Let’s break the ice. Who are you? Where are you from? What style(s) of music do you create?
Well right now the “band” consists of me (Billy R. Preston) and Juliet Gamero. I write the lyrics, play all the guitar parts and the bass parts and Juliet plays all manner of keyboards and mainly specializes in writing chord progressions for the songs and the musical arrangements.
We’ve been doing this now (off and on) for over 18 years and there have been so many other musicians who have come and gone within dizzybloom. Some were permanent for many years and some were just hired guns, but it has now basically come down to the two of us to continue with the name and the torch and to pay all the bills.
Essentially we now consider ourselves a songwriting duo and we rely on a network of musical friends and contacts to play and record instruments that we can’t play ourselves (drums, vocals, etc.) We try as hard as we can to give those guest musicians enough room, creatively, that they feel they are contributing to the music and that they’re able to leave their own personal mark(s) on the songs. We also want them to feel like they were part of the creative process which in turn will make them feel motivated to share the music with their own friends and also want to work with us again in the future.
I was born and raised in the Houston, Texas area and Juliet was born in El Centro, California, but raised in the Salt Lake City area. And by the way, yes, we are married and we currently live south of Provo, Utah, where we work “normal” daytime jobs and raise our four children together. We don’t really live the typical “Rock and Roll” lifestyle and many of the people we know probably aren’t even aware that we write and record music.
I am actually a biologist and I work for the US Forest Service in a very small town in Utah and spend most of my time up in the solitude of the Wasatch Mountains and in the forests around Mount Nebo. I always tell Juliet that she is the lucky one because she can actually claim “musician” as her official work title.
She has been teaching piano since she was about 12 years old and she is very talented and very well-educated when it comes to music. She holds a master’s degree in Piano Performance from the University of Texas in Austin. She can run circles around me when it comes to music theory and she has the ability to hear any modern rock or pop song just a single time and then be able to recite the entire chord progression from start to finish. I know because I’ve tested her on this and I have witnesses.
We use music, and the creation and recording of music, as our way of staying vibrant, happy and fulfilled as human beings. We’ve never been signed to any kind of a recording contract and so we’ve never had anyone looking over our shoulders or telling us how or what to write. So we’ve been able to indulge ourselves in basically whatever we’ve wanted to do musically.
We’ve recorded straight-up rock songs, “progressive” rock songs that were over 11 minutes in length, “jazzy” numbers with bizarre chord progressions and even ambient instrumentals with strange sound effects. Just basically whatever we feel like at the time. This has probably both helped and maybe even hurt us in some respects because it’s made our music extremely difficult to classify and hard to put into a specific genre or radio format.
We’ve been labeled as everything from folk-rock, to powerpop, progressive-ambient and even been severely mislabeled as a “Christian rock” band many times. That last one has always puzzled and even somewhat irritated us for a long time. I will admit that we’ve often used spiritual-type references in our lyrics but the messages have to be taken as a whole and not taken completely out of context. Just because you hear the words “heaven and hell” or other words like “pray”, “spirit” or even “God” it doesn’t mean we’re trying to preach the gospel to someone through our songs or lyrics. Some of these messages and phrases are really not what they seem to be on the surface with a casual listen and some of it is actually even kind of dark.
Our original singer and lyricist (Stacey Evans) wrote with a lot of these types of words and references in her own lyrics. She wasn’t talking about going to church, I can assure you. I won’t speak for her but I know that much of what she was actually talking about were references to severe personal issues she dealt with constantly, substance abuse and confusion about the purpose of life and the realities and fear of death. There was a lot of anguish in there and she was really baring her soul, so to speak. Writing can be a very cathartic exercise and I am guilty of doing this too. But people take us way too seriously.
