Within Reason

Within Reason formed in Birmingham, Alabama in 2005, built around the songwriting partnership of lead singer Chris Dow and bassist David Koonce, alongside early members including guitarist Matthew Barnes and drummer Griffin Zarbough. Formed in 2005 around the talents of Chris Dow, David Koonce, and Griffin Zarbough, and inspired by bands like Rage Against the Machine, Staind, and Linkin Park, the Southern rockers issued an independent debut EP, Cycle a Smile, in 2006, which led to a live appearance on the WB television drama One Tree Hill. That national television exposure, reaching a massive audience, helped establish the young band far beyond the Alabama club circuit almost immediately, and locally they were recognized when the band was voted "Rock Band of the Year" and "Performer of the Year" for the 2007 BAMA Music Awards .

The band's true breakthrough arrived with their debut full length. In 2008, Within Reason headed into the studio with multi-platinum producer Rick Beato and began work on their debut long-player, and the resulting Bloodshot Life was released the following year. That record sent them out on major package tours, and the release of "Bloodshot Life" took the band out on the road with major acts including Bret Michaels, Staind, P.O.D., Blues Traveler, Hinder, Chevelle, Akon, Saliva, Saving Abel, Halestorm, Black Stone Cherry, Pop Evil, and Days of the New among several others. They followed with a second release, and Within Reason's third studio album After The Crawl was released on March 20, 2012, produced by Nick Chahwala and recorded in Atlanta, Georgia. By this point the band had built a genuine national fanbase, closing out 2011 with over 135,000 downloads sold online .

The years that followed brought some of the band's biggest career milestones. To support the new album, Within Reason joined the Rockstar Energy UPROAR Festival tour featuring Shinedown, Godsmack, Staind, Adelita's Way, POD, Deuce and many others. Their profile rose further when in January 2013, Within Reason performed a concert at the Clive Davis Theatre in Los Angeles that was taped for a GRAMMY Live segment, and the band was also featured in a commercial for the Microsoft Surface tablet playing their song "We'll Have It All," which aired during the GRAMMY broadcast that year. Radio success followed with singles like "Enemy," which reached #46 on the Active Rock radio charts in 2014 while the band was on their second tour with the Rockstar Energy Drink Uproar Festival , and "Here Comes the Light," released in 2015 with a video produced by bassist David Koonce, which peaked at #39 on Active Rock radio following tours with Godsmack, Seether, and Pop Evil. The band eventually released a third studio album, co-produced by Hinder's Cody Hanson and Marshal Dutton, titled Battlefields: Life Love and War, which arrived in 2017. Within Reason has remained a working Southern rock outfit built on Chris Dow and David Koonce's core partnership, with a rotating cast of touring musicians filling out the lineup over the years. Across three studio albums and more than a decade of near-constant touring alongside acts ranging from Godsmack and Seether to Halestorm and Black Stone Cherry, the band carved out a reputation as a dependable, road-tested hard rock act representing the Birmingham, Alabama scene on national stages, radio, film, and television.

Wayne Dennon caught Within Reason live just once, capturing the band's energy in a single 2010 show that remains preserved in this archive as 18 photographs, a modest but meaningful slice of his decades documenting concert stages. Those images have since been viewed 16,398 times by visitors to this site, a quiet testament to the enduring appeal of a band that spent years grinding out shows alongside some of rock's biggest names, and to Wayne's eye for capturing moments worth remembering.