What better way to make millions of dollars, meet women and become a household name than to join a band? Being the next rock star is every young musician’s dream. Unfortunately, sometimes the Hollywood lifestyle can cause musicians to lose sight of the most important aspect of being in a band the music.
However, there are some bands that come through Eugene that have their sights set for spotlights in venues scattered across America rather than the bright lights of Hollywood. Evelate happens to be one of those bands, and fortunately for
Eugene music fans, they will be playing at Diablo’s Downtown Lounge Friday night.
Founded in a Corvallis apartment complex by three friends, Evelate has strong influences from across the musical board, including Sublime, 311, early Incubus and System of a Down.
“I would call our music ‘switch rock,’” Chris Baron, lead singer and guitar player of Evelate, said. “It’s like alternative rock, but it has a lot of changes and funky transitions; it’s highly organized.”
Bassist Brody Lowe agreed,
describing their music as eclectic and original.
“It’s kind of an intellectual pop rock. It doesn’t really stay within the pop rock realm,” said Brody, an Oregon State University student. “It kind of goes out into different chord changes and it’s something you don’t really hear in music today.”
“That’s been our goal as a band up to this point: to make music that is abnormal, but that’s still accessible to the average listener,” Andy Sadowski, drummer for Evelate said. “We try to mix technically complex music with catchy hooks and diverse transitions and we want to keep our listeners on their toes.”
Evelate has kept this promise for almost two years. All three members of Evelate were previously involved with other musical projects, but decided to dedicate as much time as possible to developing their own new music. Their name was derived from a song by Rush, one of Sadowski’s biggest musical influences.
“Being a die-hard Rush fan and thinking of how they inspired me, I remembered a line from one of my favorite songs by Rush,” Sadowski said. “It’s called ‘Vital Signs’ off the ‘Moving Pictures’ album. The song’s basic theme is deviating from the norm, and at the end of the song, Geddy Lee (the lead singer) sings, ‘Everybody got to elevate from the norm… over and over, but one random time, he says ‘Everybody got to EVELATE from the norm.’”
“It was pretty cool how he just switched it around like that,” Baron said. “Since we were doing something a little different than other
Corvallis bands, it just seemed to fit our music.”
Evelate makes its debut in Eugene this Friday at 9:30 p.m. at Diablo’s Downtown Lounge, located at 959 Pearl Street, but unfortunately, not all members will be in attendance. Sadowski is currently studying in Denmark, but a temporary replacement has been found: drummer
Chris Harver.
As soon as Sadowski returns to the United States in June, Evelate has plans to relocate to Portland and perhaps record another CD to go along with their debut album,
“Moving at Faster Speeds,” which was released in December 2004.
“Short term goals are to play as many shows as possible and see what comes of that and to keep writing new songs,” Baron said. “And eventually we’d like to get signed for the purpose of going on tour.”
“Our ultimate goal,” Sadowski said, “is to make a career out of the music that we love to play.”

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