Author: Emma Loggins
Date: 2008-09-18


Interview:
I had the pleasure of interviewing Curtis Peoples before his show here in Atlanta, GA at Eddie's Attic. He spoke about his album, the possibility of acting in his future, his favorite TV shows, and more. Check it out:

Tell me a little bit about how you got started in the business.

C. Peoples: I started when I was a kid. I used to do choir, and then I started a band when I was 12 in school with my friends. At first it was a joke, but then we got really serious about it. By the time we were 15, we were really serious about it, and that's when I committed to it, and you could tell 'cause that's when my grades started dropping [Laughs]. But that's kinda how I got started.

I lived in San Diego, and I had a band. We were called Three Simple Words. We were like the popular high school band around San Diego. Then when college happened a couple guys left, we got a couple extra guys, and that was kinda the way it was. We were doing well, and then my guitar player had a punk band and punk is, like, huge in San Diego... and that band ended up getting signed. So, the band broke up.

So I started doing the solo thing. About three months later, I was doing a show in San Diego, just started doing solo, with Tyler Hilton, and we became really fast friends. Tyler was doing exactly what I wanted to do, he was just a couple steps ahead of me. He had a record deal with Maverick. We had so much in common, we were the same age... I met him and he ended up taking me on tour about 6 months after that we became friends, got this Beatles tattoo, and everything changed; I met everybody that I am now close with in that 3-4 month period. It's like this whole world… fate… it was the craziest thing. And I moved to LA and I've been living there, and that's kinda how the whole thing got started.

Now, I know Tyler Hilton has done a decent amount of acting. Is that something you would ever do, or want to do?

C. Peoples: You know, it's funny, I'm such a big film fan. I have always wanted to get into directing, get into that side of it. But I'm not opposed to acting cause it's so helpful. There are actually some opportunities coming up for me to try out for some stuff, and I'm gonna do it. I'm open to it, but it's definitely never been first on my list of things to do.

Right. Well that's cool.

C. Peoples: Yeah, I don't want to suck at it [Laughs].

Yeah, that's understandable [Laughs]. In another interview, you said that you like taking chances with your music. What song do you think you took the most chances on?

C. Peoples: On this record?

Yes.

C. Peoples: There is a track on the record called "Hold Me down" which is the second track. I've been trying to still be in the singer/songwriter genre, but still be what I want to be, more of a rock sound. I even came up with that coffee shop arena rock name. "Hold Me Down" is like a rock song with a rock riff; it's just got a good beat to it. I had to push for it cause the producer thought it was pushing it too far. But I just bugged him and was like, "Please let's put this on the record. I promise you, it's going to be awesome." And he had a couple songs that he was trying to convince me on that I wasn't really sold on, but it ended up working both ways. But I fought hard on this one, and the day we were tracking it he was like "This is awesome!"

I'm playing it live tonight. The way we're setting it up on this tour is the two other artists are playing guitar on my set but I get to play guitar and do the solo. So that's pretty fun.