Glass Hammer

Glass Hammer is an American progressive rock band from Chattanooga, Tennessee, created and led by Steve Babb and Fred Schendel.

[2] Schendel and Babb (then credited as "Stephen DeArqe") first met in 1986, and formed Glass Hammer in 1992 when they began to write and record Journey of the Dunadan, a concept album based on the story of Aragorn from J.R.R.

[3][2] To their surprise, the album, released the following year, sold several thousand units via the Internet, TV home shopping, and phone orders, convincing them that Glass Hammer was a project worth continuing.

[1] Embarking on a small tour in the south-east of the US, the band was joined by singer Michelle Young (who had been featured as a guest on a single track of Journey of the Dunadan), and drummer Walter Moore.

[15] Later in 2009, both Bogdanowicz and Groves left Glass Hammer, and Schendel and Babb recruited new singer Jon Davison and new guitarist Kamran Alan Shikoh.

With the line-up now consisting of Schendel, Babb, Bogdanowicz, Groves, Shikoh, and Raulston, the band released their fifteenth studio album The Breaking of the World in 2015.

[1] With this line-up, they released Valkyrie, a concept album following "a soldier’s struggle to return home from the horrors of war, to the girl who loves him and must ultimately find her way to him"; the album's vocals were focused on Bogdanowicz, although Schendel and Babb also performed secondary lead vocals for the first time in years.

[35] While many musicians have appeared on Glass Hammer albums over the years, Babb and Schendel have remained the core of the band.

They also sing, although a number of other vocalists (most notably Michelle Young, Walter Moore, Susie Bogdanowicz, Carl Groves, and Jon Davison) have also handled lead vocal duties.

[1] Lyrically, Glass Hammer is inspired mostly by their love of fantasy literature (most notably Tolkien and C. S. Lewis) and by their Christian faith.

Although by their own admission they have tried to avoid becoming an overtly Christian band, their 2002 release Lex Rex was a concept album based on a Roman soldier's encounter with Jesus.

While Glass Hammer has, for the most part, combined those influences into a characteristic style of their own, they made much more direct references to the aforementioned bands on their 2000 album Chronometree, which told the story of a drug-addled progressive rock fan who becomes convinced aliens are speaking to him through the music he listens to.