Please introduce us your band, when did
you form EVA and did any of you played in bands before EVA?EVA
EVA from Italy is one of the latest
new AOR sensations and the fact that they come out of Italy is
even more suprising, because that country is not really known for
it's AOR gems. This EVA breaks the habit and the 8 songs on their
debut CD (R) can easily compete with the latest releases of
labels such as ESCAPE and MTM. This is by far the best AOR band
ever to come out of Italy and let's just hope this band is going
to be around for a long time because they really deserve a change
to become more known. You can check out the review I did of their
debut CD by clicking here and visit their website at: http://web.tiscalinet.it/eva but here's an interview I had with the
members of this Italian AOR band, let's see what they have to
say...
Please introduce us your band, when did
you form EVA and did any of you played in bands before EVA?
EVA was born about two years ago, everyone of us was playing in other bands but we were friends and sometimes it could happen to play togheter in a cover band project. I (Steff ,keyboards) was working for Warner Chappel Music as a musician and author and I was playing keys in another melodic rock project, Paolo(drums) called me to play in another band in the meantime Paolo and Claudio(bass) were playing in a good rock band but after recording a cd they did not have a good promotion.
We decided to form
an AOR band and, first Andrea (a guitar teacher at CPM the most
important school of music in Italy) and then, after working a
short period with another vocalist, Angelo (a skilled vocalist
and author) joined the band.
Can you tell us all
about your fantastic debut CD?
The first thing we should say is the fact we had a little budget
for this project and we knew we should have worked without all
the benefits you get if you have a production.We started to write
songs playing all togheter in studio, there is no rule for
writing a song, sometimes I have a good idea (verse,pre ,chorus,
bridge), one time after a real jam we had written Angel, the
first track of the cd and the first song we wrote togheter. After
a rough creation of the material we decided to arrange and record
this cd. We went to studio and Paolo recorded in a day all drums
parts (7 songs) on two of the four Alesis ADATs we had and after
few days we started to work in the school of music where Andrea
and Paolo work, we could work only during the night because
during the day all the rooms was full of students, anyway with a
little analog mixer a compressor unit and an ADAT, Claudio
performed all the bass parts and both Angelo and me performed all
vocal harmonies on few tracks.
I got all the tapes in my home but well featured studio (HD recording, digital mixer,ADAT, and a lot of keys) and I started to work about the arranging and the recording of all the keyboards, the effects, and about a pre-mix of vocal harmonies. I took four months (mainly working at night) to finish my work but at the end we were very happy of the issue. After that, Andrea performed (always in the school!) the recording of all the guitar parts and finally we were ready to come back to studio to record all the vocal parts with Angelo (two days) and to complete the final mix (two days).We had recorded seven songs and we decided to add another song (I'll be waiting) we played with a great feeling during the first live concert of our band, it was recorded in a DAT directly from the P.A. system.
Your
music is pure 80s AOR, which bands influenced you?
This is a very hard question because we have too much names to
tell you!. We can say we love bands such as Journey, Toto,
Foreigner but we can't forget all the bands that have written the
story of this kind of music. We like great musicians and
producers such as Jay Graydon and David Foster. Few months ago I
and Paolo played with Ian Haughland and John Leven a lot of
Europe songs. It was very nice to remember with this guys how
much that band played a very important part in the 80s.
How has the CD been
received, lots of positive reactions... How's the scene like in
Italy for AOR music?
Well, we decided to send our cd to all the labels we knew. The
first one was the Frontiers records (they are here in Italy) but
they said our sound is not hard enough and there is no business
for our kind of music.Few months ago we were contacted by the
Escape music, they really like our music and maybe they could
decide to do a production, anyway we have received good and
positive reactions but we know we are italians and we don't have
a tradiction in this kind of music, we hope to break this taboo
but it's very hard.About the scene for AOR music here in Italy
unfortunately it's no good. If you ask us a name of another
italian AOR or melodic rock band we can't answer, maybe they are
but we don't know. It's very hard to play live. If you play this
music live you know
how much important is to have a good sound on the stage, a good
P.A. a good sound engineer but often we have to play on a stage
ready for an unplugged of a grunge band! Sometimes it can happen
you have a good stage, when we opened the John Norum's concert
here in Milan we had also a good audience.
Are you're already
working on a new CD, if so can you tell us everything about it?
Possible songs, production, same musicstyle as on your debut,
when it is going to be released, etc. etc.?
Yes , we are working on the songs for a new cd and we are going
to record all the demos. We have fifiteen new songs, we could add
four or five songs to complete the first cd if we find a
production, anyway we want to write more songs to find out the
best of us. Till now the music style is the same but tomorrow we
don't know, this is really not a problem for us. The only thing
we know is that we love AOR and melodic rock.We will release a
new cd in few months, look in the meantime at our website if you
want news about it.
What are the plans
for the next coming months?
Writing more songs for the new cd, looking for a production and
we would like to go to play live outside Italy.
Finally, do you
have anything to add to our readers?
We think this is a period you can listen to good new AOR bands,
outside of the great musical business, outside of the MTV charts,
you can appreciate who really plays this music because simply
love it, and we love it. We want to thank Strutter Magazine, a
very important voice in the AOR universe and we want to thank Mr.
Robert Pancur of Target Records for all that he has done for us.
See you soon.