Commuter

Issue date: 3/15/04 Section: Entertainment

Media Credit: supplied photo Bill and Angie Villa [Click to enlarge]

Husband and wife songwriting team, The Villas, aren't just playing around.
Bill and Angie Villa have surrounded themselves with great musicians, two great records, and a serious, yet fun-loving attitude.
The band has been steadily gaining ground from day one, and even Cheryl Pawelski, formerly of EMI-Capital Records, didn't hesistate to sign The Villas to an exclusive contract with Filthy Mouth Music, licensing its music for use in film, TV, and advertising.
The band also is receiving airplay on 47 radio stations nationwide, with nine songs on its latest record, Set For Life.
The Villas are bringing a 'power-pop riot' to your front door.

Commuter: What made The Villas take the more grown-up approach to music, instead of taking the glam-pop approach?

Bill Villa: Well, we are grown-ups, so I don't know how glamorous we could make it, even if we wanted to (laughs). We just write 'em how we know 'em.
Angie Villa: It's not like we decided we were going to write songs a certain way. It's our influences. That's just what comes out.
BV: There's a lot of calculation to the details of songwriting, but as far as the style that we do, we do the style that we know.

Commuter: Who are your biggest influences?

AV: My influences would start in the '70s with Elton John, The Carpenters, Captain and Tennille, and later I moved on to Aerosmith, Led Zeppelin, The Rolling Stones, and REM.
BV: For me, it's The Beatles. I was the perfect age when Beatlemania hit. I was in front of the TV set on February, 9, 1964 when the Beatles were on the Ed Sullivan show, and like hundreds of millions of my generation, it affected me in a life-changing way. The Beatles are my major influence, and of course Elvis Costello, he's a big influence on me too. Also bands like The Ramones and a lot of the singer songwriters from the '70s like Jackson Browne and Joni Mitchell.

Commuter: Where would you place your career right now? Are you behind where you thought you'd be, or ahead?

BV: I guess behind.
AV: Yeah, we thought with all this national radio play we have now that we'd maybe have scored a song in a movie or on a TV show or something.
BV: Or some kind of record deal. I think our stuff is very marketable. You hear a lot of power-pop like ours on TV commercials these days, in TV shows, and even coming back on the radio with bands like Jet, The Vines and Fountains of Wayne. But look how long it took Fountains of Wayne. This is their third or fourth great record and the Grammy's just nominated them for best "new" artist this year. It takes a long time to punch through the national consciousness, or even the local consciousness. There's so much competition.
AV: There's just so many bands. Everybody's in a band (laughs).
BV: It seems when people take the time to listen to us, they really like us. But people are so busy, and there's so much to listen to, and that's the problem.

Commuter: Did you want to start as an acoustically driven band, or did it just happen that way?

BV: I just play acoustic rhythm guitar better than I play electric lead guitar. But I play it loud, like it's electric. I do okay playing some lead electric parts in the studio, and there's a couple of songs on the new record that I play lead guitar solos on.
AV: Which I then have to learn to play live, I have to copy his leads.
BV: In the studio I'm OK on lead guitar, but I need, um ... several takes. You wouldn't want to trust me to reproduce them live.
AV: Yeah, he can't pull it off (laughs). So we go with what we're better at. He's a better lead singer than I am, so he sings lead vocal on 99 percent of the songs, and I sing background harmonies. But I'm a better guitar player than he is. I think I have better training than he does (laughs). I actually took lessons, so I know a little more.
BV: Angie's a really great guitar player, she's like that line in "Sultans of Swing,"(Dire Straits), "Check out guitar George, she knows all the chords."

Commuter: Angie, do you feel sometimes you don't fit in, because 99 percent of lead guitarists are men?

AV: No, I don't feel like I don't fit in, because I just do what I do naturally. I play to support the song. I don't just get up there and wank (laughs). It's not necessary, it's not the kind of music we play, it's not really open jam kind of stuff.
BV: Our songs are very precise and concise.
AV: Yeah.

Commuter: What are your biggest career highlights?

BV: There's been quite a few of 'em. Getting to open for Los Lonely Boys and Lucinda Williams in Santa Fe, New Mexico, at a 7,500 seater outside last summer was really exciting. Getting to play on a stage where they had 48 channels of just monitor mix, (laughs) you know, that was really fun.
AV: And getting to be backstage and seeing Lucinda Williams.
BV: And getting to see those Santa Fe people out there in 110 degree heat dancing to our songs that they were hearing for the first time. That was really neat and certainly a highlight. But we did a show on March 14 at a guy's house in Highland Park, New Jersey, a guy who puts on house concerts. There were only maybe like 50 people there but they were just as receptive. So that was a highlight too. And of course, it's always a highlight playing Godfrey Daniels in Bethlehem.
AV: Always a great audience there.
BV: And all of our national radio play has been a highlight.
AV:WXPN.
BV: Yeah, WXPN in Philly is really supporting us in a nice way. They nominated us as Local Band Of TheYear 2003, along with some other bands, but it was nice to be singled out at WXPN and be getting airplay there, and on about 50 other stations around the country. All the airplay has been a neat highlight, especially getting added to the tight playlists of commercial Clear Channel affiliate stations. That's almost impossible to do without major label muscle. So obviously they just like our songs.

Commuter: Which Album were you happier with? Secrets or Set For Life?

BV: The new one, Set For Life.
AV: Oh, definitely.
BV: I think it shows a lot of growth. We'd love to go back and re-record Secrets.
AV: Yeah, I never got to redo my guitar parts, we ended up using my original scratch tracks. I never went back and re-did them. They sound very lo-fi (laughs).
BV: We kept those scratch tracks because Angie didn't make a single mistake on 10 songs.

Commuter: Where would you say you've grown the most since Secrets?

AV: All the gigs we've done since Secrets have really helped. When we got together to make Secrets, we really didn't play out.
BV: We weren't a band yet, so Secrets was kind of an assembly job. We had the songs, and then we applied the performances to the songs. The Villas was the first band I had ever been in. By the time we did Secrets, I hadn't played any gigs with "a band called The Villas."
AV: We had no live experience.
BV: I think if you listen to Set For Life, the vocals are a lot better. That's the result of playing live and me taking some voice lessons. And by the time we recorded Set For Life, most all of the songs on there had been road-tested. We had played them out live for a while. So we sound like a real band on Set For Life.
AV: And when we got into the studio, it was so much easier. We knew exactly what we were doing.
BV: Yeah, we knew exactly what the arrangements should be, and we also knew, more importantly, that the songs worked. Because when we played them live, we could tell that people liked them. When we did Secrets, we didn't really know, was this good or...?

Commuter: There are already bands that have married couples in them such as The White Stripes. Does being married make it easier or harder to write songs?

AV: Are they married, The White Stripes?
BV: Divorced I think (laughs). We may have different feelings on this. I can never get enough of Angie. We're together all the time. We both work at home so we're together 24/7, 365 days a year.
AV: We do everything together. Except for girl's night out (laughs).
BV: I love being with Angie. Whether we're eating dinner, or playing with the kid, or playing guitar. I think she maybe gets sick of me, but I never get sick of her.
AV: It has its good points and bad points. Sometimes I feel like there's no escape (laughs) but yeah, it is fun to do it together.
BV: When you think about songwriting teams over the years, you know, Lennon and McCartney (The Beatles), or Jagger and Richards (The Rolling Stones), in a lot of ways, those people are married.
AV: It helps to know each other really well.
BV: When you collaborate so heavily with one person on songwriting, you're married in a lot of ways.

Commuter: What is your next career move?

AV: Well we definitely want to make another record. We've got ideas for that, so we're excited about it.
BV: And we want to keep building on our national presence, where we actually have more of a presence, more so than locally, because people here seem to prefer cover bands. And we want to make a great third record. I was hoping that maybe when we made a third record there'd be somebody else paying for it, and maybe there will be. I think we'll probably make the record, and then shop it around like crazy before we go press it ourselves. We would like to have the right record deal I think. Even though you can become a successful cottage industry via the web these days, it's kind of a pain in the butt to do it that way. Record labels have more muscle behind them. They can get you on Conan O'Brien or Letterman.

Commuter: Have you started writing for the next record yet?

AV: We've started writing new songs, and we always have a backlog of songs that we have to go back to and re-work. We always have material, that's never a problem, but we like to keep it fresh and write new songs too.

Commuter: Do you have a tentative date set that you'd like to have a new record out by?

AV: We'd like to start it soon and get it out maybe next year. Set For Life took a year to make, and I was pregnant and had a baby during it.

Commuter: I understand the two of you met through a personals ad reading "Chain-smoker compulsively working on music."

AV: Yeah, I answered Bill's ad (laughs). It turned out we had a lot in common. We met at a bookstore, Barnes and Noble, and we both had cassettes of our songs. So we went out, drove around, and listened to each other's songs. It turned out we knew some of the same people and had similar friends in the music biz. So we got together and started working on music. We started recording in Bill's dining room. He had a little studio, so we started recording there. Some of those recordings are really nice. We'll be married five years in June.

Commuter: A show of yours at a theater in Allentown sold out recently, correct?

AV: Yes, the Theater Outlet. That was a happening kind of thing. We had music, art, dance, and food in one night. We had an artist friend of mine, Rosemary Geseck, showing her artwork, and Bill's daughter dancing. They were turning people away at the door, which we didn't like. It was a big event and a lot of people came and it was really fun.
BV: It was right after Angie had Gianni. We called it M.A.D. Fun Downtown, and M.A.D. stood for Music, Art, Dance. We want to do another happening like that.

Commuter: You are currently using Dave Baun for bass, and both Dave Ferrara and Lee Sandt for drums, because they are available at different times. Do you feel that you've got an edge by having two drummers tag-teaming for different shows, with different styles?

BV: Yeah, and I think we sound good with either of them. We've always had two drummers in rotation. We like Dave Ferrara because he played drums on both of our records. Dave tours with Herman's Hermits and Peter Noone so he's playing 150 dates a year in front of sold-out houses and not always available for us. But he's a great resource to have because he's from the world of 'professional show business.' And he's really easy to work with. If you want him here at 7:00 for a practice, he's here at twenty of, and he'll have his homework all done. So we'd always want to be associated with Dave. One of our problems has always been finding an equally good and pro second drummer who, when we're playing with him, we're not looking at each other and thinking, "I wonder what Dave Ferrara's doing right now" (laughs). But with Lee Sandt we never have that. Lee does an excellent job and he's just as professional as Dave Ferrara. And Dave Baun is truly amazing on bass. Put it all together and The Villas is a power pop-rockin' riot.

Commuter: What do you think of the Lehigh Valley's music scene?

BV: Well, it's sorta barren, for original music, with a couple of oasis exceptions.
AV: Like Godfrey Daniels, WDIY ...
BV: There's not much interest in original music around here. Most people here like hearing the same cover bands over and over. And with not much fan demand for original music, the local media doesn't cover it much, commercial radio doesn't do much with it, and you have hardly any venues that book it, so that makes it really tough here. That's why with WXPN getting behind us in Philadelphia, we're trying to make Philly our hometown. Philly's a place where an original band can launch from.

Commuter: Any final thoughts?

BV: The real monsters of rock were walking the earth in the '60s, '70s, and early '80s. Sorta like bad xeroxes, most of the 'new' stuff from the mid-'90s on just keeps fading and getting less and less original. No wonder the music biz is falling apart financially. Be interested in music history, kids. Check out some of the older acts. A lot of them are still doing some of their best work, and there's some older, new acts doing some really cool music out there too, like The Villas.
AV: I'm just a home-maker moonlighting as a lead guitar player.

Check out The Villas online: Villasongs.com

Upcoming appearances:

Friday Night, May 28, 2004
THE RAUBSVILLE INN
"New Orleans on the Delaware River"
25 Canal Road, Easton Pa
9 p.m.

Saturday Night, August 7, 2004
TRIUMPH BREWING COMPANY
400 Union Square, Bridge Street
New Hope, Pa

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