HUDSON -- Shane Loy’s new hard rock album “Redemption” has been a long time in the making.
The Hudson resident works in the security industry full time, but he has always loved music.
As a child he asked for a guitar for Christmas. His mother, well-intentioned, bought him a bass. Loy didn’t complain.
“It was, ‘I got a bass, I’m going to be a bass player,’” he said.
Since then he’s been in several bands, playing in Hollywood, the Twin Cities and the Milwaukee area.
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“Music has always been a part of my life, and I actually made a living off of it for a while,” he said.
His wife, Sheila Roisum Loy, didn’t know he was a musician when she first met him.
“But I became an immediate Shane Loy fan,” she said.
She’s been beside him on his music projects handling a lot of the logistics while he focuses on the creative aspects. She’s also a Wadena graduate.
“I clap every now and then on an album,” she said.
The band name “Raised by Fred and Alice” goes back to Loy’s childhood honoring two of his biggest influences -- Mr. Rogers and Alice Cooper.
“They couldn’t be more opposite and yet they were both equally influential,” Sheila Loy said. “I think you’ll see in the music and in the story and in the concept both those influences. Kind of that tug of I know I’m a good boy, I’ve always been a good boy, but there’s some bad boy in some of the influences I’ve absorbed.”
The album deals with the question of how we as individuals can impact someone’s life, even just one person, Sheila Loy said.
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Though the album has a Christian-based theme, Loy said it’s not what most Christian music is today. It is still a rock band, after all.
Developing the album while working full time was a lot of work, Loy said, and involved learning more about the continually changing industry. But he’s never minded giving up his weekends for music.
“We made it work because it was a labor of love,” Sheila Loy said.
The pandemic did hold them back in some ways, but it also gave them more time at home to work together on the project.
The album is out on streaming sites now, and the Loys are developing a plan for releasing physical copies. Updates will be available at raisedbyfredandalice.com and the band’s Instagram and Twitter pages.
