Thriving Ivory [ tickets ]'s song "Angels on the Moon" has been played more than 7 million times on the band's MySpace page and the video has been viewed over 1.6 million times on YouTube. That simply "blows away" drummer Paul Niedermier, because it's one of the band's oldest songs.

"For it to still be here, years and years from when it started, it's really cool," Niedermier said. "It's been through so many different transitions. I think the reason it's had the success it's had right now is, lyrically, it's such a vague song. There's so much room left for interpretation that people can really just draw their own conclusions."

Niedermier said Thriving Ivory--which also includes vocalist Clayton Stroope, keyboardist/primary songwriter Scott Jason, guitarist Drew Cribley and bassist Bret Cohune--receives "some really heartfelt e-mails" about "Angels on the Moon," the most successful track from Thriving Ivory's self-titled Chris Manning and Howard Benson-produced debut album.

"People have either lost a family member or they're battling cancer themselves," Niedermier said. "The song really seems to connect with them. Then there's other people who e-mail in; this one guy, who's a good friend of ours, he is 100 percent convinced we wrote the song about the New York Yankees or something like that. He's a diehard fan.

"Sometimes, [email is] hard to read. You're in the van running around doing shows so much you never really get time to read the e-mails that are coming in. People are really attached to [the song]. We've had people write in and say they're playing 'Angels on the Moon' at their dad's funeral, or this one guy, he worked at a children's hospital, and that's the song that kids always want to hear. It's cool to hear that kind of stuff."

Besides "Angels on the Moon" striking a chord with fans, Niedermier said he believes the band has found its niche two ways: One, with Stroope's raspy voice and, two, with Thriving Ivory's piano-laden songs.

"The songs start out on piano," Niedermier said. "Scott's pretty much the main songwriter. He'll write the skeleton of the song. He writes the majority of the lyrics, too. Clayton, he kind of helps out with that. [Scott will] get an idea of what he's going for and present it to the band, and the rest of us write our own parts and make any small changes to the song that we want to make.

"You get a different kind of rock sound when it's written on piano versus guitar. The melodies are completely different. Aside from Clayton's voice, I think that's another aspect that kind of sets us apart. A lot of bands have piano in them right now, but it's just kind of background, filler. You get a totally different song when it's written on piano first."

Niedermier, the youngest in the band, joined Thriving Ivory as a freshman at a city college in Santa Barbara, CA, and is now on break from school, as is Stroope, to pursue music. The rest of the band graduated from University of California-Santa Barbara.

"Since I was, like, 12, I always wanted to be in a band and have that be my career," Niedermier said. "I never thought it would really be possible. When I was at the school, I wasn't really even focusing on music, I was just doing regular classes. When I joined these guys, it started to really pick up. When we first started playing shows--they were frat parties and sorority parties--we'd play for beer. I never thought all this would stem from what it started as."