10-year-old channels rock gods
Family band is playing to support Epilepsy Toronto at Scotiabank Buskerfest
Forget Taylor Swift and One Direction; 10-year-old Sara Menoudakis spends hours rehearsing Led Zeppelin songs and dreams of meeting Ozzy Osbourne.
Her goal: to be the next queen of rock ’n’ roll.
Still barely tall enough to reach her bandmates’ chests, Sara has a powerhouse voice that has made her band, Motion Device, a minor YouTube sensation.
Nearly 400,000 people have watched the group’s classic rock covers, including Black Sabbath’s “Paranoid,” Ozzy Osbourne’s “Crazy Train” and Alice Cooper’s “School’s Out.”
“(Hard rock) pumps me up!” said Sara. Even better, she says, her band is actually her family.
Her sister Andrea, 15, plays the keyboard and bass, her brother David, 13, is the drummer.
Their cousin Josh Marrocco, 18, and his best friend Alex Defrancesco, 18, handle the guitars.
The Menoudakis kids’ passion for rock comes from their father — and now band manager — John Menoudakis, a devotee of the genre who opened the RockStar Music School in Bolton, Ont., six years ago.
“Rock and roll is in their blood,” said John. So is music. Their grandfather was the conductor of the Greek Orpheus Choir in Toronto, which is why the Motion Device logo is a lyre, he said.
John is the driving force behind Motion Device, working with the group to compose their handful of original songs like rock ballad “Mr. Misunderstood” dedicated to music legends like Michael Jackson and Elvis.
His hope is that the band will express the problems in the world as seen through the eyes of 10-yearold.
“Sara definitely doesn’t have a dainty voice,” he laughs. “She does realize that if she is going to continue with music she needs to, number one, be unique.”
That’s where social media comes in. Since opening a Motion Device Twitter account six months ago, John has sent a whopping 24,000 tweets, sharing their videos with rock stars like Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler and Alice Cooper.
“She does realize that if she is going to continue with music she needs to, number one, be unique.” JOHN MENOUDAKIS FATHER AND BAND MANAGER
Cooper even tweeted a response to the band’s cover of “School’s Out” saying, “The singer is a 10-year-old girl, but this band has more bite than most.”
John’s latest move is a social media campaign to get Motion Device to open for Rush at their October concert in Toronto. The band recorded a cover of Rush’s “Tom Sawyer” to help the pitch.
“I think everyone would love us and get a kick out of us playing,” says drummer David eagerly. John is just as excited — Rush was the first band he ever saw in concert.
While that might be shooting for the stars, John’s efforts are paying off. Sara and Josh performed at the Rogers Centre during an Argonauts game, the band played at Harbourfront’s Redpath Stage during NXNE and on Tuesday Motion Device made their national TV debut on CTV’s Canada AM.
This Thursday to Saturday they are playing the Scotiabank BuskerFest in support of Epilepsy Toronto — a cause Motion Device has a particular reason to ally with.
Keyboard and bass player Andrea has a form of epilepsy that causes “absence seizures,” where she zones out for a few seconds to a few minutes.
It’s something the band easily works around onstage, covering her occasional episode until she comes back, says the 15-year-old. She often wears sunglasses while performing to hide any signs of a seizure.
“Sometimes when I have solos I get nervous in case I have one of my seizures, but so far I haven’t,” says Andrea, whose rendition of Yanni’s “One Man’s Dream” on the piano made Amy Lee of Evanescence tweet that she shed a tear.
“The support of the band really helps.”