lovelife

Lovelife Newspaper Article

This is from the April 5, 2008 edition of the Manteca, CA Bulletin Newspaper:

Manteca band hawking CDs at street fair

Jason Campbell
Reporter

Hudson Thomas wants to take the music to the people.

While thousands of people are wandering the streets of downtown Manteca today from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. and Sunday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. for the annual Crossroads Street Fair - a festival of food, fun, and families - Thomas is going to make an attempt to connect with what could soon be his future audience.

As the lead singer and songwriter for Lovelife - a four-piece local alternative ensemble with influences like Depeche Mode and The Cure - Thomas will be hovering among the masses and trying to get the word out about the two-year project that he’s hoping will soon become a regular fixture of the Central Valley music scene.

"We’re looking forward to being out there promoting our next show in Tracy, and getting to know a lot of local people that will hopefully be into our music," Thomas said of today’s festival. "We’ve never done anything like this locally, so it’ll be a good chance to branch out."

With a history that runs deep in the Bay Area community of Newark, Thomas and two classmates graduated high school and each went about their separate ways - playing in different bands along the way and focusing on careers more than music.

Fate would reconnect them and their musical passion, and eventually Thomas - as well as Mike Vigil, Atom Dance, and Brian Tyley - would fuse their love for the music they grew up listening into a unique genre that can’t be easily categorized.

And they do almost all of it on Thomas’ MacBook Pro.

Thanks to the beauty of technology, each instrumental track necessary for a CD is now recorded through Logic Pro - the state-of-the-art music tracking program that allows for smaller bands to turn a garage session into their own private studio - and eventually output onto a CD without ever having to step foot inside of the traditional glass-windowed and outrageously expensive studio.

By producing their own music, Thomas says that they can take a page out of the book of one of the bigger acts when he was in high school - M.C. Hammer - and literally sell CDs out of the trunk of their car with little overhead.

As a real estate agent currently selling houses in the Del Webb senior community, he uses his downtime to record pieces to songs or conceptualize lyrics that would be perfect for a full-group session.

Despite their Newark roots, their new home is also something that has become a source of pride.

The background of the group’s MySpace page - www. myspace.com/efilevol - features a large picture of the Pacific Motel on Moffat Boulevard that was originally taken to represent a single that the group released.

A combination of the seediness and the contrasting colors just seemed like the perfect scene, he said.

"We all grew up in Newark, which has grown a lot, and now that I’m in Manteca, I’m reminded of the Newark that I used to like living in as a kid," Thomas said. "With things like the street fair where you can go out and talk to people and promote your music - that’s what it’s all about."

Lovelife will be selling their first EP - Pretty Hourglass Sunday - today and tomorrow at the Convention and Visitors Bureau Crossroads Street Fair.

For more information about the band’s upcoming dates, visit their MySpace page at www.myspace.com/efilevol
- Manteca Bulletin