A Paducah native, Derik moved to Bowling Green for a football scholarship at WKU. He graduated early and has been training and fighting as a professional MMA fighter since. His music experience goes back to playing piano at 10 years old, where he learned the fundamentals of music. Derik played throughout high school, but it wasn’t until 2020, frustrated by the pandemic and national climate of social unrest, that he and a few friends decided to start a left-leaning Punk band, Rat Piss.
“That type of heavier music where people are venting, like, deep emotions you can’t really ever talk about and stuff that is taboo to talk about in public, and having that amount of energy at our first show and just people lose it. That’s a different thing…I’ve never seen a first show have that type of energy and turnout and everything so it’s pretty cool.”
Derik is the lead vocalist for Rat Piss and also writes lyrics. He loves seeing the crowd react to his words, stating, “It’s one thing to watch videos or be in the crowd and do that stuff, but when it’s your own lyrics and people are reacting that heavily, it’s cool stuff.”
Derik gets inspiration from reading articles or watching current events. Most of the songs from their first album came from one writing session when Derik couldn’t sleep and left his unfiltered thoughts on paper. Everyone then helps write the music and as a result, Rat Piss is very much a collaboration between all the members. Derik loves the Punk scene and sees the music as a type of therapy. “…It’s just therapy for people in the scene. It’s you letting all that stuff out you can’t normally talk about and venting all that frustration in a musical form, that’s what it is for me too.”
“That avoidance of the painful sides of reality isn’t something that disadvantaged communities can do. Black people can’t avoid that shit, Native Americans can’t avoid that shit, anyone getting marginalized – people in Ukraine can’t avoid that stuff. So I think it is very important to press that border and that to people’s faces.”