BloodThirsty Vegans Story

By Nick St. Denis

Alex really never intended to get into music.

This, Alex is quite sure of. You can ask him, if you want.

“I really, really, really never intended to get into music,” says Alex, the frontman of a Buffalo-based band called BloodThirsty Vegans.

That’s because Alex was always shy as a kid. He felt very strongly about a lot of things, and had the dream of telling stories that inspired people to make the world a better place -- but he wanted to do it behind the scenes.

So it’s kind of funny how he’s performed close to 100 spoken-word and music shows over the last three years about how “humanity is not living up to it's potential.”

Because “humans,” Alex says, “do not treat one another or other living things with the care that I feel they should.”

Therefore it’s not really that funny. In fact, it’s quite serious.

It started when he decided to go into computer work as a major in college. “I decided that creating video games and computer comics would work as a nice non-public medium for storytelling,” he said.

Alex didn’t have the money to pay for people to compose the music for his programs, so he had to broaden his skill-set some more. Through self-learning and a music composition course he decided to take in college, he learned how to compose digital music.

Over the next several years, he made about 300 digital music compositions. “Some for video games, but more and more just for the fun of it,” he said. “Still, I never intended to perform in front of an audience. I just wanted to put my music out there and have that be the end of it.”

But something life-changing was about to happen.

“Then, one day,” Alex said, “George W. Bush got elected president… I was so outraged by his actions that I somehow managed to overcome my unbelievably intense stage fright and read and rapped poems in front of a live audience at open mic nights and such.”

Those performances shortly landed him a spot with his current band, BloodThirsy Vegans – a group of musicians who were members of Alex’s church. Paul Zanolli, a former band member, was the one who approached Alex to be part of the group.