You’ve shopped on Craigslist for furniture, apartment rentals, used recreational equipment … but what about people? We’re not talking the misconnection you had at the grocery store when both your hands simultaneously reached for the same carton of milk. We mean for more constructive purposes, like, say, a band member.
That’s how the members of local modern rock band The Volery came to find one another, and they stand by the benefits of the online classifieds.
“For one, you don’t know what you’re going to get, which is kind of exciting,” guitarist Eric Grilli explains of the site’s benefits. “You may get an ’80s [style] guy or you may get a Lanny.”
Lanny is Lanny Carey, singer for The Volery, and the most recent Craigslist find for the band. Also on the Craigslist rooster is bassist Mike Hoy, who, with Grilli and drummer Jason Schultz founded the band last summer.
Grilli and Shultz were the only two of the four musicians to have previously met, having played together in a previous band—Driven by Astronauts, a local group which performed for six years before breaking-up last year. But to give credit where credit is due, Craigslist also played a role in initially getting them together through the local musician want ads.
“Craiglists, for musicians, is pretty chatty,” Shultz confirms. “We all have jobs and families, and [scouting at open mics] takes time. So in some degree, we need [musicians] to come to us, and that’s what Craigslist gives us. We’ll know after an hour or so if it’s a fit.”
Luckily, it didn’t take the guys too many auditions to find the shoe that fit—at least when it came to Hoy’s position on the bass. He was the first to respond to the Craigslist ad, and even though he came from a different musical background, having played primarily jazz/funk, they found a way to blend their styles. The vocalist spot however, was a bit trickier.
“We had a lot of unique people, some really different personalities tryout,” Grilli confesses. “One lady sang [the Eagles’] “Desperado” a cappella, and we were just like, ’Wow, this is going to be different.’ We’d never actually had someone sing to us while we weren’t playing, and it was really weird.”
Ultimately, Craigslist pulled through for the guys once again. Carey, who had just moved to the area via central California, had left his punk band behind and was looking for another musical outlet, this time outside his former hardcore roots.
“What interested me in these guys is that it was way different from what I had been doing,” Carey says. “This is what comes after punk music. I felt like I needed to do something else, I needed to evolve a little bit as a singer.”
Together, the band has written 10 original tracks, with Grilli, Shultz and Hoy supplying the instrumentals, while Carey takes charge of the lyrics. They’ve also revamped a couple of numbers from Grilli and Shultz former band, and plan to work in a few covers during their live performances.
Though already attracting attention online, the band has its first show at Ruben’s Cantina on April 26, and Carey already has a couple of songs in mind to be the standouts.
“’Eyes Shut’ for me is the song,” Carey says, explaining he prefers to write from real life experiences. “It’s about a kid I knew back in California—he was 12 years old and he hung himself. The other song is called ’The Bitter End,’ it’s about an office romance, but it’s Eric’s guitar riff makes that song special.”