Photo courtesy of junior Sophia Campbell.
San Luis Obispo High School has a new alternative band called Georgey, featuring juniors Sophia Campbell, Holly Schmitt, and Zoey Nielson. The trio presents strong diversity in their tastes in music that creates a unique sound in their music.
Expressions: When and how did your band form?
Junior Sophia Campbell: Our band Georgey formed in April 2019. I went to see The 1975 in concert and as I was waiting, this idea started to form in my mind. I had loved the idea of being a singer from the time I was very young, but it didn’t really take flight until that night. The formation of the band was pretty much immediate. The day after the concert I gathered my best friends; Holly Schmitt was going to play drums, Zoey Nielsen would play guitar, and I would be the lead singer.
Expressions: How would you describe your music?
Campbell: I would say our music is pretty solidly alternative. Our songs really vary, though. “Faith / Unworthy” is very rock, “Places Left Behind” and “Haze and Butterflies” are pretty angsty, and “Stay Up” is honestly rather pop. We just like to have fun with our music and style and we have a hard time defining ourselves. With Georgey, the next song might be acoustic, it might be hard rock. We can’t always say.
Expressions: When was your last/next show?
Campbell: We have never played live, sadly, but we really want to once everyone is vaccinated and the town starts to go back to normal. We’ve been separated the entire quarantine, but in this time we’ve released four songs and I’ve actually learned how to play the guitar and so there’s a lot more for us to do now, especially because we’re not 13 anymore. We’re hoping to start playing anywhere we can in junior year.
Expressions: What musical influences inspired you?
Campbell: Across the three of us, we have a pretty diverse spread of musical influences. I am the biggest fan of The 1975 you’ll ever meet, but I also pull from artists like Jimmy Eat World, U2, and COIN. Zoey is inspired by Vampire Weekend and really introduced us to our Cranberries side. Holly is influenced a lot by Bad Suns and Avril Lavigne.
Expressions: Tell us something about the band that we don’t know.
Campbell: Our band name gets a lot of questions, surprisingly. We struggled a lot but eventually settled on the name of Zoey’s cat. It started as a joke, we were all sitting around on a voice call talking about what to call ourselves and we were like, “haha, imagine if we named ourselves after your cat” because we were all in love with Zoey’s cat. It slowly got less and less ironic and we all thought… Well, what if we did? The band name stuck for multiple reasons (there’s another half of the story behind our band name, but that will remain a mystery to our fans for the time being), and now we’re here, with our very own cat as our mascot.
