Blue October

Blue October began in Houston, Texas, in 1995 and is built around singer, songwriter and guitarist Justin Furstenfeld. His brother Jeremy plays drums, while multi-instrumentalist Ryan Delahoussaye, bassist Matt Noveskey and lead guitarist Will Knaak complete the current line-up. Over thirteen studio albums the band has placed twenty-one singles in the top 40 of the alternative rock chart. Their Houston Press awards include Best New Act in 1998, and their songs have now been streamed more than 1.5 billion times.

The band's breakthrough arrived with Foiled in 2006, whose singles Hate Me and Into the Ocean were both certified platinum. Hate Me climbed to number two on Billboard's Modern Rock Tracks chart and spent twenty weeks in the top five, while the album was certified platinum in February 2007 after selling 1.4 million copies in the US. Earlier, the group had signed to Universal in 1999, been dropped the following year, and returned to make History for Sale, whose single Calling You spread across US radio after a Dallas station picked it up. In November 2006 they opened for the Rolling Stones in Boise, Idaho.