Claire Bauer
Drona members Pasha Raghu, Arjuna Raghu and Surya Raghu perform together at the Eastside Kickoff Concert on Wednesday, Feb. 26, 2025, at Eastside Tavern in Columbia, Mo. All three siblings took turns singing and playing guitar, and Arjuna Raghu and Surya Raghu alternated on the drums.
Pink Houses
Featuring a variety of covers and original music, Pink Houses is a University of Missouri-made rock band made up of drummer Max Healy, singer Charlie Bickel, rhythm guitarist Josh Stotler, guitarist Charlie Warner and bassist Raph Sternadori.
The band formed when Stotler and Warner had a music class together during the spring semester of 2023 and realized they both played guitar and wanted to be in a band. Over the following year, they met the other three members of the group.
For many of its members, Pink Houses started early on in their college experiences. Bickel joined the group as a first-year when he met Warner through MU’s student-run radio station, KCOU, and he and Healy lived on the same floor of their dorm.
While practicing in Stotler’s house, the group spends time isolating each of their parts and then putting it all together, taking it song by song.
“We spend almost as much time talking about music and the music we want to play as we do actually playing,” Stotler said. “So when we go down there to play, I think we’ve got everything kind of worked out.”
Members of the group come from different levels of musical backgrounds, ranging from having little musical experience to having comprehensive knowledge of music theory. However, all members have a say in the process of creating the band’s music.
“Our songwriting process and our whole band dynamic is pretty democratic,” Warner said. “I think we all have ideas that we infuse into songs … We mostly write our own parts, especially more so now, and like the covers we do, we’ll vote on and try to give everybody a voice.”
Both MU and Columbia are conducive to bands and live music, as the barriers to entry are not as heavy as in other places. For Pink Houses, it wasn’t a big jump from practicing in Stotler’s living room to playing their first show. When they played their first show, they had a much larger turnout than they expected.
“I think it was a show of how much people still really, really like live music, and that if people are looking to start bands, you definitely should,” Stotler said.
Pink Houses plays shows in a variety of locations across Columbia, including paid venues, and has also enjoyed performing in homes and backyards on East Campus. During the fall semester, the band had shows about every other week but took a short break with less frequent shows before their new EP, “Roadrunner,” was released on March 7.
The band agreed that there is great variety across bands in Columbia and no particular “Columbia sound.”
“The best thing that you can have in a town or a scene or whatever for music is diversity of sound,” Stotler said. “A lot of the bands in Columbia are pretty different from each other, and they all kind of do different things stylistically, which makes shows way more fun if you show up and you hear a little bit of something different, which is really nice.”
Wilson Park Rangers
From Cafe Berlin to Rose Music Hall, psychedelic surf rock band Wilson Park Rangers has played at venues all across Columbia. The band is composed of singer and bassist Hunter Bailey, drummer Jalen Julian and guitarist Eric Kvam.
The band’s discography is a mix of genres, defined primarily as surf rock, but they have branched out into psychedelic rock, punk rock and even country.
“All of our songs have different styles,” Kvam said. “Whenever it comes to the production side, I always try to add a surf rock element to it. I always try to add a sort of vintage guitar tone to make it sound like our style a little bit.”
Together, the group has the most fun playing instrumentals that highlight their individual skills.
“I feel like that’s where we shine,” Julian said. “I feel like all three of our instrumentals are very solid. Everyone can just kind of chill. There’s no singing. It’s just like you kind of melt into the music.”
Producing a song is a multi-step process for the band that starts with Bailey writing the lyrics. Then, it’s brought to the rest of the band to put together into a coherent song.
“Usually what I’ll do is start with a melody, it’s like a chorus, like a short vocal melody,” Bailey said. “But then I’ll bring it to Eric, and then Eric is great at figuring out what chords go with the melody.”
When it comes to the technology behind the songs, the group does it entirely themselves, an opportunity they appreciate.
“It’s insane how easy music is nowadays,” Julian said. “I mean the setup that I have now, if you were to want to use all of that here 20 years ago, it would be easily, like, $50,000.”
Each member takes their inspiration from different music artists. With the drums, Julian admires the drum in songs by Kings of Leon. Kvam takes inspiration from the guitars of Red Hot Chili Peppers while Bailey looks at their songwriting. Some of these influential artists even make their way into the band’s setlist. Some consistent songs they cover include “(I Don’t Want to Go to) Chelsea” by Elvis Costello, “Sleep Walk” by Santo and Johnny and “I Could Have Lied” by the Red Hot Chili Peppers.
The band also has several singles and an EP released on Spotify. The first single they released was “White Explorer” in 2023.
“I’ve showed a lot of people that, and they’re like, ‘Wow, that’s a really good front-to-back song.’ It’s just like there’s a story to make sense, you know?” Julian said. “It was a good debut single, for sure.”
In 2024, the band released their EP, “Alternate Thelmas.” It includes six humorous remixes of their third single “Thelma,” ranging from a remix that sounds like an ‘80s video game to a metal version of the song.
As two of the members approach graduation and the future of the band is somewhat uncertain, the band is still enthusiastic to produce music that is not only meaningful for their audience but also for themselves.
“It is so fun to get a final product,” Kvam said. “Seeing it on Spotify, getting to listen to it all the way through, it’s so rewarding.”
drona
For local band drona, songwriting is almost telepathic.
Siblings Arjuna Raghu, a sophomore at the University of Missouri; Surya Raghu, a senior at Hickman High School; and Pasha Raghu, a first-year at Hickman High School debuted as drona in 2021, but they have been creating music together ever since they were little.
“That’s the little secret thing that I think people don’t realize,” Arjuna said. “Growing up with the same background and the same music tastes and sensibilities, we can work … in a really fast and cohesive way. And if one of us has an idea, we can all make it happen immediately without too much thought put into it.”
The siblings have always been surrounded by art and instruments such as the guitar and drums in their Columbia home. Their parents both played in bands in college, and the three naturally picked up a knack for creation at a young age.
“We did have a TV and we liked our cartoons, but it wasn’t like we would sit around playing games and surfing the internet and stuff like that,” Arjuna said. “The thing that was more familiar to us, and just readily available, was there was always a guitar sitting around.”
All three siblings are self-taught multi-instrumentalists, and they honed their skills through watching YouTube videos. As they got older, they began to expand on songwriting, playing and music production, creating songs on GarageBand before deciding to take their performances public.
“When we first started our band, I was like, ‘Why aren’t people taking us that seriously?’ And then I would look at … a video of us playing,” Pasha said. “And Arjuna is like, “This is my sister, and she’s in 4th grade!’ And I have this tiny baby face and giant pigtails. It’s funny to look back on how much we’ve grown in the past four years.”
Drona really has grown. They’ve booked shows around town at venues like Rose Music Hall and Cafe Berlin. This year, they also released a new EP titled “blisterpack” and returned to True/False Film Fest to perform for the third time.
“We always finish a show, and it’s extremely rewarding and extremely fun,” Arjuna said. “It’s one thing to just play the music and listen to it in your room and chill … but it’s another thing to [see] somebody watching you who’s a stranger, and bobbing their head, or one of your friends singing the words.”
Throughout drona’s evolution, their principles on songwriting and creation have remained the same. Their core motivation has always been their love for music and the people they share it with.
“What inspires us mostly, the three of us, is the desire to keep creating music and art and also seeing people’s positive reactions,” Surya said. “We have [those people] in mind when we’re making [a] song.”
Edited by Molly Levine | mlevine@themaneater.com
Copy edited by Chase Pray | cpray@themaneater.com
Copy edited by Ella McGuire and Natalie Kientzy | nkientzy@themaneater.com
Edited by Emily Skidmore | eskidmore@themaneater.com