Photograph by Shannon Gallagher

Erik Elstermann, James Coleman, Gideon Prior, Brendan Cutrer, Logan Elstermann

Gideon Prior, guitarist and singer with the progressive alt-rock band A Lens To the Sun, grew up in Los Angeles, until a quest for his Ph.D in electrical engineering took him in another direction. “I was initially going to transfer to UCLA,” he remembers, “but at the last minute, I was accepted to UC San Diego, and decided to drive south and look at the campus. I remember the credit union there, intentionally built to look like it was sinking into the ground, and the artificial talking trees distributed through the forest. I was marveling at the spectacle of it all — taking in the giant overlapping neon signs flashing the seven deadly sins against the seven cardinal virtues — when I overheard some other engineering prospects remarking how useless and wasteful the installation was. At that moment, I knew I was in the right place. I moved to San Diego a month later, and have been here ever since.”

Prior cites his parents’ music as a powerful early influence — very early. “I remember Bob Dylan’s Street Legal having a particularly profound effect on me before kindergarten. I would sit in the living room while my brother and sister were at school, and watch my mom dancing around and singing to the record. Later, my older siblings introduced me to Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd, which led to my interest in the guitar. To this day, I listen to [Pink Floyd’s] The Wall, often on repeat, several times a month.”

A Lens To the Sun started at the end of 2018 when guitarist Erik Elstermann responded to an ad on Bandmix, which Prior says is “basically a dating website for musicians. We met at a coffee shop and started writing some beautiful acoustic singer-songwriter stuff. Shortly after, his son Logan [a keyboardist] moved back to San Diego after graduating with a degree in music from the University of Miami. Logan is one of the most brilliant musicians I have ever played with, and he added so much cinematic complexity and texture to the music that we all got excited about what the project was turning into.”

As for the band name: “Out of impatience, I gave Erik and Logan a list of five names, and they had to pick one. I only had four I liked though, so at the last minute, the idea of a lens being placed towards the sun popped into my head. I liked the imagery. The sun is made of white light containing all colors, representing stylistically how eclectic we had become. I also liked the idea of a lens concentrating something that was already almost infinitely potent.” Bassist Brendan Cutrer and drummer James Coleman completed the quintet, which has released seven songs as of this writing, including fan favorite “Dive Deeper.” Prior says they’re sitting on roughly one hundred additional tunes, as they discuss how to release them.

Genre-wise, he says he’s happy to be a proghead, but not exclusively. “The Cure, Radiohead, Ours, Muse, Porcupine Tree, Pink Floyd, Roxy Music, and Smashing Pumpkins are my main influences. They have all shaped the mood and overall soundscape I’m trying to create, which, when achieved, makes the hair stand up on the back of my neck. Delicate and languid spaces of beauty punctuated by ferocious guitar monsters have always done it for me.”

The band’s singular vision also applies to playing live. “Starting out, most venues were looking for cover bands capable of playing long sets. I decided that, given the ample supply of cover bands in San Diego, we would not be one of them. So to book these gigs, we just wrote a lot. Even early on, we would play over three hours of original music.”

The approach could sometimes prove humbling. “We played at the Roxy once in Encinitas, which has a stage almost big enough for a small drum kit. I remember getting hit in the back by the cymbals and my guitar bumping into Erik’s as we tried not to fall off the stage. We also played at the Temecula Balloon and Wine Festival, and were an opening act for Bret Michaels, which was a bit strange. The country rock scene that was present didn’t quite know what to make of us. We had a lot of people standing still and just staring, but we got a few new fans out of it, which was great. And a few people that had never seen us before were singing along to the second chorus, which is something I will always remember.”