Star Trek Band Five Year Mission Gears Up for “Year Five”
Five Year Mission. Image Twitter
StarTrek.com has published a new profile of Star Trek tribute band Five Year Mission.
The Indianapolis-based band, consisting of Mike Rittenhouse, Noah Butler, Chris Spurgin, Patrick O’Connor and Andy Fark, started in 2009, and they’ve spent the last decade writing albums of songs based off Original Series Star Trek episodes. They have already released four albums (Years One through Four) and are gearing up to produce the final album in the series, Year Five.
Five Year Mission are well-known in Star Trek fandom, even being asked to be the house band at the 50th Anniversary celebration at Star Trek Las Vegas in 2016. They also recorded a cover of the Deep Space Nine theme tune for the documentary What We Left Behind, in 2018.
They’ve been doing this for a long time, so surely it should be simple to produce Year Five? Not so much. When asked what were the biggest challenges for writing the new album, there was plenty to talk about. Butler lamented the “big fan-favorite episodes”, like “All Our Yesterdays”. Spurgin called out “The Savage Curtain” as being a challenge because “it’s so dumb.” Fark noted that just finding the time to concentrate on new content has been difficult. He said, “As the band got more and more popular, we started playing more and more shows, and we just lost time. We haven’t been able to find that good mix of being able to just sit down and flesh out 16 songs a year and record them.”
Rittenhouse, who had the original idea for Five Year Mission, cited the pressure to “leave an impression”. He has been tasked with writing “Turnabout Intruder”, the last song on the album, and the last episode of The Original Series. He said, “I had the first song on the first album, and I’m going to have the last song on the last album. I’m struggling with many different thoughts about that, because it’s a silly episode, and part of me wants to do a silly song. But another part of me knows this is the last song of the five albums— it needs to leave an impression.”
Follow along with the band’s progress on FiveYearMission.net, or you can listen to their previous albums on your favorite streaming service.
This article was written for the podcast Daily Star Trek News.
Alison Pitt is the writer, producer, and host of Daily Star Trek News, on the Roddenberry Podcast Network. A veteran Star Trek podcaster, she started her career on the weekly show Priority One: A Roddenberry Star Trek Podcast in 2015. She has appeared on panels at Star Trek Las Vegas, WonderCon, and San Diego Comic Con.
