Loyalty and, believe it or not, optimism are the two qualities I admire most in people. So I was genuinely touched the night of October 8 when the members of Loudermilk called me at home to thank me for supporting them since 1998. There they were, in the middle of a sold-out tour supporting Dashboard Confessional, and the day their debut, The Red Record (DreamWorks), finally hit stores, they called me.

I shouldn't have been surprised, because Loudermilk is a band that has seen more than its share of woe and good fortune since moving to Seattle from the Tri-Cities four years ago; through it all, they've managed to remain free from detectable bitterness or pretense. And they remember their friends--which is probably why, though much of Seattle had never heard of Loudermilk until their single hit on The End, their shows have always been populated by what felt like a bunch of friends supporting one another.

It wasn't long after Loudermilk put down their brief roots in Seattle in 1998 that drummer Isaac Carpenter called me at work, just to shoot the shit. He introduced himself and said he wanted to be my friend, and between his video store customers and my deadlines, we forged a friendship that hasn't wavered. (That he was from the Tri-Cities and only 19 years old helped allay the fear that I was being schmoozed.) There was something so genuine about these four guys that I immediately wanted to see them succeed.

Looking back, it's a funny scenario: A band from the Tri-Cities moves to Seattle, signs to a major label soon after, then falls into a quagmire of label bureaucracy--but climbs out a shining example of unbroken spirit and ability to remain optimistic through several false starts.

"I think it has to do with growing up in a small town, which assured us we'd be naive for the rest of our lives," surmises singer and guitarist Davey Ingersoll as to why Loudermilk never threw in the towel. "I think we always try to give people the benefit of the doubt, and where we come from, it's kind of illegal to do anything with your life. I think that forced us to be the opposite of cynical, which is optimistic. Plus we have an amazing love for playing music with each other. I've seriously just chalked it up to stupidity; we're like a stupid dog that just keeps coming back for more, even when it got to a point where we knew that we were going to keep playing music but we didn't think anybody would care about it."

There was an early period when a lot of industry folks cared, and perhaps that's when things started to go sideways for the band. After a bidding war almost immediately ensued (enflaming portions of Seattle's rock community with an unfair dislike that persists today), Loudermilk decided to go with the Columbia-backed American Recordings out of loyalty, because they had shown interest in the band before all the other labels caught on. What would follow was anything but a country kid's rock-star dreams realized: "We wrote all this material and made a [demo] in '97, then in '98 we got signed and went into the studio and stayed there until the summer of 2000."

"We were geeks," admits Ingersoll. "We were excited about the prospect of being in a big studio and being able to spend a lot of time making a record, so we just decided to go full-on and make our Hotel California, our big studio record." Not exactly a sound that was popular around Seattle in 1998, but the members stuck it out anyway. "I think it goes back to being naive, from the Tri-Cities, where we don't even know what styles are," he says.

So how did Loudermilk make the jump from American to DreamWorks? "Basically, by the time we finished the record for American, the label hated us and we hated them," explains Ingersoll, bluntly. "They wanted us to make the record a certain way and we just refused to go along with it. We were dead-set on how we wanted to sound; rather than throw everything through Pro Tools and fix it up, we wanted to work hard and get our guitar tones really good and not rely on that 'fix it in the mix' mentality. Also, I think we cared too much about what they [American and producer George Drakoulias] thought of the record, so we'd spend a lot of time arguing and trying to convince them that we were doing the right thing, instead of just shrugging and saying, 'Well, sorry you don't like it,' which is probably what I'd do now. By the time we'd finished, they didn't seem too interested and kept pushing back the release date. Then American decided to leave Columbia, and we decided to exercise a clause in our contract that enabled us to be free from the label--but they got to keep the record."

It was at that point that DreamWorks came in. "We decided we wouldn't go with a major label again unless it was with Michael Goldstone at DreamWorks, a label that wasn't afraid to take chances," relates Ingersoll. "We felt like damaged goods, but we played a showcase for a bunch of labels. In our minds we were playing strictly for DreamWorks, and if they liked us, great; if not, we didn't even want to meet with the other labels. Luckily, Michael Goldstone loved us."

The Red Record sounds like something out of the '70s: part metal, part prog, and entirely rock. Ingersoll explains why. "We're not the kind of kids who started buying records when we were 14 or 15 years old and started going to shows until punk rock ruled our world. We've been buying records since we were five and six years old, and we are definitely a product of what our parents listened to: tons of classic rock--Zeppelin, the Beatles, and Thin Lizzy. And Queen, which was our favorite band when we started hanging out together as kids. When we got a little older, it was all about Mötley Crüe's Too Fast for Love and Shout at the Devil, and Isaac and Shane [Middleton, bass; guitar player Mark Watrous rounds out the band] were more into Guns N' Roses' Appetite for Destruction.

"Around 15, when we were at that malleable age, Northwest bands like Sage, My Name, and Engine Kid really made an impression on us, along with Shudder to Think, Fugazi, and Nation of Ulysses. After that, it seems like music kind of got bad again, and we just went back to listening to classic rock. If we didn't hear something that was new and innovative, we'd go back and dig out the old stuff that was innovative in its time."

Though the album is just released, no one would blame Loudermilk if they were less than enthusiastic about performing material written so long ago. Again, optimism prevails. "I try not to think about it too much because there's a definite, definite, definite side of us that, when we get on stage, feels like, 'Oh my gosh, we're playing these songs again,'" says Ingersoll with a chuckle--but it's obvious the fact that the disc is out and people are able to hear it has made things new again. "Art is all about communicating with people," he says thoughtfully. "Whether it's five people or a million people doesn't matter."