Battle of the Bands: Carlyle's Strikes a Chord
by Jasmine Betancourt, Karly Judge, Jessica Tucker, Aaron Chafe, and Justin Gerald Dixon
Late entry to annual St. John’s music competition quickly finds its rhythm to win fan support—and top prize
Carlyle almost didn’t play at the Battle of the Bands competition. Now, weeks after having won, they’re certainly glad they did.
“It was pretty awesome,” said bassist Jacob Earle with a laugh.
“There’s not a whole lot of other ways you can describe it, we actually weren’t expecting to win it at all,” added guitarist Brian Knee.
“We actually got thrown on the bill last minute, because the guy putting it together forgot to put us on the bill,” continued Knee.
“And then our first show that we played was last minute, like we hadn’t jammed much before then, so we went out and played it, and somehow won our first night.”
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The Battle of the Bands competition is an annual music competition held by The Levee, a bar located in Holdsworth Court in the heart of downtown St. John’s. Each year, numerous local bands take part in preliminary shows over the course of every Thursday for a month, with a fan vote and judging scores determining which top four bands will take part in the finals.
The funk rock trio of Jacob Earle (19), Brian Knee (21), and Dan George (23) that make up Carlyle has been together for three years, tirelessly working to hone their craft. They defeated over 25 other groups to win this year’s competition, which secured them the coveted grand prize of 40 hours of studio recording with GNAudio, Album Pressing, a MusicNL membership, and a ZOOM HD Recording Camera.
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Carlyle Strikes a Chord
To the left is Carlyle's performance from the Battle of the Bands 2017 at the Levee
Winning such a prestigious competition is no small feat, but Carlyle prefers to focus on their bright future rather than dwell on their accomplishments.
Brian Knee said: “It’s going to dictate a significant portion of our future, because we have a significant amount of funding now to actually go and progress with our next project after this album that we’re working on.”
“It gives us a very clear path as to what comes next after we finish this.”
Jacob Earle agreed. “It makes it a lot easier, because we were going to do all of these recordings and everything anyway, but now we actually have it for free, and so it’s just going to be a lot quicker to get it out to the world.”
With St. John’s conquered and big plans in store, Carlyle has their eyes on the rest of Canada, the United States, and eventually the world.
Published 23 March, 2017