Power Take Off band turns farm life into rock on Cornfields at Midnight

There is a line in the name of the Power Take Off band that does more critical work than most band bios manage in three pages. On a working farm, the power take-off is the spinning shaft that transfers an engine’s force from the tractor to whatever implement needs driving. It is, in the plainest mechanical sense, a system for passing power from one machine to another so the work gets done. As a metaphor for what is happening nightly between frontman Scott Theis and his son Ayden behind the drums, it is almost too good to be accidental.

The band comes from Barneveld, Wisconsin, a detail that carries weight when you understand what they are writing about. This is not a rock group cosplaying rural life for aesthetic effect. Scott is a fourth-generation farmer and a lifelong musician who spent decades playing drums in touring bands before the pandemic changed the equation. With a teenage son, time on his hands and a shared obsession with music, the two retreated to the family basement. Scott moved from the kit to the microphone. Ayden took over the drums. Power Take Off was born.

From the basement to the highway: the Theis family on the road

What followed was five years and thousands of highway miles, a rolling apprenticeship that Scott is running as much as he is performing. Every load-in, long drive and late-night payout is, by his own account, a lesson in work ethic, patience and how to treat people, the same values learned on the farm and now passed down from behind a microphone instead of a tractor wheel. The school of rock and the school of life, as the piece puts it, share a classroom.

‘Being a lead singer and having your 19-year-old kid pounding the crap out of the drum kit behind you, giving the music life, making it breathe, is such a proud, honored, dream-come-true kind of moment for a father,’ Scott says. Ayden, for his part, is clear-eyed about what the arrangement gives him. ‘I just love the time with my dad. He has been one of my biggest influences as a musician and a person,’ he says. ‘I also really enjoy meeting new people wherever we go. We’ve met so many cool people and so many new friends and fans who have been so supportive of me and Power Take Off.’

The line-up is rounded out by guitarists Ethan ‘Hank’ Schluter and Mike ‘Cowboy’ Delp and bassist Jakob ‘JR’ Ripp. The sound they produce together sits somewhere between late-1990s and early-2000s rock and a pop-punk urgency with a modern edge, though the engine at the centre of it is the father-son dynamic rather than any particular guitar tuning.

Cornfields at Midnight and the land that is disappearing

‘Cornfields at Midnight’, released on 18 August 2026 on all streaming platforms via ANRGIRL/Betachain, distributed through FUGA/Universal, is where that context becomes music. Scott writes the songs originally as slow country ballads on piano, and then Ayden and the rest of the band shape them into the Power Take Off band sound. The process has its own agricultural logic: something patient and rooted, transformed by collective effort into something louder and more urgent.

The subject matter of the new single is the farmland the Theis family knows first-hand: acreage that fed families for generations, now shrinking as cities push outward and subdivisions and strip malls advance acre by acre. It is a thread Joni Mitchell pulled in ‘Big Yellow Taxi’, and Power Take Off pull it again here, though the song is careful not to harden into a protest anthem or dissolve into nostalgia. It holds its subject at a slight distance and lets the listener sit with it, the past and the present meeting at the edge of a field that may not remain a field much longer. The restraint is what gives the track its texture; the anthemic hook is what makes it work on a car stereo or on a night out.

What separates Power Take Off band from the many acts who write about where they are from is precisely that they are writing from inside a way of life in active retreat, not from a safe remove. ‘Power Take Off is truly a bunch of Midwestern farm boys telling our stories through high-energy rock and roll music,’ Scott says. ‘For the most part, all Power Take Off songs originate from slow country ballads that I write on a piano. Ayden and the rest of the boys give the music the Power Take Off sound.’

The band is signed through AnRGirl, whose founder Holly Hutchison Weinman has more than 35 years in the entertainment industry and a record of early identification of acts including Skid Row, Deftones, Alanis Morissette, Blink-182 and Slipknot, among others, through A&R executive roles at Atlantic Records and Capitol Records/EMI. Her involvement is a mark of industry credibility for a band that has, until now, built its following the old way: van, miles, and a set played like something is at stake.

‘Cornfields at Midnight’ is available now on all platforms. Further details are at the band’s official about page.