Everett band finds success on MySpace

Published 9:00 pm Monday, September 25, 2006

I t all started in the basement of Eric Bowley’s home in the Silver Lake area of Everett.

Make that his parents’ home.

It’s the pretty typical evolution of a rock band story: Vocalist meets guitarist. They jam. They write some songs together and set out to conquer the world.

But here’s where The Scene Aesthetic veers off the normal course.

New bands usually try to flood their hometown with demo tapes and CDs and live shows at the American Legion hall and at dingy bars where they have to move pool tables aside to set up in a corner and play in front of five people, two of whom just wanted to shoot pool.

But Bowley and guitarist Andrew de Torres, both 20, had a different plan. They were aiming to flood their community, all right. But, for these guys, it was a global community.

The acoustic rock duo posted its first song, “Beauty in the Breakdown” on the popular social networking Web site MySpace.com in January 2005. Less than two years later, MySpace users have played the song online more than 3 million times, and the band has racked up nearly 9 million total plays of “Beauty” and a handful of songs it has posted since.

The guys’ friend Brandon Metcalf saw enough potential that he provided the equipment for them to record a CD’s worth of tunes in two weeks, while he was home for Christmas vacation from college in Utah. Metcalf took the recordings home, mixed and mastered them and released the duo’s first CD, “Building Homes From What We’ve Known,” on his brand new independent label, Destiny Worldwide.

The guys promoted themselves mercilessly on MySpace.com, gathering up 140,755 “friends,” at last count, and creating banners, which are ads that people post on their personal sites and lead users to the band’s profile and music.

“As things started to catch on, it was kind of like a wildfire,” Bowley said. “We didn’t even expect it. It was completely unplanned.”

The online success was enough to back a two-month tour of the United States that paid for itself and yielded enough profit to allow Bowley to quit his job at Everett’s Best Buy store, where he sold televisions.

Now and then, reality would sink in for Bowley, who said, “We’d be in, like, West Palm Beach, Florida, and it was just really surreal. Like, what are we doing here?”

“There were a lot of eye-openers on tour,” Bowley said. “The realization comes when you’re on stage and playing this stuff you wrote with one of your really close friends in your bedroom, and these people are singing with you and they want to take pictures with you. When that happens, that’s when you realize this is a bigger deal than we ever thought we would get to be.”

Now it’s time to see whether all this online success will translate into even bigger things. Bowley said the duo was approached by large record labels during the tour, but decided to hold off on signing any contracts for now.

He said they have a deal with Red Distribution, a division of Sony-BMG that distributes independent-label CDs, to re-release of “Building Homes From What We’ve Known” on a retail level early next year that will get it into major record stores, online stores, such as Amazon.com, and Apple’s iTunes Music Store.

They have already sold nearly 10,000 copies of the CD on tour and through their Web site.

“We feel comfortable with what we’ve done,” Bowley said. “We don’t want it to get out of hand. We want to maintain a lot of the artists’ creative rights and it’s in our control. We like the way it’s going.”

Columnist Victor Balta: 425-339-3455 or vbalta@heraldnet.com.