If you’ve been to a show at The Independent recently, you’ve likely seen owner Heath Truitt beaming the video for How I Became The Bomb’s synth-driven pop masterpiece “Mothership” onto the bar’s projector screen in between sets to entice people to see the Nashville-based perpetual buzz-band play Friday night.

If an Internet-era video has better captured the groping, kid-in-a-candy-shop wonder of early ‘80s multimedia – of a time when synthesizers weren’t instruments of irony, but tools of the future – I haven’t seen it.

Imagine the aesthetic randomness of the video for Thomas Dolby’s “She Blinded Me With Science” combined with the uniform dystopia on the set of Styx’s “Domo Arigato, Mr. Roboto” and the special effects of Tron and you’ll have an idea of it’s power (or just Google them and watch it yourself).

“We were just trying to make a cheap sci-fi video,” says 1982-born frontman Jon Burr, which is exactly why it works; the entire decade was a cheap sci-fi video, and after experiencing a video – and it’s catchy soundtrack – made by guys who tracked down an actual cosmonaut helmet worn in vintage Cold War space, it works.


“The ‘80s were a bizarre pastiche of bygone eras,” Burr says. “You had the cocaine-fueled recklessness of the ‘20s, the Reagan/Thatcher-era paranoia of WWII, and some really strange notions regarding fashion. Television was growing as a medium, and some of the best and worst comics and films were coming out, resulting in a sort of pop-culture explosion, whether you look at it ironically or not.”

How I Became The Bomb doesn’t look it ironically, but with an unrepentant nostalgia (“We all got together in our attic and started making the music we wanted to hear”) and modern sensibility that has earned them press in Rolling Stone, Billboard, The Guardian, and even an invite to record at Maida Vale Studios at the BBC.

Burr is an incurable Tennessee fan and his great-grandfather was a quarterback for the Tide. He’s never been to Auburn.

“I’m actually somewhat terrified that I’ll burst into flames upon entering the city limits,” he says.

Have a Flip Vid handy, and that’d actually make a pretty killer video, too, but here’s hoping he doesn’t. At least until they finish playing.

For more on the band, visit howibecamethebomb.com.