[/caption]This is the 36th post in our Musician of the Day series.
[audio http://fansiter.files.wordpress.com/2009/09/01-the-metronome.mp3]
[The Metronome by Wheels Above]
Wheels Above is an emerging band in downtown Orlando with a truly unique sound. After seeing them perform they invited me for drinks and after an adventure of wandering through downtown Orlando on a Friday night, I finally got to sit down and get to know these four amazing musicians. They even took the opportunity to interview themselves, which has never happened before and was very interesting.
Exclusive Interview with Wheels Above
Stephanie Schoppert: Why don’t you guys start off by introducing yourselves?
Isaac Pinedale: My name is Isaac Pinedale. I’m 21 and I’ll tell you more about me later because a lot of me is tied in with music. (lead singer, guitar)
Pete Tremblay: My name is Pete Tremblay. I’m 28 years old, almost. I play guitar. I’m a libra… and there’s a gigantic horse right there. Bye Bye gigantic horse. (He's not crazy, Orlando's mounted police were walking by)
Alex Perez: This is Alex from Wheels Above. I have spent the last 15 years trying to practice my announcer voice so I can work for Disney and every radio station in the country. I can be hired for a dollar a word, very cheap. And uh… (bass)
Pete: You’re a balloon twister.
Alex: I am a balloon twister; I twist balloons, professional balloon twister. And here is Chris Denny! Chris Denny how do you feel?
Chris Denny: I think I am the one that is supposed to be saying my name over there. My name is Chris Denny I am 26 years old from West Palm Beach, Florida. I am the drummer and I have been playing drums for 15 years now. I am old, wow, that’s a long time. I’ve been with the band for about four months now.
Steph: Okay the next question…What is the story of the band?
Isaac: I guess I’ll start. I started this project like in March of 2008. What happened was I wrote a few songs, put them up online, Pete, our guitarist, expressed interest in playing for me, and so we started collaborating. Soon after me and Pete got together.
Pete: Yes, we got together.
Isaac: in a musical way.
Pete: When was that? That was August of 2008 right? The ground rules were made in May of 2008, we started talking at the Radiohead show in Tampa.
Isaac: And then Alex came along with our then drummer, Kyle Peeples. That was in August 2008, and then we played a couple of shows.
Pete: The first show as December 22, 2008 at The Haven.
Isaac: And then he left, Kyle Peeples, and Chris Denny joined in April, right before we played the Florida Music Festival in May. So he learned all the songs in two weeks, and then you know the rest is history.
Pete: Basically it’s taken awhile for us to really find the sound that we’ve been trying to get. Through a cultivation of a lot of different drummers, different arrangements, different instruments, literally trying to find the tone for this band has been a journey.
Pete: What about you Alex? Fondest memory with the band.
Alex: I joined this band, I saw it on Craigslist?
Pete: Why did you join this band? What was your main motivation?
Alex: Ok, Ok, I was on craigslist and there were like 5 bands. I went to their MySpace pages and I listened their music. There were two bands that I liked, one was in Ocoee or something and the other was Wheels Above and Love which was the original name for Wheels Above. Isaac will extrapolate on the story but it came from a dream. So I said I have to join the band, I emailed Isaac and the rest is history.
Pete: What did you play before you played bass?
Alex: Oh, before I played bass I played guitar for a church band. It was definitely an awesome experience. My dad’s a pastor so it was actually the same church that he played in. But yeah, Chris Denny is even the future, future story.
Chris: future, future story?
Pete: Chris Denny, please tell us succinctly why you joined the band, what you were thinking of doing and what you did before you were in this band.
Chris: The story of my beginning in this band…you know we’re doing this interview for them. Just take the night off and then listen to what we have to say and just write it down. So the beginning of my story, Alex our base player, came out to a show of mine with my old band Oh Romeo, which actually still is a band around now. And he thought that I had you know decent skills on the drums I guess, and he suggested me to Isaac. It actually didn’t happen till about four months later, when they needed a drummer because the old drummer just quit. The main reason I wanted to try out for them was I was looking for something a little different, I’d been playing like heavier music for a long time, and I kinda wanted to take a break from that and try something new. The rest I guess is recent history, since I’ve only been with the band for four months. So it’s not too much history but yeah I love it and I love the style that we’re going for.
[caption id="attachment_1379" align="alignnone" width="510" caption="Wheels Above playing at 2Trax"]
[/caption]Steph: Well something I always like to ask is- Any embarrassing moments with the band?
Isaac: Well most embarrassing moment for me was, I could have had a few moments in our earlier shows where I talked a great deal more than I was supposed to. I just kept rambling and I had to be shushed by the rest of my band.
Pete: First show. First show ever at the Haven. Isaac’s arguing with the sound guy before we even go on. I had to go up to him and be like “Listen, shut the f**k up.”
Isaac: No, I wasn’t arguing with him, I was just doing mic check, and you were like “Shut up.”
Pete: We were all new to whole thing working together.
Isaac: We were all pretty much on edge too.
Pete: It was a good show though, the Haven is a great show. But the funniest thing about that whole show was, there was this lady, she had about 30 beers no joke. She jumps on the stage and sings the National Anthem like Melissa Ethridge, straight up. And then later while we playing she’s like “You guys are f**king like Coldplay! Yes! Coldplaaay!” Yeah, it was awesome. Alex has got a story.
Alex: This is my story. In a land far away…no wait, wait. F**king Coldplay! My most embarrassing moment, I have friends and they say “do the pose.” Now the pose is a front stance in Karate. And so once when I did the pose, I knocked the chord out of my guitar, so for a good five seconds I was posing without any sound, and it was very embarrassing.
Chris: So one time, I was on tour with Oh Romeo and WoodAle. And the whole band, every single one of them had airsoft guns. And they were shooting at us like on the highway. Like they would get ahead of us so the wind would try and carry it back. And we were touring on a school bus that ran on biodiesel. So everybody got shot but me, and it was on the last day, they told me to go and get something from the bus. And it was on the floor and as I bent over to pick it up, I had like the worst stinging pain in my ass. Cause somebody was hiding in the seat and just jumped out and shot me point blank in the butt. It’s not really embarrassing but funny I guess you could say.
[caption id="attachment_1381" align="alignnone" width="510" caption="Alex and Isaac"]
[/caption]Steph: Well, now I’d like to know a little bit about your music. What is your favorite song that you guys have written?
Alex: Most fun, I think would have to be Metronome, because it kills and its funky, and it’s just a really good song, to play.
Pete: Well there’s two of mine, I have two favorites, well three actually. As far as like crowd favorite, that I enjoy playing cause it’s fun is obviously the Metronome. You know I get to play a really sick guitar solo, it’s a lot of fun. But as far as like meaning, it would be probably be Diamonds in the Rain, only because the subject matter of the song, it was really important to me when it was written, it’s still very important. But as far as songs go, it’s great because it continually changes, it starts out as an acoustic song and then morphs into a very plain, clean with a little bit of lead, and now it’s the whole band version. We’ve been trying different things to express the emotion in the song, because every time I think about it, it takes on different things. Because what Isaac and I wrote about is a very heavy subject matter, it’s about people you love leaving you, anyway, it’s fun.
Chris Denny: My favorite song is actually Mistgaze, I would say Metronome because that’s when I get to show off a little bit more on the drums. But Mistgaze is my favorite just because of the groove, the feel of it, the spaceyness, the ambiance, you know everything, that’s involved. It’s just got such great ups and downs. It really allows me, as far as a drum perspective to get a really nice fluid, watery groove, I guess you could say.
Isaac: My favorite song to play live is probably Starting Over Again, which is usually our first song in the set. I really like that one because it can be very intense, and it’s probably one of my favorite vocalist jobs in the band so far. Newer stuff is going to be more in that direction, I suppose. You know, we’ll keep you updated.
Steph: Okay, now we need to talk about where your name came from. How did you come up with Wheels Above?
Isaac: I guess that’s on me. Well originally I had a major project called Romatics, still is going on, but only when I have time. It was a hodgepodge of many different styles, and I decided one day that I needed to split away from that. The split was actually manifested when I had a dream, where the band that I was playing in, normally at that time, I was playing drums for them, called Blush Response, the band came up with a different name for the band. Blush Response changed their name to The Wheels Above and The Love, and they did it without my permission, and I was sort of the band manager at the time. So after waking up and checking to see that that really didn’t happen, I decided that I had to use the name in some way. And so then the project started, I met Pete and I met Alex and Kyle and other people, and we decided to shorten it to just plain Wheels Above because it was easier to remember.
Pete: It just seemed catchier that way. The idea of Wheels Above and the Love and the whole concept behind it, is very interesting and necessary to our sound, but you know with any kind of idea.
Isaac: It can go many different ways.
Pete: Wheels Above can mean so many different things. People always get something different from it.
Isaac: It’s sort of unexpected.
Pete: It’s kind of like our sound, very ethereal.
Alex: It could also be biblical with a reference to Ezekiel.
Isaac: Yeah, it wasn’t mean to be biblical, so we’re not a Christian rock band.
[caption id="attachment_1382" align="alignnone" width="510" caption="Isaac and Pete"]
[/caption]Steph: Here’s a fun question I like to ask. What for you is a sign that you’ve made it big? What do you want to see the band become?
Isaac: A sign that we have made it big would be if we played on a TV show, namely Saturday Night Live or with Later with Jools Holland.
Pete: I want to play with Later with Jools Holland. That would be amazing, that would be a very good indicator. Also if I could afford a custom Les Paul hollow body 1967, that was only played by Les Paul himself, that would go for about 15,000 at least. That wouldn’t actually be the indicator that would just be the idea behind it. But the indicator would actually be that I would have my own guitar tech and someone to be like alright, this is how it needs to be set up. The real indicator would be being on Saturday Night Live, Later with Jools Holland or just something where we could express our music to a large audience. It’s not all about like stadium tours, I think that’s like ridiculous. But then I was actually reminded by a car that making it big would be to buy a Lamborghini and drive it downtown.
Alex: Somebody’s got a small penis!
Chris: She’s gonna find out!
Pete: That’s what I’m going for, but my penis would remain intact.
Alex: My idea of making it big like truthfully, all I wanna do in life is make music and have awesome experiences. I mean my dad played bongos on my mother’s belly. Rhythm is just the thing that is the most natural in life, in my opinion. And maybe one day I’ll be able to just be on stage on the time just for living. Just to live to be on stage. Have those moments of, Mountaintop moments.
Chris: I guess my perception on what it is to be big, is a little bit different. Other than money and awards and stuff like that. My whole thing is just like connecting with people and having people be influenced by our art, in some sort of way, whatever that is. You know some people like to listen to us while they paint because it inspires them to paint, or anything like that, whatever. Anything that involves you life, if our music can enrich your life, or somehow creative a positive movement and help you move forward, to me, that’s making it big.
Steph: You’re so poetic, I love it. It’s all about the music man.
Alex: Chris Denny wants to have girls, like all over him, all the time, day and night.
Chris: What I was going to add, is that I would like to have a very comfortable lifestyle, at one point in time. But there’s also a cap that I would put on that before I would start contributing to other people besides myself.
Steph: Alright, here’s another basic one because I like having you guys talk randomly. What is your influence in music?
Isaac: My biggest influence is usually stuff about dreams, I have a lot of dreams and I take them to heart. And they usually give me some pretty juicy stuff to write about. When I write music I like to explore deeper recesses of the human mind, and I think dreams is a good place to start.
Pete: My biggest influence is music is probably, there’s two parts to it for me. There’s songwriting and there’s performance. With songwriting I really try my best to reach as deeply inside myself to really find an emotional connection to the music that I am trying to play. In my opinion, the only way I can truly get out what’s inside of me, is through music. Usually I go to places within my head whenever I’m playing things, especially like Diamonds in the Rain. It’s really emotionally difficult to play that song sometimes because of the subject matter, and who I wrote it about and everything. But at the same time inspirationally speaking, it’s always other people, it’s always emotions, it’s always relationships, and I know it’s cliché but they affect me a lot. I believe it’s what the truth behind what I’m doing is.
Alex: I guess my biggest influences have to be my parents, they pretty much put themselves through graduate school. They wrote and sang, they did all these things, my earliest memories of them are of them singing these songs that they wrote. I wanted to be musical like them, and second Mark Anthony, Mark Anthony is something that you know, especially back in the day, he worked hard to get where he was. And every note he sang, he put everything of himself in that. I guess one day I’d like to be able to do that, all the time.
Chris: Alright, I’ll make this one short this time. ‘Cause I keep getting looks every time I get the microphone, oh great , here goes this guy again. He’s gonna talk a d*mn book. What influences me in music is life I guess. I’m sorry I just lost all train of thought because I just like looked at you (Pete) for some reason, and your gesture, my thought just went away. Seriously, with everything that is going on the world there is so much, greed and hate, and when we’re playing we’re not about that, we’re not about anything other than just having a good time and creating something beautiful in this world, which I think that if more people made an effort to do something like that, our lives would be better.
Steph: Now, not because I don’t love you guys, but because we have a limit here. But last question, I want to know what you guys want people to take away from your music.
Chris Denny: We’re going right back to the guy who gave the short answer the last time. In all honesty it all goes back to this whole enriching life. I could go on forever but I don’t need to talk about the travesties that go on in the world all the time. What I want people to take away from our band is they are going to come to our show and they’re going to be able to like let go and not worry about what’s going on in the world, not worry about the economy and not worry about their husband or wife if they’re in the military…You know just anything, anything that could be going on negative in your life, I would like that to go away when you’re at our show. And have something positive flow into you at our show and be happy.
Alex: I pretty much agree with Chris Denny. I just want people to go to our shows and they realize “hey I’m a badass dude and you know what I’m going to go up front and I’m going to move to the music and I’m going to be cool.” People forget that they have their little talents. People forget that they have those abilities that they maybe enjoyed as a kid. Maybe they’ll remember that they were inspired at one time
Pete: As far as the music and people taking away from what we’re trying to do. I dunno, I think we put a lot of honesty and integrity into what we’re trying to play. It’s really important that we’re doing something at least innovative within the style that we’re accustomed to. We want to not really fill the world with pretense as to what we’re trying to play and I realize that this answer’s probably pretentious by the fact that I don’t want to fill the world with pretense. But in all honesty we put a lot of ourselves into this music and we really care about it. Basically if anything, the most simple answer would be, I want people to understand that we’re really trying to do something personal, important and something we really enjoy doing.
Isaac: That is a tough question, I want people to leave the show feeling confident about the human race. The stuff I address in the songs, or at least I’m trying to. When I'm singing I'm being kind of serious but yet I'm not, I'm being sarcastic about it. I'm sort of explaining to people that's the way it is and you can try and change things but in a way, people always do what they want. It's tough to address, but I think it is worth tackling, especially if maybe I can make the world a better place just by saying something. That way will give people at least some bit of hope, just somebody in this world.
[caption id="attachment_1383" align="alignnone" width="510" caption="Chris Denny"]
[/caption]To learn more about official website.
Or check out their upcoming show at the Plaza Theatre on the 9th of October. Doors are at 8. Tickets are $5. We will be playing with Tam Tam the Sandwich Man and the Magical Sugar Cookies, Alias Punch, the Queues, Yogurt Smoothness, and others. (I'll be there!)
[audio http://fansiter.files.wordpress.com/2009/09/starting-over-again.mp3]
[Starting Over Again by Wheels Above]
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