Eisley sounds like a fairy tale. The band — composed of home-schooled family members from small-town Texas — formed about a decade ago when keyboardist/singer Stacy DuPree was only 7.
The quintet — sisters Stacy, Sherri and Chauntelle, their brother Weston and a friend, Jon Wilson — released a pair of stunning, dreamy rock EPs in 2003, which set the stage for tours with Coldplay and Snow Patrol. The full-length debut, 2005's "Room Noises," led to tours with New Found Glory, Hot Hot Heat and Switchfoot, as well as headlining tours of their own.
Not bad for a family band whose oldest member is 24."We never deal with sibling-rivalry issues or anything like that," singer/guitarist Sherri DuPree, 22, said in a phone interview. "We grew up really close. Each of us were each other's best friends."
As if to prove the point, she and the rest of the band are talking and laughing as they walk through downtown Portland, Ore., looking for a place to grab a quick lunch. There's none of the tension that might be expected from a gaggle of youths trying to pick a fast-food joint.
"It's helpful that we're all related because we're not as afraid to step on each other's toes, not in a bad way, but we're close, so we're able to talk through things and work out issues," she added. "We all have the same ideas about musically what we want to do with the songs and everything like that. We're on the same wavelength, so it makes working as a band a lot easier."
Eisley believes the saying that the family that plays together stays together. When Wilson left last summer to pursue other interests, Eisley added cousin Garron DuPree, now 16, to the mix as bassist.
"He fits right in," Sherri said. "Obviously, he's part of the family, so it was a really smooth transition from our last bass player."
The band has been busy touring and writing new music, and plans to head back into the studio this summer to work on an album. Fans will get an earful of new tunes at the Club Congress show Sunday.
"It's a more mature, grown-up Eisley, opposed to the first album when we were so young," Sherri said.
Sherri admits that reading fairy tales and fictional literature inspired a lot of the band's early lyrics, but the new music doesn't have quite the same youthful whimsy.
"On the first album it had a lot to do with us being really young and not having a lot of life experience to draw from, so we tended to fall back on making up completely fictional songs," she said. "We've been a band now for 10 years and we've written so many songs and toured endlessly, so I think there's more content to these next songs."
Just because the members are growing up doesn't mean the fantasy is ending. In fact, Sherri's personal fairy tale with New Found Glory guitarist Chad Gilbert is just beginning.
"We totally became best friends on tour. It was amazing, and we got engaged in December," she said. "It was a fairy-tale crazy thing."
Gilbert popped the question at the Hollywood premiere of the movie version of Sherri's favorite book, "The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe."
"This year is going to be totally crazy because my fiance and I are building a house, we have to plan the wedding and we have all these tours and we have to make the album," she said. "It's going to be lots of touring and not seeing each other, but we know what we signed up for."
Sherri will be the first DuPree to leave the nest after the February wedding, but she and the rest of the family plan to stick together and continue making their enchanting rock.
"We're in it for the long haul," she said. "We're so passionate about it and we love it so much. I hope I can do this for the rest of my life."
Source: azstarnet.com
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