Mad at Gravity have played a surprisingly small number of shows since they formed less than a year ago, yet they already have good road stories.

"We had to actually push back our set time back because the PA would interfere with the hog caller," singer J. Lynn Johnston deadpanned about a recent county fair gig.

"Even the pizza parlor show was better than that show," added drummer Jake Fowler. "We had to wheel our cases through dirt, by all of the displays. Have you ever looked a llama in the face before?"

The Southern California rock group suffered through a few agonizing nights onstage, but the path from forming last August to releasing its debut album this week has been mostly smooth sailing.

The band came together after Fowler's last group fell apart and he teamed up with music scene friends Anthony "Bosco" Boscarini (guitar, keyboards) and bassist Ben Froehlich (bass). Fowler then placed ads in a few Los Angeles magazines and found guitarist James Lee Barlow and Johnston.

At Johnston's audition, the fivesome wrote "Walk Away," their first single, which is featured in the summer movie "Reign of Fire." "Pretty much on the spot I came up with the chorus, and then wrote the verses overnight," Johnston said. "We gelled immediately."

The group wrote "Burn," which is also in "Reign of Fire," and "Kerosene" the next day and continued writing until it had enough material to record a demo to send to promoters. As practice for a real studio session, the band logged three acoustic tracks on Johnston's own equipment. Happy with the results, they pooled their contacts and mailing lists from previous groups and wrote an e-mail asking them to check out the songs on MP3.com.

"That week, I got calls from about 10 labels," Fowler said.

The guys quickly found themselves in a major-label bidding war that ended when they signed with ArtistDirect Records, which formed last year.

Johnston and cohorts had only one major challenge in their first few months. "Naming the band is the hardest part, especially when you have such distinct personalities," he said.

The singer was combing through his notebooks for phrases when he ran across Mad at Gravity.

"It works in a lot of different ways," Johnston said. "My mother's friends liked it because they are in their 50s and gravity is setting in. On a more metaphorical level, gravity can been seen as the force that holds us down. And it's so scientific and being mad is so emotional, so it is kind of like our music, a mix of the two."

After deciding on a name, Mad at Gravity cleared their schedule and booked studio time. They recorded half of their debut, Resonance, before the end of the year, and then returned to finish it in March, when they hit their first significant roadblocks.

"I got really sick in the second part of the album," Fowler said. "I was making all of these strange growls while I was playing, so I had to tape my mouth shut with duct tape. I looked pretty sketchy. And I couldn't breathe out of my nose, so it was pretty gnarly for me."

Around the same time, Johnston lost his voice and had to take a break from recording. The band was under the gun to finish the album by summer, so they wrote, arranged and recorded five songs without hearing any of the vocals.

"Talk about going on faith," Fowler said. "Everything had gone so quickly up to that point, I like to think it was nature's way of making us pay our dues. Overall, though, it came out phenomenally."

While Mad at Gravity hail from Orange County, Resonance has more in common with the music coming from Calabassas (Incubus and Hoobastank) and Riverside (Alien Ant Farm and the Color Red) than the scene that spawned No Doubt and the Offspring. The instrumentation is striking and complex, particularly when it comes to guitar and bass change-ups (like on "Time and Time Again"), which Johnston compliments with his pipes.

The singer, who sounds (and looks) a bit like Brandon Boyd, also has a knack for writing lyrics that are both personal and universal. Take "Walk Away," for instance, with the chorus, "Wonder if I've said too much/ And we'll never speak again." The song is about a broken relationship, though even Johnston's bandmates, who had all recently left other bands, could relate.

That connection is what inspired Mad at Gravity to name their album Resonance.

"From a sound standpoint, resonance is when you play something at a certain pitch and then, say, the table in the room will vibrate at that frequency," Johnston said. "I was drawn to that because I would like to think there will be other people that really resonate with the music we're making. That's the goal, anyway."

Mad at Gravity have been resonating with fans (not llamas) this summer on the Locobazooka tour with Sevendust, Filter and others. Next month, they will open for Creed on several dates.

Mad at Gravity tour dates with Creed, according to ArtistDirect:

  • 8/7 - Scranton, PA @ Coors Light Amphitheater
  • 8/9 - Tinley Park, IL @ Tweeter Center
  • 8/10 - East Troy, WI @ Alpine Valley Music Theatre
  • 8/16 - Maryland Heights, MO @ UMB Bank Pavilion
  • 8/17 - Antioch, TN @ AmSouth Amphitheatre
  • 8/21 - Burgettstown, PA @ Post-Gazette Pavilion
  • 8/24 - Hershey, PA @ Hersheypark Stadium
  • 8/26 - Cincinnati, OH @ Riverbend Music Center
  • 8/30 - Bristow, VA @ Nissan Pavilion
  • 8/31 - Saratoga Springs, NY @ Performing Arts Center
  • 9/1 - Toronto, ON @ Molson Amphitheatre