Gone West members Colbie Caillat, Justin Young, Jason Reeves and Nelly Joy had been friends for years, but it wasn’t until just recently that they decided to come together as a band.
“Like two years ago, we all figured, ‘We hang out, write all the time in different formations together,’ and we thought, ‘Let’s write a song and see what happens and if we like it, we will go from there,’” Caillat told PopCulture.com. “And now we’re Gone West.”
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Each member of the group has a different musical background — Caillat found success as a pop singer, Joy was a member of country duo The JaneDear Girls, Young made his name in the Hawaiian music scene and Reeves is a singer-songwriter — and they admitted that fitting their various styles together was a bit of a challenge.
“It took many tries,” Reeves said. “It’s kinda like making a jambalaya, if the jambalaya is music and the ingredients are all of us. We all kind of come from similar places musically, just each of them being unique. We all have our different styles and our different tastes and stuff we like, but they’re not that far away from each other. In my opinion, they kind of share a commonality.”
“We all have our different backgrounds in music, but there’s also some overlap on all of them,” Young mused. “We like telling stories, we like real songs that mean something personal to all of us, we like harmonies and we like acoustic instruments. And so I think we had that in common, and the fact that we all have these unique musical backgrounds sort of makes this jambalaya so special.”
Ultimately, Gone West succeeded in their goal, finding a musical style that’s captivating, harmonic and all their own. In January, they released their first EP, Tides, and followed it with the single “What Could’ve Been” in June, which serves as the lead-off single from their upcoming debut album.
“The majority of the record is heartbreak songs,” Caillat revealed. “We have a lot people around us going through it, and honestly, we all feel like, those are the ones that hit you the hardest emotionally and that people around the world can relate to and we’ve all related to. So, they feel really good to sing too.”
Young added that the project will also have a bit of Hawaiian influence, including ukulele and Hawaiian language.
“It wasn’t ’til I moved to Nashville that I realized that there’s a lot of crossover and there’s a lot of similarities,” Young explained. “Hawaiian music is folk music from Hawaiians, and country music is folk music of the people, of the rest of the country.”
Gone West is composed of two couples — Caillat and Young are engaged and Joy and Reeves are married — which means its members are never lonely on the road.
“I always wanted to be in a band, I always had stage fright at the beginning of my career and even now,” Caillat shared. “It naturally progressed for us to start this band, but it was something that I also really did want, for a long time and I’m loving it. Especially, that we’re friends and we’re with our significant others, it makes traveling really fun.”
Photo Credit: Getty / Steve Jennings
