/lighthouse
You can find us on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and all major streaming platforms. Beyond that, come see us live! Bring a friend, share a song, or tell somebody about the band. For an independent band, that kind of word of mouth genuinely matters. We love to talk to our fans and we even do free raffles at every performance to show how much we really appreciate our fans.
We’re also always looking to connect with other bands, venues, promoters, photographers, videographers, artists, and people especially throughout the Florida music scene. We want to play new places, meet new people, and keep building within the community. Plus we’re looking to get our debut single “Lighthouse” heard by as many people as we can, whether its radio play, playlist placement on music streaming platforms, or just good old jamming out in the car.
For booking, collaborations, or other opportunities, reach out through social media or at crainiac.band@gmail.com.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://linktr.ee/crainiac.band
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/crainiac_band
- Other: https://distrokid.com/hyperfollow/crainiac/lighthouse
