Piebald

All Music Guide:

Emocore outfit Piebald formed in 1994 when vocalist/guitarist Travis Shettel, guitarist Aaron Stuart, bassist Andrew Bonner and drummer Jon Sullivan were still high school students in suburban Andover, MA. Sullivan left a few years later; Alex Garcia Rivera stepped in before the band ultimately settled down with Luke Garro behind the kit. Quickly becoming a staple of the Boston-area indie circuit, Piebald released their first album, When Life Hands You Lemons, in 1997 via Hydra Head Records. They followed up two years later with If It Weren't for Venetian Blinds It Would Be Curtains for Us All, which further presented the band's lighthearted spin on typical emo values, offering such song titles as "Fat and Skinny Asses." The EP The Rock Revolution Will Not Be Televised appeared in 2000 before Piebald amicably split to focus on life outside the band. Boston-based imprint Big Wheel Recreation released the dual-disc retrospective Barely Legal/All Ages the following year, which collected shaky recordings from their high school days all the way up through their 1997 debut; the set also included all of Piebald's early 7" EPs, some demos, live cuts (including a blistering cover of the Beatles' "I Saw Her Standing There"), and out-of-print tracks. During the break, Shettel also put out a solo record under the appropriate project name of Totally Travis. The band's separation didn't last long, however; Piebald announced their return in 2002 with We Are the Only Friends We Have, a fun-yet-mature album that was quickly embraced by fans and critics alike. A single from that album, "American Hearts," saw minor success on MTV and was even sampled a few years later by MC Lars on his emo-laptop-rap "iGeneration." It was a year of unprecedented good fortune for the band, but things took a turn for the worse when Shettel had to undergo throat surgery. Shettel's health problems resulted in the cancellation of a string of live shows (opening up for Dashboard Confessional, no less), but the band wasn't down for long. Shettel healed up in a few months' time, and Piebald headed back out on the road to headline with bands like My Chemical Romance, Minus the Bear, and Fairweather in tow. By early 2004, Piebald had inked a deal with Cali-based indie label SideOneDummy, and their next album, All Ears, All Eyes, All the Time, came out that May. Late in the next year, while the band toured with Hot Rod Circuit in their new environmentally friendly, vegetable oil powered van, the CD/DVD B-sides collection Killa Bros and Killa Bees was issued. Piebald's next proper full-length, Accidental Gentlemen, hit stores in January 2007.

Wikipedia:

A piebald or pied animal is one that has a spotting pattern of large unpigmented, usually white, areas of hair, feathers, or scales and normally pigmented patches, generally black. The colour of the animal's skin underneath its coat is also pigmented under the dark patches and unpigmented under the white patches. This alternating colour pattern is irregular and asymmetrical. Animals with this pattern may include horses, dogs, birds, cats, pigs, and cattle, as well as snakes such as the ball python. Some animals also exhibit colouration of the irises of the eye that match the surrounding skin (blue eyes for pink skin, brown for dark). The underlying genetic cause is related to a condition known as leucism.

Etymology

The word "piebald" originates from a combination of "pie," from "magpie," and "bald", meaning "white patch" or spot. The reference is to the distinctive black-and white plumage of the magpie

In horses

In British English piebald (black and white) and skewbald (white and any colour other than black) are together known as coloured. In North American English, the term for this colouring pattern is pinto, with the specialized term "paint" referring specifically to a breed of horse with American Quarter Horse or Thoroughbred bloodlines in addition to being spotted, whereas pinto refers to a spotted horse of any breed. In American usage, horse enthusiasts usually do not use the term "piebald," but rather describe the colour shade of a pinto literally with terms such as "black and white" for a piebald, "brown and white," or "bay and white," for skewbalds, or color-specific modifiers such as "bay pinto", "sorrel pinto," "buckskin pinto," and such.

Genetically, a piebald horse begins with a black base coat colour, and then the horse also has an allele for one of three basic spotting patterns overlaying the base colour. The most common coloured spotting pattern is called tobiano, and is a dominant gene. Tobiano creates spots that are large and rounded, usually with a somewhat vertical orientation, with white that usually crosses the back of the horse, white on the legs, with the head mostly dark. Three less common spotting genes are the sabino, frame and splash overo genes, which create various patterns that are mostly dark, with jagged spotting, often with a horizontal orientation, white on the head. The frame variant has dark or minimally marked legs. The sabino pattern can be very minimal, usually adding white that runs up the legs onto the belly or flanks, with "lacy" or roaning at the edge of the white, plus white on the head that either extends past the eye, over the chin, or both. The genetics of overo and sabino are not yet fully understood, but they can appear in the offspring of two solid-coloured parents, whereas a tobiano must always have at least one tobiano parent.

In other animals

Many other animal species may also be "pied" or piebald. Snakes, especially ball pythons, may also exhibit seemingly varying patches of completely pigmentless scales along with patches of pigmented scales. The term was used in The Conservationist by Nadine Gordimer when referring to kingfishers. The various types of magpie are so called because of their pied plumage. The bald eagle derives its name from the word "piebald" in reference to the contrast of its white head and tail with dark body. Some domesticated foxes born from the Russian Institute of Cytology and Genetics also carry this coloring.