Additional Details

Additional details

Been Together Since: 1996

Sounds Like: An alternative rock band aspiring to play anything with a good melody.

Members

Jeff Crowder -- vocals, guitar
Carlos Fumero -- vocals, guitar, keyboard
Jason Light -- bass
David Garcia -- drums

MP3S

It look's like you don't have Adobe Flash Player installed. Get it now.

After All

It look's like you don't have Adobe Flash Player installed. Get it now.

Silence

It look's like you don't have Adobe Flash Player installed. Get it now.

Lynt

It look's like you don't have Adobe Flash Player installed. Get it now.

Big Gulp

Audio Interview

Discography

Last Year's New Thing, 2002
Empty Seas and Memories, 2007

Where To Buy

• iTunes
• CDBaby.com

Review

Onstage, Deep Ella performs as if alone in the studio. Its members marvel at their own musicality, playing as if the fans, with their flickering lighters and boisterous abandon, were not an audience at all, but an integral part of the band.

"We want to be the band everyone feels like they can be a part of," says Jeff Crowder, lead singer of the upstart, artsy rock group.

Deep Ella -- Crowder, Rob Atherton (guitar), Pat Murphy (drums) and former roadie turned bassist Jason Light -- also wants to develop a reputation for delivering distinctly different songs. All the tunes from debut album Last Year's New Thing showcase the band's willingness to sculpt a new identity with each piece.

"With our music, you won't hear 'Oh, they sound like so and so,'" Murphy says. "One of our biggest goals was to make sure that not all the songs sound the same. We just have this unmistakable sound."

Since its inception in 1996, Deep Ella has seen its local celebrity grow. Often described as a sonic hybrid of U2 and Peter Gabriel, the band has forged its own anti-pop consortium replete with coherent lyrics, hefty melodies and fleshy arrangements.

"We play what we feel we should play," says Atherton. "We're not trying to be a cookie-cutter band. The way we look at it, by making the music we feel, make it or not, we've succeeded. We don't want to be doing what everyone else is doing."

That adherence to playing outside the box has also helped build a respectable fan base.

"We made history at the Sidecar Pub," Crowder says. "It was the first time that place had ever sold out. We went from not playing for two years to having a good draw because we promote the hell out of ourselves."

Their pit-bull enthusiasm is easy to digest considering that Crowder and Murphy completed their quartet by placing ads in the newspaper.

"We put this ad in the paper for a guitar player and Rob called," Crowder recalls. "When I heard him on the phone with his English accent, I knew he was the guy for the job."

Atherton doesn't mind that it took moving across the Atlantic to find a band that would allow him to express his musical talents.

"I wanted to be part of a band that focused on good song writing and melodies," he says. "And compared to English music fans, the fans here are real purists. That definitely presents more of a challenge."

And that's a challenge the promising collective has been able to meet by keeping the creative process wholly internal.

"We're 100 percent self-produced," Murphy says. "A lot of the songs were built in the studio in the beginning and that was tough."

"Yeah, we all got to know Pat's couch really well," adds Jeff, speaking of the recording studio in Murphy's house.

But now we've got a cohesive unit and new songs come much easier," Murphy adds. "We're all driving forces in the band. We all collectively think about whatever we do musically."

With influences that range from the Smiths to Ben Harper to the Beatles, Deep Ella has carved out its own brand of sticky melodies that has people listening. Just don't ask them to put a label on what they do.

"Green eggs and ham," Crowden says. "That's what I tell people when they ask us put a label on our kind of music. I mean, that's a hard question to have to answer. We just make music that we feel."

And while they don't play radio-friendly music, their strict musical values should not be interpreted as a lack of desire to make it big. They like their day jobs -- Atherton's a graphic artist, Light's a horticulturist, Crowder's an art student and Murphy's a lawyer -- but Crowder says "Sure we want the big record contract, who doesn't? But in today's musical climate, you kind of have to already make it on your own before the big labels will consider signing you. You've got to build a fanbase yourself. Right now, though, we're just having a great time because we get to play our music."

-- Maurice Bobb | September 30, 2002