After more than three decades behind a drum kit, Wisconsin musician and fourth-generation farmer Scott Theis could probably have been forgiven for thinking his days of loading into vans, sleeping wherever there was space and grinding his way across the United States were behind him. Instead, music found another way back in.
This time it came through his son.
What began with Scott and Ayden Theis writing and playing together at home during the isolation of the COVID years gradually became Power Take Off, a multi-generational Wisconsin rock band fuelled by old-school work ethic, youthful energy and songs that carry a surprisingly strong connection to family, community and the places that shaped them.
When I caught up with Scott for Crannk, we went right back through that journey, from broken pots and pans and teenage punk-rock tours to learning how to become a frontman in his fifties. We also dug into the five-year journey behind latest single “Cornfields at Midnight,” the changing Wisconsin landscape at the heart of the song, working with producers Malcolm Springer and Chuck Alkazian, and why Scott is already thinking several releases ahead even while the current one is still finding its audience.
From Pots And Pans To Life On The Road
As always, I wanted to start with that earliest core musical memory. For Scott, rhythm seemed to arrive before there was even an instrument to play.
“I just felt it at a young age,” he recalls, laughing about having broken just about every pot, pan and wooden spoon his mother owned before eventually finding his way to the drums.
By around 13, music had become something more serious. There were school talent shows, the sudden realisation that being in a band could change the way people looked at you, and eventually years spent playing drums professionally and touring across the United States.
Scott describes those years as the school of hard knocks: punk-rock tours in vans, sleeping on people’s floors and learning first-hand what life on the road actually demands. It was roughly a decade of doing things the hard way, and although the circumstances around Power Take Off are very different today, that experience still underpins the way he approaches the band.
Being a fourth-generation farmer only reinforced that mentality.
“I don’t know any other way to make anything a success, whether it’s farming, business, band or anything,” Scott says. “It all comes down to hard work. You got to get out there and do it.”
That isn’t some manufactured blue-collar image attached to Power Take Off after the fact. Work, agriculture, family and music have been intertwined throughout Scott’s life, and you can hear pieces of all of them turning up again throughout the band’s songs.
When Dad And Son Became Bandmates
For a while, however, Scott believed his serious band days were finished.
Once Ayden came along, trying to combine fatherhood with the realities of live music became increasingly difficult. Scott remembers getting home from shows after driving through the night only for a two-year-old Ayden to be awake and ready for the day at 6:30 in the morning. Eventually something had to give.
Years later, the person who helped bring him back into music would be that same little kid.
As Ayden moved through middle school, he kept telling his dad that he wanted to get into a band. Scott assured him that high school would bring plenty of opportunities to meet other young musicians.
Then COVID arrived.
With much of Ayden’s early high-school experience suddenly disrupted, father and son found themselves in the basement instead.
“I was just like, ‘Well, let’s just start writing some songs,’” Scott says.
There was another twist. After spending more than 35 years looking at lead singers from behind a drum kit, Scott had always wondered what standing at the front might feel like.
Suddenly he had an opportunity to find out.
Learning To Be A Frontman At 50-Plus
There’s something wonderfully backwards about Scott’s journey into songwriting and singing.
Most musicians start out finding their feet, eventually build decades of experience and then settle comfortably into the role they know. Scott already had those decades of experience, but Power Take Off forced him to become a beginner all over again.
“I’ve always contemplated being a lead singer,” he explains. “There’s always that lead singer in front of you.”
Having spent years interacting with crowds even from behind the kit, he discovered that communicating from centre stage actually felt surprisingly natural. Recording vocals was another matter entirely.
Scott readily admits that learning how to sing in a studio became its own education: discovering what worked, what didn’t, what not to drink before trying to deliver a vocal, and how different producers could pull something new from him.
More importantly, though, Power Take Off also turned him into something he had never really considered himself before.
A songwriter.
“I’ve never written a song in my entire life until I started writing with him,” Scott says of Ayden.
That father-and-son relationship isn’t simply an older musician handing knowledge down to a younger one. Ayden and the younger members of Power Take Off have given Scott new stories to write about and, in some ways, allowed him to revisit emotions from his own youth.
Watching young relationships develop around the band helped inspire songs such as “Dixie Cup,” with Scott drawing on that wonderfully awkward space where friendship starts turning into something more.
Then there is “All The No’s,” carrying a different side of the same Power Take Off outlook: believe in yourself, follow the thing that matters to you and don’t let rejection be the end of the story.
For Scott, those ideas are closely tied to fatherhood.
“What do you want to tell your kids? Of course, follow your dreams, right?”
Every Power Take Off Song Starts Somewhere Unexpected
For all the energy Power Take Off throw around once the amplifiers are fired up, the beginnings of these songs are considerably quieter.
Scott grew up working around cattle, with AM radio carrying old country music through the barn. He remembers artists such as Kenny Rogers and Loretta Lynn forming part of the soundtrack to those early years, and that influence still sits deep inside his writing.
“Everything starts as a slow country song,” he tells me.
Scott will build an idea around a piano, laying down the basic story and structure before handing it across to the younger musicians around him.
Then they kick it in the arse.
What might have begun as a restrained country ballad suddenly gets louder, faster and heavier as Ayden, Ethan and the rest of Power Take Off put their stamp on it.
“We’re a rock and roll band. We’re loud. We like power and energy,” Scott laughs. “I just try to keep up with it all.”
It’s an interesting collision of generations and influences. The storytelling comes from someone raised around farmland and traditional country music, while much of the final energy comes from younger players who grew up in an entirely different musical world.
That mixture is probably one reason Power Take Off are difficult to neatly shove into one box.
Five Years Of Cornfields At Midnight
That songwriting process brings us to “Cornfields at Midnight.”
Digging back through Power Take Off’s history before the interview, I noticed the title appearing amongst the band’s original material well before this current release campaign. So rather than treating it as a newly written single, I wanted to know how long Scott had actually been carrying the song around.
The answer was roughly five years.
During that time Power Take Off travelled through several stages of development, including recording sessions in Los Angeles, working in Nashville with Malcolm Springer, and eventually heading to Detroit to work with Chuck Alkazian.
Each stop added something.
Each producer taught the band another lesson.
And Alkazian ultimately helped reshape “Cornfields at Midnight,” including working with the band on the song’s middle section and helping bring the version we hear today into focus.
Scott can hear the growth across those years too. The songwriting has improved, the musicians have grown together, and the band has learned how to function on the road as a unit.
They’ve also discovered that when five people are travelling in a four-bunk rig, somebody is getting the bad spot.
According to Scott, it’s usually him.
When Concrete Replaces The Cornfields
There is a reason “Cornfields at Midnight” needed time.
The song is tied directly to Scott’s own landscape, and that landscape continues to change.
His family’s 210-acre farm was once surrounded by what he describes as a rural township community. Today, Madison has expanded around it.
There are now fire hydrants and sidewalks around the farm. Four-storey apartment buildings sit on the skyline. A 110-acre cornfield near where Scott once played ball as a kid has disappeared beneath a Walgreens, a major intersection and modern road infrastructure.
It would have been easy for “Cornfields at Midnight” to become an angry song about development, but Scott’s perspective is more complicated than that.
He’s not arguing that nobody else should be allowed to move into somewhere beautiful or that landowners shouldn’t be able to make their own decisions. He understands why communities grow.
What hits him is the speed at which somewhere that seemed permanent can become almost unrecognisable within one lifetime.
“As the years go by, you go, ‘Man, I remember that,’” he says. “It just makes you sad how things can change so fast.”
That is where the song lands hardest.
It isn’t simply about losing dirt.
It’s about losing the places where memories happened.
The fields where people played. The routines that shaped a childhood. The neighbours, sounds and knowledge tied to a community. The little reference points that once told you that you were home.
The Farm Isn’t A Prop
That connection also gives the “Cornfields at Midnight” video considerably more weight.
Those agricultural scenes aren’t Power Take Off borrowing somebody else’s rural imagery because it looks good behind a rock band. They were filmed on Scott’s family property, the same landscape tied to the memories and changes he is singing about.
That authenticity runs through much of the band’s visual identity.
“Dixie Cup” heads into the local bowling alley. “All The No’s” carries its own community-centred feel. “Cornfields at Midnight” takes you directly onto the farm.
When I mentioned how those videos collectively feel less like traditional rock clips and more like little windows into the community around the band, Scott’s response probably said more than any carefully prepared PR quote could.
“You’re melting my heart over here.”
For Power Take Off, these places actually matter.
Malcolm Springer, Chuck Alkazian And Learning When Less Is More
Power Take Off’s studio journey has also exposed Scott to different philosophies about what the band should sound like.
Working with Malcolm Springer in Nashville allowed room for elements Scott naturally loves, including keyboards and organ. Scott is somebody who enjoys a big, full arrangement and readily admits that his instinct is often to start asking what else they can put into the mix.
Chuck Alkazian came from a different direction.
Scott recalls Alkazian essentially looking at the band and asking why they needed to add keyboards in the first place.
“You guys are a rock band.”
Sometimes the answer really is two guitars, bass, drums and amplifiers turned up.
Scott laughs about that contrast between producers, but he values both approaches. Every producer Power Take Off has worked with has shown them something different, and part of the band’s growth has been learning when to add another layer and when the song simply needs room to breathe.
“Less is more” is a lesson Scott says they’ve heard more than once.
Looking Back At His Son From Centre Stage
For all the discussion around singles, farms, touring and production, one image kept resurfacing throughout our conversation.
Scott standing at the front of a stage, turning around and seeing his son behind the drum kit.
After decades spent as the drummer looking at somebody else’s back, there is something beautifully circular about it.
Power Take Off take that even further during their live set when Scott returns to the drums and Ayden steps out front to sing. Scott told me Ayden is developing as both a vocalist and songwriter in his own right, and the possibility of the two switching roles more extensively in future recordings is certainly there.
At the same time, Scott is conscious of the difference in where they are in their lives.
He’s 55.
Ayden is 19.
Scott speaks openly about having a few more years where he wants to push Power Take Off hard, while knowing his son and the other younger musicians around him potentially have entire careers still ahead.
“I don’t want to hold those younger guys back either.”
There is no bitterness in that statement. Quite the opposite.
Scott knows exactly how difficult the music business can be because he’s already done the vans, the floors, the long drives and the years behind the kit. That experience lets him recognise just how rare the thing he gets to do now really is.
Making music with his son.
Writing songs together.
Looking behind him onstage and seeing Ayden there.
As Scott puts it, it’s priceless.
Four New Songs And Plenty More In The Tank
Power Take Off aren’t treating “Cornfields at Midnight” as the finish line either.
Scott told me the band had completed four new songs only recently, selected from a much larger group of ideas he has been developing. His process is to keep moving, getting basic piano ideas down with Ayden helping him establish a click track and basic verse, bridge and chorus structures before moving onto the next thought.
Once Scott has around twenty ideas sitting there, he starts sorting through them.
This time, four survived the cut.
Power Take Off also try to operate around six months ahead, meaning Scott is already thinking about what follows while listeners are still discovering the current single.
After spending large stretches of the previous year touring, the band have spent some time closer to home in Wisconsin, writing, recording and rebuilding the war chest. Scott jokes that every musician knows the post-tour feeling of coming home and realising you’ve somehow managed to become broke again, but there is no suggestion that he wants to stop.
If anything, Power Take Off feels like a second musical life he never expected to get.
And he intends to enjoy it.
Ozzy, Green Day, Rancid And The Records That Built Scott Theis
Our usual Crannk quickfire eventually revealed a few more pieces of the puzzle.
The first album Scott bought with his own money was Ozzy Osbourne’s Blizzard of Ozz, complete with a T-shirt whose sleeve apparently survived about two days.
His first remembered concert came courtesy of his parents taking him to see Barbara Mandrell, while childhood memories are tied to country music playing from eight-tracks at home. Later, punk and alternative rock reshaped his understanding of what was possible.
Scott remembers Green Day arriving as a genuine game changer. Coming from punk bands himself, hearing that kind of fast, melodic music break into the mainstream made a huge impression. Alice in Chains, Pearl Jam and blink-182 all entered the conversation as records and bands that shifted the landscape for him as well.
Then we found the Rancid connection.
Mention …And Out Come the Wolves and Scott immediately lights up. It’s the sort of album the whole Power Take Off crew can throw on during a long drive and simply let run.
Different generations again.
Same record.
Same van.
Same reason they’re all there.
Power Take Off Keeps Moving
Power Take Off might be built around a father-and-son story, but reducing the band to that misses most of what makes the story interesting.
This is also about a drummer becoming a singer after 35 years. A farmer unexpectedly becoming a songwriter. Country songs mutating into loud rock songs when a younger generation gets hold of them. Wisconsin musical families intersecting again decades later. A family farm slowly being surrounded by a city. A father trying to help his son build something without deciding what that something ultimately has to become.
And through it all sits that same work ethic Scott learned long before there was a Power Take Off.
Get up.
Do the work.
Keep climbing when you’ve slipped a few rungs backwards.
And, apparently, accept that if five blokes are touring in a four-bunk rig, Dad might be sleeping on the floor.
“Cornfields at Midnight” is out now.
Check out the full Crannk video interview with Scott Theis of Power Take Off above, crank the track bloody loud, and give the neighbours something decent to listen to.
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