As Australia's Red Bull Bedroom Jam winners, Way With Words, visit the Red Bull Studio in Santa Monica, Dustin Downing catches up with the youthful band for a chat...
By the time I was 18, all I had ever recorded was the outgoing message on my answering machine - an undistinguished feat far below the achievements of 16-year-old Joey Cirillo, frontman of Australia’s newest pop/alt group Way With Words.
Joey and his stoked band of teen demons - Dylan Giannakopoulos (guitar), Luke Mann (guitar), Sam Berry (bass) and Jack Nicholls (drums) - have spent the past seven days in Los Angeles recording their first EP at Red Bull Studios; an $80,000-value reward for winning Australia’s first Red Bull Bedroom Jam.
© Red Bull Studios
Red Bull’s Bedroom Jam is an online music competition that is giving young bands their chance to get out of their homes and onto the stage. Each band first posts a video on YouTube, anything from a cell phone to a professionally shot video, to showcase their musical talent. Then it’s time to spread the word across Facebook, Twitter, music websites and forums, and the wider web. The more people who watch, comment on and rate their video, the higher they’re likely to soar up the Buzz Chart - which is a specialized web crawler which measures a band's hype across the web - the more people talking, the better their chance to win!
“When we discovered it on the web, there were only like two other bands signed up. So, we were all, maybe we have a chance,” says Dylan. “Then, like 100 other bands signed up after us and we thought, no chance,” add Joey. The band took first and second round defeats in their stride as Jack puts it, “Heck, we’d only been together 42 days 6 hours and 42 seconds when we entered.” “Yeah, the video we sent in was from our first show ever this September. Shit! We haven’t been around that long,” realizes Sam.
But in the end, this band's unique youthful energy coupled with a sound akin to Jack’s Mannequin and Panic At The Disco tipped the Buzz Chart and won over the crowd and judges at the finals. “It was an amazing feeling twice.” says Luke, “Jack caught a glimpse of the paper while we were waiting for the announcement and was jumping around on stage all, ‘We won, we won’ before the people could even get in over the speaker. So they had to calm us down and then we got to celebrate again.”
© Red Bull Studios
So what's next for the band once they return to Australia? “We really think we should be signed with (wink-wink) Red Bull Records in the near future,” predicts Dylan.
Part of Red Bull’s goal for the winner is to “provide long term career support to the artists who work hardest in the rehearsal room and on promotion to equip them with all the tools and opportunities that they need to connect with thousands of new fans in both the online and real worlds.”
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