Youthful Eisley shapes magical imagery into
magical sounds
by Marc Hirsh
[photos courtesy of Warner Bros.]
originally published in The Boston Globe, March
31, 2006
Sherri Dupree insists that her band’s songs are just love songs, a natural outgrowth of the music she and her siblings listened to in their formative years, from the Beatles to classic musicals. But the Eisley guitarist knows all too well how her band is often perceived.
“That’s something people always make fun of us for: ‘They write songs about fairies,’” says Sherri. “Just for the record, we have no song with the word ‘fairy’ or ‘fairies’ in it.” She does, however, acknowledge the influence of fairy-tale-based Disney films such Sleeping Beauty and Beauty And The Beast, as well as C.S. Lewis. “The Chronicles of Narnia, that had a big influence on me when I was growing up. I read those when I was 8 or 9 years old, and I was so impacted by those kind of stories that I think they just ended up being engrained into our heads and they come out in our writing still, to this day.”
Indeed, Eisley’s songs are full of imagery that borders on the magical, if not mythical. On last year’s excellent Room Noises, the five-piece band (which headlines the Paradise tonight) sings of spontaneous flight, bees celebrating unexpected romance with airborne pollen sculptures and music itself growing from seeds planted by loved ones past. All of it sways with the slow-motion progress of a sepia-tinged dream, with Sherri and her keyboard-playing younger sister Stacy trading off their honey-thick vocals from verse to verse, singing in fractured harmony and overlapping independent lines, occasionally all in the same song.
The band may have only a single album to its credit, but it’s hardly a debut: Eisley are practically veterans, with a handful of EPs and a much-buzzed about appearance at the 2003 South By Southwest Conference under their belts. There have also been tours with bands as diverse as Switchfoot, Reggie and the Full Effect and Coldplay. To properly grasp the magnitude of the latter, consider that at the time Eisley was an unsigned band whose members had an average age of 18.
The band’s roots lie firmly planted in Tyler, Texas, two hours to the east of Dallas. When sisters Sherri and Chauntelle both started playing guitar almost ten years ago, it was only natural that Stacy wanted to join in. It was also natural that they resisted.
“She was 8 years old and she was like the baby sister who was really annoying, and so we wouldn’t let her,” says Sherri. “She ended up writing a song on her own and she showed it to us, and it was so good for her age. We hadn’t even written a whole song by ourselves yet, so we started writing with each other after that, and we just haven’t stopped.” Brother Weston soon joined on drums – “I guess that was just the natural thing for him to do, being the guy,” Sherri says – and Eisley was born.
A decade later, their youth remains the most difficult preconception to overcome. At 24, Chauntelle is the oldest, and with Stacy and cousin Garron (who turned Eisley into an all-Dupree band when he replaced longtime bass player Jonathan Wilson, who left last year) still of high-school age, Sherri acknowledges that audiences can occasionally be tough to win over. “If you look at us onstage, we’re a bunch of young girls and young guys, and so there’s a tendency for people to not want to take us seriously at first,” she says. “I mean, I don’t know if I would take it seriously at first unless I’d heard our songs.”
That may have also been complicated by the perception that Eisley is a Christian rock group, but while Sherri acknowledges her family’s religious beliefs, she stresses her band’s desire not to be limited to the audience and the subject matter of Christian music. “If you’re a Christian and you’re a painter, you don’t only paint pictures of heaven and angels and stuff,” she says. “So there’s no reason why we should have to write all songs about God just because we’re Christians.”
Instead, the producers who have worked with Eisley look like a who’s-who of secular rock and pop, including John Goodmanson (Sleater-Kinney), Mike Mogis (Rilo Kiley, Bright Eyes), John Shanks (Kelly Clarkson, Sheryl Crow) and Rob Cavallo (Green Day). Despite stepping in for the final few songs after four other production teams had nearly completed Room Noises, Cavallo credits the album’s unified sound to Eisley’s uniqueness and eclecticism. “I think there’s just no one else like them,” he says, “so therefore the music is going to sound like no one else.”
“It comes from a place where it’s almost like God gives it to you and it’s just born, it just comes. They’re such interesting individual personalities, and these three sisters are just amazing to watch. They sing like angels. Their voices come together in a way that is just heavenly and sort of spiritual-sounding, and also it can also be kind of dark and macabre and eerie, too, though,” says Cavallo. “It’s just very artful the way they do things.”
With the tour winding down in May, Eisley is looking ahead to album #2 as Sherri oversees construction on a house and plans her wedding to New Found Glory guitarist Chad Gilbert; the two met, unsurprisingly, when the two bands toured together. Although the band hasn’t decided on a producer yet, Sherri is excited about becoming a three-writer band by including songs by Chauntelle, who Sherri says “kind of dropped off from the writing process” when she and Stacy took to it with such gusto.
If all else fails, there are still more Duprees to recruit back in Tyler, including two younger siblings and Chauntelle’s five-year-old daughter. “So there’s plenty extra, yes,” Sherri jokes. “If anything happens to one of us, we’ll just stick another one in there.”
