Erica Banas: Writing Samples

My name is Erica, and if you’re reading this right now, there’s a good chance you’ve read other articles I’ve written for this website. Perhaps you’ve enjoyed a news story or listicle I’ve written. Perhaps you’ve taken issue with a news story or listicle I’ve written. Wherever you may stand in this situation, you can thank/blame Cameron Crowe for me being here.

From May 2011 to February 2012, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame featured an exhibit called “Women Who Rock: Vision, Passion, Power.” From September 2012 to August 2014, the exhibit traveled around to various museums in the United States. It made its final stop at The Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Mich. where I was given a private tour of the collection from over 70 different performers, from Janis Joplin and Tina Turner to Chrissie Hynde and Stevie Nicks. While the exhibit’s artifacts dated bac

Sarfraz Manzoor delved deep into his Bruce Springsteen fandom in his memoir Greetings from Bury Park, which has been adapted into the film Blinded By The Light that opens tomorrow (August 16.) One of the most interesting facts about his fandom is the fact he’s seen The Boss in concert over 150 times. With that many shows, there’s plenty of different venues where he’s seen Springsteen live, but one of his most memorable experiences took place in a very intimate setting: “This isn’t a venue at a

Growing up, most people have that band or singer that forever changes you, and it’s that moment and mountain-moving feeling that’s at the core of Blinded By The Light. The film is based on Greetings from Bury Park, a memoir by Sarfraz Manzoor that chronicles how the music of Bruce Springsteen impacted his life growing up as a Pakistani teenager in a small English town during the 1980s. Manzoor co-wrote the screenplay with director Gurinder Chadha, best known for 2002’s Bend It Like Beckham, and

Let’s cut to the chase: With the release of the Elton John film Rocketman, there are undoubtedly going to be a lot of comparisons between this film and the uber-successful Freddie Mercury/Queen biopic Bohemian Rhapsody. That’s unavoidable since two films about two British music icons are being released less than a year apart. What’s also unavoidable is this truth: Rocketman is the far superior film, for many reasons. For starters, Rocketman certainly isn’t your average biopic. For most of the p

There are many musical moments that are celebrating their 50th anniversary this year, and among those are the 50th anniversaries of Led Zeppelin I and Led Zeppelin II. In recent years, the Zeppelin catalog has received a massive reissue campaign, and in honor of their big 5-0, the band, as a brand, has expanded to include various partnerships from Vans to Burton Snowboards. But if there’s one thing that shouldn’t happen along with Zeppelin’s golden anniversary, it’s a reunion. Robert Plant has

I’m not one for early mornings, but I was finally able to get out of bed around 5:30 AM to watch the highly-anticipated film adaptation of the Motley Crue memoir The Dirt. In hindsight, I should have requested a press screener from Netflix, but sometimes life and never-ending to-do lists distract you from thinking logically. Twenty minutes after finishing the movie, my groggy mind was struggling to figure out what exactly was wrong with The Dirt. Something just didn’t feel right once the 10

The 61st GRAMMY Awards telecast was a massive celebration of women in music. It’s too bad the rock genre wasn’t invited to the party, because they had a hell of a representative.

Much like the making of this film and Freddie Mercury himself, the reactions and impressions of Bohemian Rhapsody are complicated. The highly anticipated biopic has been years in the making and went through some major ups-and-downs in order to become a reality. (The Wrap summarizes all of the drama rather succinctly, from multiple director changes, to Sacha Baron Cohen originally being tapped to portray Mercury, to credited director Bryan Singer’s firing weeks before the end of production.)

INDEPENDENCE TOWNSHIP -- Hours before Slipknot took the stage Friday night, July 29, at DTE Energy Music Theatre, frontman Corey Taylor tweeted out that he was “in a particularly ornery mood.” Taylor is still recovering from an unexpected spinal surgery that delayed the original tour start date, so while that could have contributed to his less-than-stellar pre-show state, that mood clearly subsided during the interim, because Taylor’s rapport with the crowd and the sensory-overload show his fellow masked bandmates delivered proved otherwise.

INDEPENDENCE TOWNSHIP -- It was two shows in one from Peter Frampton on Thursday night, July 28, at DTE Energy Music Theater. And it wasn’t just because he was pulling double-duty due to Lynyrd Skynyrd’s absence. The guitar legend’s two-and-a-half hour show shoehorned a four-song mini-acoustic set in between eclectic, electric bookends with plenty of anecdotes sprinkled in for good measure. Frampton, of course, addressed Skynyrd’s absence due to founding member/guitarist Gary Rossington’s rece

Popular lore dictates that vampires burst into flames when exposed to sunlight, but as the Hollywood Vampires took the stage Saturday night (July 16th) while the sun was still setting past the DTE Energy Music Theater in Clarkston, Mich., the only thing on fire was the energy between the band and the vocal crowd. Part tribute band and part belated wake, the Hollywood Vampires covered the likes of John Lennon, Jimi Hendrix, The Doors and The Who, a nod to the members of Alice Cooper's former dri

Andy Samberg, Akiva Schaffer and Jorma Taccone (collectively known as The Lonely Island) have created some of the best viral video clips of the past decade, but can they hold an audience for more than five minutes?  In their first feature film, Popstar:  Never Stop Never Stopping, they more than prove they can. Popstar stars Samberg as Conner4Real, a pop/rapper who originally rose to fame as a member of a rap group called The Style Boyz but has since gone solo to achieve bigger fame.  However,

Whether it’s a car or a love, they say you never forget your first, and that’s certainly the case for Don Felder and his first guitar. In a recent chat with the former Eagles guitarist, Felder reflects on that guitar and the role fireworks played in getting it: “I remember seeing ‘The Ed Sullivan Show,’ and Elvis Presley was on, and it was like his first/debut [performance], and they only showed him from the waist up.  But I saw all of these women screaming at him and girls crying, and I went,

INDEPENDENCE TWP. — Opening night for any concert tour can be stressful for obvious reasons. But you’d never know there was any sort of concern going on behind-the-scenes with Incubus and deftones, which kicked off their co-headlining trek Wednesday night, July 22, at the DTE Energy Music Theatre. Both alternative rock-leaning bands delivered all killer, no filler sets that spanned each band’s catalog, with Incubus playing three tracks from its recent “Trust Fall (Side A)” EP. And while new mat

In my 15 years as a licensed driver, I’ve cranked enough music on the road to discover these two truths: 1. Blaring any death metal while driving through a rich neighborhood produces some of the best snooty glares ever. And 2. No other drummer can rattle a rear view mirror quite like Meg White. Over the course of their eight-year career (1999-2007, although they didn’t announce their breakup until 2011), The White Stripes released six albums, and in the process turned the roc

Velvet Revolver’s debut album Contraband will celebrate its 15th anniversary on June 8, and it was an album that came at the perfect time for me: the summer heading into my senior year of high school. Attending high school in the early 2000s and discovering my identity through music was a weird experience. I can’t speak to anyone else’s high school experience at that time, but similar to how the rock genre had splintered into unique sub-genres, so did the groups at my very suburban high sc