Gabrielle: I had grown up with music. When I was two years old, I fell in love with singing and I've been singing ever since then. And my family loves music, so I've always been around it and I guess that's how I fell in love with it.
Tommy: I can't remember. It was so long ago. My older brother was in a band, and they used to rehearse at the house. So there was always tons of great music coming out of the basement. and that just makes you want to, you know, I'm the younger brother and I just wanted to hang out with them more than anything else. The only way in was to learn to play. You know what? I played in his band for a little bit, and then he played in my band for a little bit, and then I threw him out of my band because, you know, he just wasn't getting any better.
Q: How long have you been performing?
G: I started dancing when I was two, and we used to do recitals and stuff, and I loved the feeling of being on stage. At six I started vocal lessons. I asked my parents for vocal lessons, and at seven I started acting, I used to do shows every semester in acting class, and I fell in love with being on stage. And I haven't been off since.
T: Forever. I got a guitar when I was five years old, started taking lessons when I was six. Did classical piano for a couple of years, and just started playing Long Island clubs when I was 15 and just kept going.
Q: How old are you two now?
T: I'm 18, and Gabrielle's 47.
Q: Is it alright if we flip that for the article?
T: Yeah, that's what it is. Forty-six, I'm not 47 yet.
Q: Do you have any artists that inspire you?
G: I definitely do. I grew up listening to Celine Dion, Whitney Houston, Miriah Carey, so definitely the big voices have inspired me. Now I love Christina Aguilera. I listen to John Mayer, I love his writing.
T: I grew up listening to guitar players, mostly. Hendrix and Johnny Winter and Alvin Lee and all the old-timers. You know, BB King, anything that had to do with blues, shuffle blues, guitar stuff, anything like that. And may I say that, for the past 18 years, Billy Joel has been a constant source of inspiration for me! Billy's definitely a great inspiration as a writer. He's a great writer. When you're sitting down to write your stuff, they all come to mind. Billy, Elton, all of them, just classic, wonderful song writers.
Q: How did the two of you wind up getting together to perform?
G: I got together with a group called OCD Music Group and they've been acting as a great member of the team for the past couple of months. I met Stefano who's in OCD, I met him a couple of years ago at an open mic on Long Island, and ever since I kept in touch, and the past couple of months they've been really involved as far as live performances go, and introducing me to new producers and writers, and that's how I met Tommy. And so we've been working together and it's a lot of fun. And I'm learning a lot, too.
T: Yeah, OCD, they come to me with a lot of the projects that they're interested in. And sometimes it works and goes forward and sometimes it doesn't, but we just keep doing it together and looking for new young talent. And Gabrielle's really a remarkable writer, even though she might not think so just yet. She's got perfect instincts as to interesting melodies and lyrics themselves. It makes it easy, because when you're looking for somebody, when you're looking for a sound for them, you really want it to come from them. You don't just want to contrive something and write a bunch of beats and send it to somebody and have them sing something over it. You listen to too much radio today that's just guys my age writing songs for 20-year-old girls to sing. As lucrative as it is, because they're all little bars of gold, it's much better, from my point of view, if it comes from them and they develop as an artist that way, and you can help the process. It's great.
Q: Have you two been working together writing all of you [Gabrielle's] songs?
G: We started working together about a month ago.
T: We've got about three things that we're working on right now. One of them, my partner Tony Bruno, is doing the tracks on. He's also Rhianna's musical director. So he's building the tracks for us. We'll get together and map out a song, map out an idea. Get a melody together, then he comes in and changes everything and goes back and [something] the track, and it works good like that. I've done a lot of work with Tony in the past, and I've had a lot of success with him. So I think you just have to try not to screw it up when it's already good, you know?
G: And I've been really fortunate to work with them, and I've been learning so much about myself and writing and I've also been really fortunate to work with some other producers. Jim Beans, I just got back from Philadelphia working with him, he's a very well-known vocal producer. And within the next month or so, I'm supposed to be working with Crucial Keys, which is Alicia's production team, so it's really exciting, too.
Q: What is your favorite memory from your musical career?
G: My favorite...I have lots of amazing moments. One of my favorites was winning the Apollo theater competition. It was really cool because I was a kid, I was 14-years-old in the adult competition, or 15-years-old, and I won all around, and then I won the finals, and then I went on TV and everything, so that was really cool. And that audience is tough, so that's amazing for me.
T: That's an easy question for me, you know the answer to that one. Playing "I Saw Her Standing There" and "Let It Be" with Paul McCartney in Shea Stadium is, you know, that kind of dwarfs every other musical memory I have.
Q: What was it like performing at the Apollo/Shea Stadium?
G: It was going to another world. You step on that stage, and so many legends have been on that stage and it was just an honor to be there. The energy from the audience was great. They loved me, and I loved their energy. I got a standing ovation, which is extremely exciting from an audience like that. And it was overwhelming.
T: Stadiums are not very intimate because the nearest member of the audience is usually about 30 yards away from you. Even at places like the Garden and the arenas are much more intimate. You do a stadium tour and then go back and play in arenas, it's like playing in pubs. But Shea is kind of like a blur. We were all in this little euphoria bubble for five days, and about five days after it. I'm just trying to remember moments. The days were enormously, just totally tiring. You're doing a four hour sound check, you're running all the stuff with all the other guests, you're up there doing your own sound check. You have the string section, that's another hour of trying to get things right; extra horn players, extra singers. And then you deal with Tony Benett's going to do his thing, John Mayer's going to do his song, Don Henley's going to do his song, Steven Tyler is going to do his song, Roger Daughtry's going to do his song. By the time you're finished, you're like, OK, it's 6:00, doors are in a half hour, and we're not on until a quarter to nine. There's nothing left of you by a quarter to twelve at the end of the show. So it's kind of really blurry. And I know there were almost as many cameras there as people. We filmed it for Billy's production company. You know, he's actually just formed a little film company for the moment. So I'm excited to see it, but I'm also a little nervous because I can't quite remember what happened. What was that?
Q: Where do you get the inspiration for your music?
G: I write based on things I feel or things I see. It's funny, a lot of people say that I'm an old soul in a young girl's body. And it's like, depending on the mood I'm in, I can tap into experiences even if I haven't experienced them and sort of find the emotion and write based on what I'm feeling at the moment. But, yeah, observations and things I'm feeling or experienced.
T: I think when you're young it's important to be able to put yourself in other peoples' shoes and tap into that. Use your imagination; that's the best thing you've got going for you when you're starting to write. And Gabrielle definitely kind of has an old soul approach to it, because what we don't want to do is create another little hip-hop girl who's going to go out and sing pop songs that are going to give people a toothache because they're so sweet or something. We wanted to tap into the fact that she really has a much more mature style to what she's singing, what she's feeling, and what she's writing. And it was almost kind of theatrical the first time I heard her sing. It was like, wow, this is a voice that could work on Broadway without a problem. Are you sure you want to do this? Because I could see a great career for you there. It was like, nope, we're going to do it, and we're going to do pop. But it's got to be bigger than that. Quirkiness has its place, but quirky people don't necessarily have longevity. So even someone like Christina starts off her career with a song like "What a Girl Wants." The voice is still there, the songs have drastically changed since then. They've gotten huge. And it's not to say you want to start off like Celine Dion or Barbera Streisand or something like that, but you want to be able to last long enough to end up there if you want.
Q: How old were you when you performed at the Apollo?
G: I was 14 the first time, and then 15 and 16 when I competed. I was 14 when I performed there for a Martin Luther King celebration, but at 15 was when I competed, and I turned 16 right at the end of the finals.
Q: How often do you perform on Long Island?
G: I perform a lot on Long Island. Not this summer but the summer before that, I did a whole series of performance throughout the whole summer on Long Island and throughout New York and New Jersey. Whenever I get the opportunity.
T: Very rarely. Whenever we come through town. This has really been a fun moment to put together. I do regular gigs or anything. I might go and jam with some friends once in a while, but I don't like to set anything in stone and commit to a gig because I run around too much and there's too much other stuff going on I couldn't commit to it. Lets play every Thursday over here or something like that. Cause I don't need to.
Q: Where on Long Island are you from?
G: I'm from Bellmore. I was born in Brooklyn and moved to Bellmore when I was very young, and I've been there ever since.
T: I grew up in Lynbrook, went to Shamanad High School. That's why I felt I didn't need any further education after Shamanad. I've lived in Oceanside for a long time, though. Billy still hails me from Oceanside. He does that. I lived in Lynbrook for the first 18, 19 years of my life, then my family moved to Oceanside, and I lived there with them for a couple of years before I split. Right around the block from J Paul's. I've probably still got a tab there. Great bar.
Q: So what's next?
G: Lots. We're going to keep writing and recording all new music. I'm going to keep working on my album, which is very exciting. I plan on working with Crucial Keys, probably in the next couple of weeks. I'm just going to keep trying to get exposure and working on my album and I'm always in vocal lessons and dance lessons and acting and everything, and I'm just going to keep trying to get out there and accomplish my main goal. I want to be in Madison Square Garden and all the big theaters.
T: And I want to be in your band!
G: And that's my main goal. I want to have hit songs on the radio and be in huge theaters touring, doing what I do now, but on a bigger scale. I like to touch people with my music. I like when the audience feels my lyrics and my emotion, and I'd like to do that in a bigger capacity. So I'd like to work towards that.
T: I don't know. I'm riding the Billy moment until it falls off a cliff. And I think it's ever going to, because he's going stronger than ever now. We're starting in Asia at the end of October, Hong Kong, Singapore, Korea, Japan, Australia, New Zealand. Then we break for Christmas, then we're doing five weeks in a Seminal reservation down in Hollywood, Florida. Then we go out with Elton for five weeks, then we break, then we go out for another five week run with Elton. So he's saying yes to a lot of work, which is really great. He's in better form and better shape then he's been since he was a much younger man.
