Country Fame Comes to Gloriana

Tiffany13 Mon Oct 05, 2009 5:19 pm

Here's a phone interview with Mike that i found.It's a pretty new interview, posted September 2,2009 You cant hear the interiveiw, you have to read it. But its an awsome interview, they talk about touring with Taylor, preforming on Good Morning America,and more. So make sure to read it! Here ya go..

Could Gloriana be the next big thing in country music?

Superstar Taylor Swift sure thought so when she personally called the new group up to join her on her Fearless 2009 Tour. Renowned Grammy-winning producer/label executive Matt Serletic was "blown away" the first time he heard the young country-pop quartet, signing them to his Emblem Music Group label.

Fans are catching on. The band's debut single, "Wild at Heart" is the best-selling single from a new country act in 2009, and their four-song digital collection "The Way It Goes" debuted at No. 3 on the iTunes Country Album chart.
I caught up with Gloriana's Mike Gossin for a phone interview while the band was in Louisville, Ky. on a tour stop. It was a bit surreal for me, because Mike and his brother/co-bandmate Tom, both lived in Wilmington, N.C. for some time and I spent years watching Tom play the local bars, clubs and restaurants before he moved to Nashville. I couldn't interview Tom on Sunday because he was on vocal rest, but Mike shared the Gloriana story instead:

Question | Where are you today?

Answer | Louisville, Kentucky. Are you in Wilmington?

Q. | I am. I'm still here. I can't believe I get to talk to you guys while you're on the road touring.

A. | I know, isn't it weird? This is our fifth show in the row (tonight). We had to do TV shows also. We did Good Morning America, The Today Show and we're doing shows at night and rehearsals during the day. Tom's voice sounds like a whisper so we got him on some steroids right now. He's trying to get his voice back before tonight.

Q. | What was it like performing on Good Morning America?

A. | That was amazing. It wasn't our first TV performance because we got to play at the CMT Awards - that was actually our first television performance. They were really great. Everyone at both of those shows just treated us really well. I don't think any of us were as nervous as we were when we did the awards show - that being our first. I think we're kind of getting used to it now, finally.

Q. | So what is life like on the road? You and Tom played locally around Wilmington, then went to Nashville and now you're touring. What's it like to be a touring act now?

A. | It's awesome. It really is. You know, Tom and I loved playing Wilmington. We were playing four nights a week, five nights a week for a really long time. Tom was doing it by himself before I moved. And it's funny, you do that for a while and you're like "Man, I so wish I was on tour, I so wish I was on a bus." And then you do this for a while and you miss the other thing.

So it's a balancing act. I think with too much of anything, you start to miss what you did before.

Q. | So what is it like touring with Taylor Swift?

A. | It's great. It's all arena shows, so it's anywhere from 15,000 to 20,000 people a night that we're getting to play in front of. It's just a rush. Tom and I have been doing this for about 10 years now, but for a band that's relatively new (we've only been together for 2 years) it's like to come out and start playing stadiums for 15 to 20,000 people is pretty amazing.

Taylor Swift has been so good to us, too. She personally called us up when we were doing our radio tour, which was us basically a 15 passenger van driving everywhere in the country to every country radio station, just trying to get them to play the music. We were just getting back in the van after visiting a radio station one day and she called us up and was like, "I love your music and I want to ask you to come out on tour with me before anybody else does." We thought it was a joke at first. We thought it was the record label pranking us and we're like, "No way." And she's like "No, really." And we're like "Oh my gosh, that's awesome, absolutely, we'll do it!"

She's really such a sweetheart. She involves us. We come out at the end of the show and do a song with her. There's this big video screen and she has pictures of us and her hanging out that come up throughout the show.

For her to reach out to a new band like us and give us the opportunity to do this - a lot of the success of this band is really owed to her for giving us this opportunity.

Q. |So, I want to know when you guys decided to move to Nashville? What was the prompt there? Just time to get out of Wilmington and move on?

A. | We were doing bars and restaurants. We were playing Wild Wing Cafe, The Dirty Martini, Wilson's, The Whiskey - just all week long. And it's always been a dream of ours. We're like, "Man it would be so cool to move to Nashville and just start meeting people and writing and seeing what it's all about," 'cause we had been there before.

So we saved up a little bit of money from playing and finally we were like you know what, let's just go for it. We went and we immediately found Rachel on her music MySpace page, which was awesome. Then we found Cheyenne and the three of us were playing out in Nashville at a bar called 3rd and Lindsley, we wrote our first song and gave us a record label and just kind of took off from there.

Q. | How did you guys fall into the hands of producer Matt Serletic?

A. | After Cheyenne joined the band, we wrote our first song. We had a manager at the time who knew Matt and his brother Dean. They were starting a record label and he said "It would be really good to get introduced to these guys." We said "Yeah, he's one of our favorite producers." So we sent him the song and within a week or two we had record contracts - they loved it! They're like "This is really, really, really good." We went to Los Angeles, flew out there and played for them and got to meet him it was really cool.

Q. | Who came up with the group name Gloriana?

A. | It was me, actually. We were in the break room in the studio, eating dinner and tossing around the word Glory and I just threw out Gloriana and it just stuck. Everybody liked the sound of it and to get everybody to agree on it was a good sign. We knew we had something good.

Q. | Do you have a favorite track or tracks on your debut?

A. | Yeah, there are two. A song called "How Far Do You Wanna Go," which is going to be our next single. And then there's another song that we wrote on the record called "Time To Let Me Go," which is one of the first songs we wrote together as a group.
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Source:Thesunnews.com