Cherub
Cherub is living large these days. Tomorrow night, the velvet-smooth electro-pop duo kicks off the two-month North American Blow’d Tour — on which they’ll bring along visually dazzling stage production and document the trek with a video crew — with a headlining gig at the 1,000-plus-cap Cannery Ballroom (tickets
here!). What’s an even bigger BFD is that the band inked a major-label deal with Columbia Records at the end of 2013. Last week, the label sent the band’s semi-viral hit, the near-two-year-old “Doses and Mimosas,” to alternative rock radio, where it debuted in the Top 40.
Kicking back on couches in living room of their East Nashville crash pad — where the beers are ice cold and ice cubes fill the bong on the coffee table — the duo’s Jordan Kelley, 26, and Jason Huber, 25, (two chums who met as music business majors at MTSU and started their ‘80s R&B-fetishizing pop-EDM combo a mere three years ago) are pretty stoked as they talk to the Cream about their whirlwind career thus far. If they (and Columbia) get their way, expect a slew of articles from publications worldwide with ledes having some variation of “electro duo proves there’s more to Nashville than just country music.” From fun facts to crucial deets, here are some key things to know about the band.
They did it the old-fashioned way — through touring.
That’s right, a whole lotta viral love — which Cherub’s received to the tune of more than 1.7 million YouTube views on the “Doses and Mimosas” video — no doubt aided and abetted the band’s success, but it was through three years of relentless road-doggin’, including gig after gig at clubs, frat parties and rave-ish EDM-y shindigs, that they built the kind of word-of-mouth following that resulted in the band doing their first NYC show as headliners at the 700-capacity Highline Ballroom. “The bigger cities, even if you haven’t played them, they are just more up on what’s going out and what’s really new,” Kelley tells the Cream.
Now they’re on a major label.
“For the most part, really, nothing changed,” Kelley says of the bands decision to sign with Columbia Records. “Me and Jason have tried to keep everything as self-sufficient as possible. … We don’t want to be a band that collects a fuck-ton of debt and never makes any money.”
That spendthrift ethos includes cutting their records at a friend’s (producer Nick Curtis) home studio: The Stu, in Franklin, where they recorded their first three albums, in addition to their forthcoming fourth record, which will also be their major-label debut. They recorded most of the album before inking their deal, and finished it with minimal influence and interjection from their corporate overlords at Columbia — “They’re stoked with it,” Kelley says.
The Cherub signing signifies how, more and more, major labels aren’t looking to take baby bands and build businesses around them, but rather jump on board with ones that are already building their own cottage industry and giving them a steroid injection of sorts.
“The way they pitched it to us, and the thing that made us feel comfortable with [signing], was that they were a magnifying glass and they just want to take our vision and put it on a platform that we couldn’t [get to ourselves],” says Huber.
The viral success of “Doses and Mimosas” helped them get a major-label deal.
“I think at this point if labels see a song get the slightest bit of a viral [presence] on the Internet, they contact management and say, ‘Hey, what’s up with [your artist],'” Kelley muses.
In other words, YouTube views and the like are the new A&R barometer, or the music industry’s Gallop poll.
“We didn’t need to take the deal,” he goes on, explaining that the team (booking agent, management, legal, et al.) they’d built was already turning the band into a profitable business. “During the negotiation process we decided that, if it came to it, we would be ready to walk away. … We knew that we were able to keep doing what we were doing and sustain it.”
Their major-label debut will be titled Year of the Caprese.
That’s right, Cherub’s next record will be called Year of the Caprese, and the band hopes to have it out this summer. They’re also planning on playing seven songs from it at tomorrow night’s Cannery show, and one of them is called “Disco Shit.”
Another song currently has the working title “The Back and Forth Song,” but they say they’ll have to change it to avoid similarities to Aaliyah’s 1994 hit “Back and Forth,” which they admit provided the inspiration for the song’s sound and title. In fact, they say that the song was, by sheer coincidence, so sonically similar to another (unnamed) pop song that they had to hire a musicologist to analyze it and make sure they weren’t in an intellectual-property-theft danger zone.
As far as the rest of the record, expect lots of fast tempos with saturated, half-time curveballs that come from left field. “It gets really drippy,” Kelley says, going on to explain that the material also has a heavy R&B influence along with more multi-instrumentation and a heavy dose of vintage, analog synth lines.
They wouldn’t mind being the biggest band in the world.
Columbia believes so much in “Doses and Mimosas,” that the label recently sent the not-all-that-new single to alternative-rock radio, where it cracked the Top 40, making it the “Sounds of Silence” of electro-pop. In Nashville, you might be able to catch a spin on 102.9 The Buzz. “I heard Korn, Disturbed and Stone Temple Pilots while I was listening for us,” Kelley says. “I was just [wondering] what people would think when ‘Doses’ popped up.”
“We were tempted to do the cliché thing and fight it — ‘No, we have so much new music!’ — but our dream for this whole thing is to have it reach a global scale,” Huber says.
They’re more than a party band
Cherub cut their teeth opening for EDM stars like Pretty Lights and MiMOSA and jam-band-friendly outfits like Sound Tribe Sector 9 and Umphrey’s McGhee, so don’t be surprised if you go to one of their gigs and get shoulder-tapped by ravers on the look out for doses and rolls. That said, Kelley and Huber aim to be more than just a “party band.”
“I feel like it’s so temporary when you’re a ‘party band,’” Kelley, the duo’s principal songwriter says. “There’s a catch-22 there — we don’t mind playing and having people party to our music, but I also don’t want it to be a thing where it’s like, the next week they find the next party song. I want to make songs that can connect with people.”
That’s not a whole lot unlike jam culture, though, where one faction of the crowd is their to hang on (or excitedly vibe on) every note, while the rest of the crowd is there because it’s a good place to get the best drugs and party.
They opened for STS9 at Red Rocks.
“Colorado is a really strong market for us,” Kelley says.
They get trolled on hard by STS9 fans
In January, a wiley Sound Tribe Sector 9 fan punked Cherub by tweeting a Photoshopped image implying the duo had stolen STS9 bassist David Murphy, along with the hashtag #Sector9NoMore.
As serendipitously dumb luck would have it, Murphy announced he actually was leaving his own band two hours later. Compounding matters, Murphy actually was due to record some bass tracks on Caprese, but canceled in the wake of the whole leaving-the-band non-troversy.
“[Their fans] we like, ‘Oh shit, this is fucking true!’” Kelley recalls. “There were some heady-ass bros that were making us feel like they were going to kill us.” But most of those irate STS9 fans just tried to get under Kelley and Huber’s skin by “telling us how gay we are,” the singer says with an eye-roll, “like that would make us really defensive. … The thing that’s so mind-blowing about Internet haters is the amount of time and dedication that is spent on negative energy. The people have liked our page and commented on all our threads on, like, a daily basis.”
They at one point lived off McDonald’s while Jordan Kelley really did live off Subway.
Kelley is a former Subway sandwich artist. As luck would have it, a few years back he got laid off two weeks before he was about to quit and go on tour, and supported himself hand-to-mouth existence on the road from the meager unemployment checks. “That was lucky as fuck,” he says.
“We lived on the [McDonald’s] 20-piece for a while,” Huber says of the duo’s early days.
Jordan Kelley is a metalhead at heart
“We play pop music — that’s what it is at the end of the day, just catchy hooks and stuff people can hopefully not feel embarrassed singing [along] to.” Kelley, a native of Lincoln, Neb., explains. “[But] I grew up on metal. I love metal.”
So he was beyond proud when, at one Cherub show, he spotted a metal bro in a Soylent Green t-shirt, thrashing about to the band’s set with reckless abandon. “That’s so awesome that this music translated to him like that, because I just love metal; I love angry, drunken, screaming metal.”
They’re moving up the Bonnaroo marquee.
The band made its Bonnaroo debut two years ago on the modest Budweiser stage. This year they’ll appear on a much larger stage.
