Milwaukee trio The Yell Leaders has had its share of accolades over the its eight-year existence. In 1998, one of the band's songs, "Windchill," was prominently featured in its entirety in the opening scene of an episode of FOX-TV's "Party of Five." The year before, the band was named best unsigned band in the region by VH-1 as part of the music channel's "Rock Across America" program. The alternative pop-rockers have also garnered a few WAMI nominations along the way.
This week, The Yell Leaders were featured twice on Garageband.com, a website for unsigned bands, owned in part by Milwaukee native, Jerry Harrison. "From the Beauty," a track from the band's "Cornelia Street" CD, released last year was the featured pop/rock song on Tuesday and today, Thurs., Dec. 7, the site features "Carry Me Through," from the same disc, which features guest vocals by Del Amitri's Justin Currie, who also sang on another the disc's tracks.
Milwaukee music fans will recall that Madison/Milwaukee-based Monovox vaulted to the top of Garageband.com last year.
According to Joe Vent, the band's guitarist and lead singer, The Yell Leaders have been working at Walls Have Ears with Bill Stace on 14 new songs, with an eye toward releasing 12 of them on a new CD in 2001. The two other tracks are covers destined for tribute CDs, one saluting the legendary British lefty skinhead soul boys The Redskins, released by German-based label, Mad Butcher Records, and the other a paean to the Internet-only band, Masters of the Obvious.
"We've taken a different, slower approach to this record," Vent says. "In the past, we went in to the studio and did things pretty much all at once, with a producer. This time we recorded a lot of the basic tracks at home.
"We brought them into the Miramar hoping to use them as demos from which to create new tracks, but some of those original tracks were so good, we kept them and just added to them. In some cases we only really added some vocals," he says. "It's an interesting way to work."
Vent says the band is currently in the mixing stage.
The disc will be the band's fourth. "Thursday" was released in 1993, followed by "Up for Steam" in 1996 and "Cornelia Street" in 1999. A pair of 45s was released in 1992 and the band has contributed songs to a number of compilation CDs, including a cover of Bruce Springsteen's "I Wish I Were Blind," which was issued on a Capitol/Right Stuff/EMI 45 in 1997.
Also in The Yell Leaders are singer Mary Schmid and drummer Bobby Tanzilo, who works at OnMilwaukee.com.
To see the feature on Garageband, click here http://www.garageband.com/genre/poprock. You can also find other mp3's by The Yell Leaders on the site. To see the OnMilwaukee.com band page for the group, click here, http://www.onmilwaukee.com/music/bands/band-102.html.
Andy is the president, publisher and founder of OnMilwaukee. He returned to Milwaukee in 1996 after living on the East Coast for nine years, where he wrote for The Dallas Morning News Washington Bureau and worked in the White House Office of Communications. He was also Associate Editor of The GW Hatchet, his college newspaper at The George Washington University.
Before launching OnMilwaukee.com in 1998 at age 23, he worked in public relations for two Milwaukee firms, most of the time daydreaming about starting his own publication.
Hobbies include running when he finds the time, fixing the rust on his '75 MGB, mowing the lawn at his cottage in the Northwoods, and making an annual pilgrimage to Phoenix for Brewers Spring Training.
