Parmalee Feels The Carolina Pride

This Tuesday will be a special day for the four members of the band Parmalee. It’s the day their debut album, “Feels Like Carolina,” will be released.  The first single has already made it to the Top 5.  But now fans will be able to hear more than one example of the band’s music.  The band spoke with Country Countdown USA, and lead singer Matt Thomas had these thoughts about this Tuesday’s release date: “We’re gonna celebrate a lotta hard word, a lotta years, a lotta pride in this record, and a lotta closure, knowing that we got this thing wrapped up, and its ready for people to listen to.  I just can’t wait for everybody to hear it, and I can’t wait to play our first show after everybody has a chance to hear this record, and sing back songs they don’t know yet.  I think this’ll be our biggest sense of accomplishment too.  Finally putting out a top-notch, full length album, for our fans, we’re just proud of it, and happy that it’s almost here.”

It’s been a long hard road for the band from North Carolina.  They’ve been together practically their whole lives.  Lead singer Matt and his brother Scott started playing music with their father Jerry, who led a popular local band.  Scott said music was all they knew:  “I just thought my dad was the coolest person out there, and whatever he did was cool to me.  The music he turned us on to is still what we listen to today.  The Allman Brothers, Bob Seger, Travis Tritt, Otis Redding, that was the stuff we got introduced to.  Because he was so cool, that was what we wanted to do.”  They soon added their cousin Barry.  A few years later they added a friend, Josh McSwain, as guitar player.  That was 12 years ago.  Their name came from the North Carolina town of Parmale, where they practiced two nights a week. The guys found work playing clubs in the Carolinas.  “When we were real young, the college town where we went to was one of the top music towns in the southeast.  This was one block of original music clubs.  There are so many colleges in the southeast, there are plenty of bars for us to play.  We just kept grinding and grinding.  We could only play on weekends, because we had real jobs during the week.”

The turning point came when a manager in Los Angeles suggested they move to Nashville: “That’s when it clicked.  It took a while for the Parmalee sound to find us.  Once we found it and let people listen to our music, people said we had to come to Nashville.”  What is the Parmalee Sound? “It’s good time music.  It’s rock & country with a touch of soul.”

The band then spent some time traveling between the east and west coasts.  It was there that they came up with their first single, “Carolina.”  Lead singer Matt Thomas remembers: “We had been in California, and I came back to North Carolina, and I just had this idea that the studio reminded me of California, but I knew I was in Carolina.  So we had this idea that it feels like Carolina, looks like California.  We’d been working on it in the studio, took it to a producer in Atlanta, and it was one of those moments when it all comes together.  Really cool how it came about” The first line of the song is “Home is where my heart is still beating,” and we asked the guys where they came up with that line: “That was actually from another song.  It was a song called ‘She Loves,’ and I knew I’d use that line somewhere.  You gotta move on, if something’s hot, use it and finish it.  I have dozens of half-finished songs.  We’d been writing so much at our studio at home, and we needed to finish something.  It was a good tune, it was 100% us, and that was awesome to hear that for the first time.  That was 2008.  We knew we had something, but everybody else took more time.”

By 2010, the guys were in Nashville, playing their music for producers and labels, when the story took an unexpected turn.  The guys had just played a show, and were packing their equipment in their RV.  A couple of armed men approached them and demanded money.  Shots were fired, and Scott Thomas, who had a gun, fired back.  Scott was hit three times.  He spent ten days in a coma, and more than a month in the hospital.  Six months later, Scott was able to get behind the drums again.  That was the day they played the showcase that got them their record deal.  The first two songs they recorded were “Carolina” and “Musta Had a Good Time.”  Those are two of the twelve songs on their debut album, “Feels Like Carolina,” available December 10th.

Tags: parmalee

Category: New Artist