“Honestly I thought ‘we’re not going to be a band’. That was my honest thought […] I was like I don’t know if we can do this we all have very different styles,” songwriter and vocalist Emili Alexa Romano thought as she met with her classmates for the first time to form the band “Out of Nowhere.”
However, doubt and skepticism turned into excitement once the band made progress on its first song.
Band keyboard player Justin Matteau said “As soon as we had the makings of the first song, the body of the first song, we were like ‘wow we can actually make songs and do this together. This could actually work.’”
That first meeting took place in October, now the band is preparing for its first concert and its first Extended Play album release on Friday, Feb. 3 in the Burnight Theatre at 7 p.m.
The group began as a challenge from Cerritos College Director of Commercial Music Andrew Maz.
After sharing commercial music classes bassist Andrew Jones, vocalist and keyboard Matteau, vocalist and guitarist Oscar Chavez, drummer Terrance Alexander, piano player Su Ha, guitarist Alejandro Haegendoreens and Romano accepted Maz’s challenge and formed Out of Nowhere.
Chavez also adds, “That jam session turned into this passion, more passion to do what we love.”
Jones described the bands’ music as, “Heartfelt more introspective kind of songs, as far as our lyrical content we tend to focus on what’s going on [emotionally] as oppose to what’s going on [externally]. Musically it’s pop rock, it’s nice safe catchy tunes with introspective lyrics to go along with it.”
Haegendoreens added, “We all have different backgrounds in music, definitely everyone’s style and background comes out in multiple songs and fuses together.”
Romano sings four out of the six songs that will be released in the bands EP.
She is also the main songwriter in the group, with Chavez writing and singing the song “Us” that will be included in the upcoming EP.
Another song on the EP is “Out of love” which is a collaboration between Jones and Romano. For the song Jones created the music and theme for the song sharing with Romano that it should be a heartbreak, sad love song, after which Romano sates “I interpreted it my own way to fit his vision according to his music, but still being honest to myself” and wrote the lyrics for the song.
Every aspect of the band is handled by a student of Cerritos College, from the writing, singing, playing, to the sound engineering and the band management is all work undertaken by students.
Students like Commercial Music major Joseph Escandon, who is the band’s manager and Commercial Music major Alvi Talavera who was the recording engineer for the band’s EP.
Alexander emphasizes, “We’re up and coming students and we put everything together ourselves.”
The band members devote their time after work and classes practicing from 7 p.m. onward because as Jones states, “We genuinely love it, and we love playing music, we love expressing ourselves.”
The band considers the Friday, Feb. 3 concert to be a way to share their art with the students on campus.
Chavez said the concert is their version of the student art show gallery that takes place at the end of the spring semester. He is anxious to see the audience at the concert and its reaction to the music.
For Haegendoreens the upcoming concert, EP and subsequent album release is something music students can look forward to, and follow.
