The Riveter Story, Part 4: OMG, there's a boy in our band

Once Kelley joined our group, we really started to take our rock 'n' roll selves more seriously.

We started thinking about playing shows out of town. We scored a couple of gigs at the Larimer Lounge in Denver and a GoGirlsMusic.com showcase in Littleton. We were also playing festivals such as the Fruita Fall Festival and the Fruita Fat Tire Festival here in the valley.

But our biggest gig came in March 2007 when we were selected to join the GoGirlsMusic.com's Invasion of the GoGirls in Austin during the famed South by Southwest Festival.

This was a huge deal for us and we were beyond excited to be selected to play. SXSW is an amazing festival just chock full of music with bands literally on every corner.

We all flew down to Austin with Scott and Bill in tow, except for Bridgett who drove to Austin with her husband, Johnny. It was a long trip exacerbated by Bridgett's morning sickness.

Yep, that's right, one of the Riveter girls had a little Riveterette in the oven.

The festival was amazing. Music on every corner. The GoGirls showcase was a blast and we brought some western Colorado rockin' down to Austin.

A few months later, Bridgett left Riveter. But she didn't abandon music for motherhood, instead she opted to continue playing with the Wrong Impressions with her husband (my husband's in that band, too).

Now we were down a drummer ... and not just any drummer, but a girl drummer. Girl drummers are hard to find anywhere and REALLY hard to find in our little Grand Valley. But we had shows coming up and the show must go on.

Luckily for us, Laurena's incredibly talented husband, Scott, volunteered to fill in on drums until we found a girl drummer.

That was more than a year ago ... and Scott — aka "Boom Boom" — is still hittin' the skins for us.

We tease him a lot and give him tons of grief (not to mention that he's often stuck carrying the heavy stuff), but we're really happy to have him in the band.

Since he's been with us, he's coached Kelley and I in improving our guitar skills and helped us tighten up our playing.

We've cut out a lot of our ballads and mid-tempo songs for more hard-hitting, in-your-face rock 'n' roll. We discovered that the more Kelley swears and flips off the crowd, the more they love us.

We played SXSW at the GoGirls showcase again last year. This year, we scored the Bret Michael's opener and we've been writing kick-ass new music like crazy.

We're 100 percent rock 'n' roll these days and are always ready to flip you off ... you don't even have to give us a reason.