Unknown Chapters are a five-piece Indie Pop-Rock band formed in London in late 2017. Blending Pop vocal melodies with a more Funk-Rock sound, the band is a crossroad between Red Hot Chilli Peppers and early Maroon 5.
In the past months, Unknown Chapters have been recording their debut EP, which is to be released later this year. The very first song to appear online is the incredibly catchy ‘Losing my Mind’, released on July 25th, along with a music video. The EP’s songs have been recorded with promising young producer David Flahou, and mixed & mastered by Grammy-nominated engineer Jonas Westling (Lady Gaga, etc.). Unknown Chapters have also started climbing the London live circuit ladder, headlining historic venues such as The Water Rats, Nambucca and The Hope & Anchor.
With the five members coming from different musical backgrounds and countries, Unknown Chapters is truly a band of versatility; initially formed by the ambitious young guitarist, Lorenzo Calvo. After performing as a session guitarist for many artists in the London music scene, Lorenzo gathered the best performers he had played with. Growing up in Monaco, he embraced the heritage of masters like Jimi Hendrix and Mark Knopfler, while he also attended the local Jazz Academy. Another member from a conservatory background, Cléo moved from Geneva to London to pursue his dreams as a keyboardist and songwriter. Having made an even bigger move, vocalist Andrei and bassist Tudor are both from Bucharest. While Andrei grew up around opera and artists from the 50s like Dean Martin, Tudor came up in the local Ska-Punk scene. His band Electric Fence even competed to represent Romania in the Eurovision Song Contest in 2012 and 2013. The less exotic member Jake, originally from Kent, provides rock-solid drum beats inspired by the likes of Foo Fighters and Don Broco.
The band is on a mission to make their mark on the UK music scene and beyond.
State your reason for choosing music as a career.
Lorenzo:
Music was a passion before anything else. Then, during the final year of my Business/Management Degree, I realised Music had become too important for it to remain just a hobby. That’s probably when I put myself into troubles!
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Tell us how you write the lyrics to your song.
Andrei:
The lyrics for ‘Losing My Mind’ were written as a monologue. The intention was to portray the thoughts and feelings of someone experiencing a one sided love affair.
Well outside of Music we all have our own hobbies, personally I’m a huge Football fan and I play in a West-London Club and so does Cléo actually! While our Rhythm section (Jake and Tudor) are more into electronic games, and then… well I’m not sure we should discuss Andrei’s hobbies in front of him!
Andrei:
Hahaha! Thank you Lolo, now it looks like I have some weird hobbies, which is not the case. Beyond music I’m also into acting and poetry and I like to be up to date with the movie industry.
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Discuss your music career.
Lorenzo:
Well we’re pretty much at the start of it, since the band formed less than a year ago, but we are definitely motivated and determined to make this happen for ourselves. We’ve all been in different bands previously and some of us still do some session work as instrumentalists but we are all aware that this project is our main focus, and to be fair we are super excited about it!
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Elaborate on your artist’s name.
Lorenzo:
After forming the band we quickly realised that there was a natural connection among us, and that was quite unexpected considering we all have different musical backgrounds, but we somehow bonded very well. Nevertheless, we didn’t really know what our music was going to sound like, and we felt like every song we were writing together was kind of defining us a bit more. Based on this concept we found Unknown Chapters was the most appropriate name that could define us, so I guess every Single and Album that we’ll release will be a new chapter of our story.
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List your five favourite music videos with reasons.
Lorenzo:
One of the last videos I was really impressed by is Childish Gambino’s “This is America”. Otherwise I really like the psychedelic stories that Tame Impala depicts in their videos, such as in “Mind Mischief” for example. “Adventure of a Lifetime” by Coldplay is pretty outstanding with the visual effects they used. I also really liked the humour on John Mayer’s “New Light” video and on “I Don’t Wanna Know” by Maroon 5. I really like when artists don’t take themselves too seriously! That’s actually what we tried to portray in our first music video.
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Tell us your source of inspiration.
Andrei:
The song was written when one of the band members got involved in a relationship with a person who we could define as “hard to pin down”. Watching our boy losing his head over this involvement made me imagine a relationship where one of the lovers gets locked up in an asylum, losing the connection with the world and being driven nuts by a taunting lover.
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Tell us your impression on dealing with paparazzi.
Andrei:
Truth is that we love attention. At this moment in our career we fully embrace the interest of mass media.
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Elaborate on the recording of this song.
Andrei:
The song started in rehearsal as a jam, with Cléo (pianist) improvising an intro on top of which I (Andrei) wrote the melody of the verse. The song had a much slower tempo at the start, but when Lorenzo jumped on the chorus, the song suddenly acquired a funkier feel, which ended up being the trademark of the song.
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Tell us your future projects.
Lorenzo:
In the next few months we’ll release three new Singles, which we have already recorded, and some of them will be illustrated with a music video, so there’s quite an exciting horizon ahead of us! And that’s just in the short term, since we’re getting ready to record our Debut Album from the very beginning of next year!
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List the names of those that have supported you so far.
Lorenzo:
Well we’ve been pretty lucky having amazing people supporting us in the past few months. Firstly I think my brother Ilario did a great job as the main character of our first music video. He’s a professional actor so it didn’t take him long to get into the character we had designed, but he also helped us as an artistic director through his experience in the creative industries. Then we should also mention Ian and Phil, two teachers of our Music College, who personally followed our project and gave us advices both from a musical and a business perspective. And finally David and Richard, respectively the producers of the song and of the music video. They both helped us to materialize our vision of the song and of the video.
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Tell us your point of view on vocal tuning.
Andrei:
In my opinion, today’s popular music is heavily dependent on the vocal tone. Nowadays, most pop songs deliver minimalistic arrangements, so the voice has an even stronger leading role in the mix. All of the “top” artists today are “betting” a lot on their vocal texture, this ultimately leads to a desire of creating interesting vocal tones with the use of post editing. In my view, vocal tuning can be useful, but it can also diminish the human factor, which can make one’s art seem less relatable.
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Tell us your thought on quality and quantity for the release of songs.
Lorenzo:
We live in a world where as soon as you’re looking for something you’re hit by a massive wave of information delivered on the Internet. This can definitely be helpful, but then in the music industry artists are now fighting to rise above. This means that as artists, we have to deliver finished songs in a shorter time scale in order to surf the wave of attention, and this can result in lower quality songs. Fortunately, being three songwriters in the band, we manage to write songs pretty fast, and I believe we are writing songs that we are all proud of. That’s the most important thing considering quality in music is a very subjective concept.
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Tell us your viewpoint on comparing music career to non-music career.
Lorenzo:
Well any career is full of uncertainties, but with a music career you’re definitely sure that you’ll be questioning yourself for the rest of your life! But then again I always recall Brian Eno stating that while children learn to play, adults continue playing through Art, and I quite agree with such statement. We should be aware of how lucky we are to be able to live off our art.
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Tell us your opinion on categorizing music into genres and sub-genres.
Lorenzo:
Genres are definitely useful to identify music, as it’s true that most of the music we like has common traits, and genres and sub-genres are a way to identify these. However, our first single is literally a melting pot of genres, going from a piano ballad feel in the verse to a funky chorus and introducing a “rap” section in the bridge… There you go, try and categorize the song in a single genre now!
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State the genre you despise most with reason.
Andrei:
Despise is a strong word. There are some genres which I can’t say I’d listen to for a long time, such as death metal. But I think it’s just a matter of taste.
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List your five favourite movies with reasons.
Andrei:
I absolutely loved ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’, ‘The Shawshank Redemption’, ‘Forest Gump’, ‘Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind’, ‘Mother’ – these movies have achieved a special place in my heart for their beautiful plots and wonderful actors.
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State the title of the song and the meaning.
Andrei: The title of our song is ‘Losing my Mind’ and it comes as a statement and a conclusion for the lyrics of the song.
