The Pep Rally Performance
Weston Wold performs for the first time live with his band.
By Corbin Casassa | Reporter
Weston Wold hits the high note of the chorus and the crowd goes ecstatic. He stood motionless on the waxy basketball court in his debut live performance.
He didn’t even take the microphone off the stand during the performance.
“I didn’t know anything about performing,” Wold explains.
Justin Dokken, Tomas O’Keefe and Wold made up the band 45 Degrees North. They performed Pompeii by Bastille for the pep rally in 2014. They were in 9th grade.
“I was so proud that we pulled something out of nothing,” Dokken said, considering they were only playing Coldplay covers in their basements at the time.
Upperclassmen who were involved with music told them they needed to keep going with their music because they saw a future in them.
“I really took that to heart,” Wold said. He considers the start of his music career to be inside that gym at Andover High School. The band started to get asked when the next show was. They kept doing shows at the school and later landed local gigs.
The three of them had different paths they wanted to take their musical talent. O’Keefe went to Concordia in Moorhead to be an orchestra conductor and Dokken studies International Law at West Point.
Wold is now a senior at Bethel University. He is studying to be a communications major, but he is still pursuing his dream of making music full-time.
“That one event is really what I think has shaped my life the most musically.” — Weston Wold, musician.
Wold has put out an EP and multiple singles so far. His biggest song to this day has been Barely Breathin’ which has about 2,700 views on YouTube. On Oct. 30 an acoustic version of his single Shimmer dropped on all streaming platforms, following the original song and music video.
Wold considers that performance his favorite childhood memory, “that one event is really what I think has shaped my life the most musically.”
