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By Amy Sciarretto Team Spirit I Am Ghost vocalist Steve Juliano had the dream job. He was working in Los Angeles, doing storyboards for HBO’s Tales From the Crypt and enjoying life in the entertainment business when he was bitten by the music bug. “I went to a party and there was a band playing in the living room,” Juliano recalls with fondness. “Everyone was watching this ska-punk band jam without a singer. I had few beers in me, so I karaoked some Sublime covers and they said, ‘We need a singer.’ I told them I was not a singer and I had never been in a band. But I got hooked.” That singer-less band was his first, but isn’t how he formed I Am Ghost. Rather, IAG is Juliano’s fifth band now. He is a natural when it comes to the music sphere, since he grew up appearing in theatrical productions and musicals, courtesy of his mom. He learned to sing, to fully pronounce his words and never had a chance to develop stage fright. He may have had a great pre-music career, but it’s obvious that the gravitational pull to perform and make music was inescapable and in his blood. But the road to success with I Am Ghost was a rocky, unpaved one for Juliano. “We were signed after our fourth show ever,” Juliano recalls about the band’s humble beginnings. “The core members were only together for five months and we didn’t know each other well. We didn’t tour and didn’t know the niches of people’s personalities and what we could deal with while on the road. We did as much as we could as members of the band, but it never feel like the right core to me.” Juliano assembled the band himself, culling members from MySpace and other online means. Despite the band having a shaky core, fans were gathering, scooping up tickets and records. “It’s like we were stuck with what we had,” Juliano admits. But the band kept touring and paying its dues, posting 300 shows in 2007, morphing from no touring experience at all to earning deserved “road dog” status. With Those We Left Behind, I Am Ghost continues with its ghostly and ghastly, Edward Scissorhands-meets-Corpse Bride aesthetic, emerging from the drama with a tight album of neo-pop-punk, loaded with enough melodies to have you pogo-ing all over the dance floor. Juliano admits that it was a scary period, going from relative obscurity to healthy scene success, saying, “We didn’t know what would happen next. But splitting with the old members was like a cancer in the body. You have cancer in your arm and it keeps growing, so you have to cut off the arm and save the body from infestation.” It’s a harsh metaphor, but Juliano isn’t pulling any punches or hiding from the truth about I Am Ghost’s road from there to here. He’s super proud of the album, recorded in Maryland, saying, “The record is the darkest, most honest we can be. Our last record had Latin choirs, cellos and violins, which was too much. We pared it down. We said we’re a punk hardcore rock band, and let’s just be that. We cut the fat and did a rock album.” ON THE WEB: Oct. 12— Glass House (Pomona) On the web: iamghostmusic.com |
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Copyright © 2002 Mean Street Magazine, LLC |
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