When hearing the word Saguaro, many people’s first thought might be about a Spanish giant cactus, but after a new band’s performance at Hershey High School (HHS), there’s a new meaning behind the interesting word.

Juniors Anthony Zimmerman, Luke Sheppard, David Randall, and Jacob Drexler have come together to come to perform as the new band Saguaro.

With Randall on vocals, Zimmerman on guitar, Drexler on drums, and Sheppard on the bass, the band has strived to create their own unique sound.

Zimmerman, who founded the band, chose the name because it was something different.

“When people hear our name, they usually have no clue what it means and that’s exactly what we want. It sparks conversation and causes people to talk about us,” said Zimmerman.

From the name to the sound of the music, the band is working hard to create something new for all the students at HHS.

“I can say all of us share a desire to create a different kind of music under our own rules,”  said Sheppard. “We all are a part of one of Hershey’s music ensembles, but by creating Saguaro it gave us a chance to be unique and do something different.”

The band has been practicing together to create their music since December 2018, while their first performance was set for four months away.

With this deadline in mind, the band had to be dedicated to many long practices. Saguaro meets to rehearse once or twice a week in order to create the best sound and music possible.

After many practices, the band’s first performance was April 6, 2019 at the Hershey Community Youth Alliance (HCYA) talent show, and they performed a cover of the song, “Dani California” by the Red Hot Chili Peppers.

They received an overwhelming amount of support and had a fun time showcasing their band’s debut. Saguaro enjoyed the talent show and is now reviewing their performance as a baseline to improve from.

The band feels the most important thing for them to improve upon is their stage presence.

“I think something we will strive to work for in the future is having more stage presence. It was our first performance so we were mainly focused on sounding good, but now we want to work on moving around a little more,” said Drexler.

The band members believe that the HCYA performance was only the beginning. They hope to continue to perform in front of larger and larger audiences and continue to have fun. Saguaro feels as though they have a bright future ahead of them.

“As of right now our main goal is to be able to play as many songs as we can and have opportunities to play these songs. We also are hoping to make t-shirts that we will sell to all of our fans. Hopefully in the future we will also be able to record a CD,” said Drexler.