Who
The Hit On List is usually just me — Todd A — with an acoustic guitar. Occasionally, I wrangle a band together.

The Name
I saw a story on the news one day post-Columbine about a kid who’d been taken out of school after he was found with a hit list containing other students’ names. He was held and questioned and eventually released when authorities determined that it wasn’t a “hit list” he’d created but a hit on list of girls that he liked.

I connect with just about every element of that story: the desire, the paranoia, the bullying authorities, the poor, humiliated kid. When I heard the phrase, “hit on list,” I filed it away knowing that’s an awesome band name.

Back then
I started a band in Nashville, Tennessee with my friends Todd and Ryan called The Carter Administration. We all wrote songs for the band. Mine were usually complex masses of riffs played as fast as we could manage. I had a few simple songs — dumb lyrics, easy melodies and few chords — which were different from my material in the Carters. I had this idea in the back of my head that they were for a side project. Notably, most of the songs were named after girls. I was creating my own Hit On List.

In 2001 after 3 years with the Carter Administration, I started having panic attacks and I left the band. That December I recorded three songs on a 4-track — two of them with with Todd K from the Carters on drums — and gave them out as The Hit On List’s Christmas Single 2001.

I released a Christmas Single each year from 2001 to 2005. Ryan, Todd and the new Carter Admin member, Andy, played on them. Sometime in there I recorded an EP with my friends in Slack called Crazy From the Heat. It was a joke on going solo — I wrote four songs with the same titles as those on David Lee Roth’s first solo release.

Presently
I made a lot of other recordings in that time that never got polished up and released in any way. I started playing live again in December 2007 when I did an acoustic gig with my friend David Dewese and managed not to crap myself.

Currently, I’m trying to write, record and play as much as possible.

–Todd A