SIXTEEN-YEAR-OLD girls ask their dads for cars. They ask their dads for designer jeans and iPhones. What no father expects to hear is “Dad, I want my own rock band.”
But that’s what Nicole Cheri said when she turned 16. She’d been fronting her father’s classic rock cover band since she was 12 years old, an experience that had to be pretty intense for a pre-teen.
“There were some weird venues a 12-year-old probably shouldn’t be in,” she admits with a laugh.
The 20-year-old singer and lyricist for the South Bay rock band Cadent, who play Homestead Lanes on Saturday, Jan. 22, knows that if it weren’t for her parents, she wouldn’t be where she is. They saw her vocal talent long before she herself knew what she had.
“My parents took it into their hands when I was really young,” she says. “I started out doing competitions and things like that.”
Now a state vocal champion several times over, even Cheri is a little shocked when she hears recordings of herself at a young age.
“I’m like, ‘Damn, I was 10? Really?” she says.
But after four years, Cheri wanted the chance to find her muse. She knew Motown, she knew classic rock, but she was missing some pretty basic points on the teen-music curve.
“At 16, I didn’t know who Motley Crue was,” she says.
She quickly learned. Upon teaming up with lead guitarist Jonathan Beachler, who would be the main architect of the band’s sound, Cadent started out as a cover band. They were covering everything from Pink to Sublime to AC/DC to Incubus, and making money doing it. But unlike most cover bands, this one had a long-term plan.
“It was very structured,” says Cheri. “It was like, ‘We’re going to do cover songs for this long, then we’re going to write our own songs.’ I was always writing lyrics and things, and Jonathan always wanted to write songs.”
A year and a half ago, the next phase kicked in, with the band’s sound not so far away from that of Cheri’s favorite group, Paramore. Cadent is slightly heavier, less faux-punk and more straight-up rawk & roll, with a dark and stormy edge. It’s a sound that suits Cheri’s vocals, which have far more range and nuance than Hayley Williams ever imagined being able to sing with. For the record, though there are some eerily similarities to Williams’ and Cheri’s stories (performing when they were barely into their teens and finding their bandmates at a young age), Cheri is not a fan of how things went down in that band.
“She wanted the limelight to herself from the beginning,” says Cheri.
While that certainly must be a relief to her bandmates, the early days were not without their moments of turmoil, like a lineup shuffle that left the band scrambling for enough musicians to play their sets.
“We were desperate, like ‘Anyone? We don’t care if you’re on drugs!'” remembers Cheri.
Once the dust settled, however, the current lineup was in place, including Beachler on lead, Spencer Roberts on guitar, bassist Nate Skelton and drummer Kern Sigala.
“We’re all pretty easy to get along with,” she says. Which isn’t to say they don’t have some good arguments over the music: “We do, but we’re still friends.”
When it comes to writing the songs, Beachler will usually come up with musical ideas and bring them to Cheri, who doesn’t waste any time writing lyrics for them.
“As soon as I hear his ideas, I pretty much go to town,” she says. Then it goes to the rest of the band. “We start working on it, and something happens.”
Cheri’s lyrics are not cheery stuff, from the angry rebuke of an alcoholic leech in “Not Now” to the romantic tangles of “Like Tonight.” But she’s open-minded about it.
“Anything can inspire me,” she says. “Mostly people who piss me off.”
While there was a little hesitation from at least one member of the band about giving up lucrative cover-band gigs for more difficult to book original sets, Cheri says the band’s pop sensibility and appeal to young audiences have made the transition fairly smooth.
“We took ourselves out of the scene and started writing for a while. Once we started playing again, it wasn’t hard for us,” she says.
Despite performing for more than half her life already, Cheri says that most of the time she’s not the extrovert people expect.
“I’m really shy, even to this day,” she says. “But it just takes the intro to a song to get me going.”
Cadent
Saturday, 8:30pm
Homestead Lanes, Cupertino
$5
