Matt Cosby - Bass Jake Roche - Guitar Joe Smith - Vocals Kerry Ryan - Drums Nick Goodale - Guitar
How did a rock band from the small working town of York, Maine, score two local radio hits and a major label deal less than two years after graduating from high school? Let's review: While their classmates were sweating SAT prep work, Joe Smith, Nick Goodale, Matt Cosby, Jake Roche and Kerry Ryan spent the late Œ90s studying the classics‹Zeppelin, Aerosmith, Skynyrd and The Who. The young group learned their old school lessons well‹especially the part about foregoing fashion statements in favor of the fundamentals. At night, they burned the midnight oil, practicing and writing freewheeling rock songs into the wee hours, then road-testing the tracks at any hole-in-the-wall that would have them. By the time they graduated in June of 2000, the quintet‹a.k.a. Jeremiah Freed‹had already secured management and a fervent following that stretched from Boston to Portland. The kids were most definitely alright.
Jeremiah Freed's signature sound, Smith's soulful vocal grit, Goodale and Roche's glorious guitar work, and the propulsive kick of bassist Cosby and drummer Ryan‹brings back rock's once-confident swagger by stomping to the beat of a different drummer‹not a drum machine. And by reflecting back on hard rock's Œ70's roots, Jeremiah Freed is helping to restore confidence in the battered genre's future. More importantly, the band's songs seem to reach not just one gender, region or age group‹but all of them. Says frontman Joe Smith, "I've had kids come up to me after a show and say, ŒMan, I've never heard anything like that before.' Then two minutes later, an adult will walk over and say, ŒYour songs really bring me back to the good old days.' It's an amazing feeling to think that your music can bridge generations."
This past October, the hard-working band went the D.I.Y. route with a self-issued, self-titled debut disc. Famed producer Beau Hill (Alice Cooper, Ratt, Bad Brains) recorded two of the album's tracks ("Again" and "How They All Got Here"). "Beau met our manager, liked the music, and flew out to Maine to work with us," enthuses Smith. "That was incredible. At first we were really intimidated at the thought of working with him, but we clicked immediately. He was open-minded and treated us as if we were his equals. It was a wicked good time." Within a few weeks of the album's release, a copy made its way to WCYY, an alternative rock station in Portland, Maine. No one could have predicted what came next.
"I heard the song 'Again' and immediately knew it was a hit," says Brian James, the program director at WCYY. "We decided to play it and the audience response was overwhelming. It ended up being one of the top five most requested songs, then spent a solid two months at No. 1 on our [afternoon program] Top 5 at 5. They outperformed‹or performed as well‹as bands like Creed and Puddle of Mudd." Shortly afterward, the station began playing "How They All Got Here" and that shot to No. 1, with "Again" right behind it in the No. 2 slot.
Says James, "You can hear that these guys grew up listening to their parents' records. That's definitely what attracted me."
Fueled by constant airplay, the album took off at retail, selling close to 2000 copies in just a matter of weeks. As if that weren't enough, Jeremiah Freed was invited to play alongside Nickelback and Saliva on WCYY's sold-out holiday show at the Cumberland County Civic Center. "Here we are," says Smith, "An unsigned band with the No. 1 and No. 2 song on a commercial radio station, and we're on this amazing bill playing in front of 8000 people. We went from zeroes to heroes."
Remarkably, a month after releasing their own album, Jeremiah Freed signed with Republic/Universal Records and went back into the studio with Hill. Smith is still shocked by the speed of events. "We've only been together since we were high school sophomores," says the 20-year-old singer. "Nick and I grew up together. We used to play basketball every day until his father taught him how to play a few chords on the guitar. Rather than play basketball by myself, I took up singing and we started writing songs together. Next came Kerry, then Matt and Jake. I know bands that were together for 10 or 13 years before anything ever happened, and we're getting this chance now. It's just amazing."
Jeremiah Freed's talent and unapologetic love of heartfelt rock & roll comes through loud and clear on their self-titled major label debut, an album that bristles with effortlessly arching melodies, sing-along hooks and solid, punchy guitars. The band plays and writes with a maturity well beyond their years, crafting melodically gripping songs that cut right to the emotional core. "We're just an American rock band, playing the kind of music we like to listen to," says Smith.
Smith's powerful, impassioned vocals lend emotional impact to the explosive bar-band dynamics of "Rain" and the guitar-jangled glow of "Reason." He wrestles with personal demons in "How They All Got Here" and "Again," addressing and assessing relationships from the inside and out. His confessional lyrics are fleshed out by the scorching guitar heroics of lead player Goodale and rhythm partner Roche, a duo who work as one, slamming out spirited leads and lean, muscular chords one minute, then painting atmospheric pastels the next. Holding it all together are Ryan and Cosby, the band's rhythmic glue and anchor.
The album's emotional centerpiece is the heartrending "Out of Trust," a song written in honor of Smith's late father, Charlie, who passed away last winter after a heroic four-year battle with cancer. As the band tells it, Charlie was an inspiration to all who met him, a strong-willed man who fought and lived three-and-a-half years longer than doctors expected. The song was written shortly after his death. Jeremiah Freed are dedicating the album to his memory.
Says Smith, "He was one of our biggest supporters. He was a really conservative guy, the kind who believed in the four year plan‹four years of high school, followed by four years of college, then you wait four years and get married, and then four after that, you have kids. Despite that, when we graduated, he said to me, Œdon't go to school. You should play music. You need to follow your dreams. I'll never forget that."
