the hum / By Bob Doran

Talking to a Friend

(Feb. 1, 2007)  It’s a Sunday morning and Hello Stranger is off the road for a change. Lead singer/keytar player Juliette Commagere is supposed to be finishing up a new song for band practice that afternoon, but, admitting she’s a procrastinator, she’s more than willing to put the task off to chat. She’s at home in West L.A. - “like two minutes from where I grew up” - which is OK with her since “with touring you get to see everything and you’re never home.”

I point out that we are not total strangers. We’re MySpace friends. “Cool,” she says chuckling. I friended them months ago after downloading the Hello Stranger song “We Used To Talk” at some random MP3 blog. The tune from their eponymous album is catchy as hell and made me want to hear more. Thus, I became one of their 10,693 “friends.”

“I’m the laziest MySpacer of the band aside from doing the tour blog, which I enjoy. It’s definitely easier than dealing with a website. And when we book our tours we use it to contact bands in other cities to see if they want to play shows.”

And, I point out, where else would I get to see the contents of Juliette’s purse, shown in a photo on the site? The vulnerable girl searching for her keys in a parking garage stands in stark contrast to the Barbarella figure in the group’s press photo.

“I like to have fun in the photo shoots,” she says. “So much of the time you’re trying to look like you, but cool. Instead we decided to get as out there as we could.”

The roots of the band stretch back to Juliette and drummer Joachim Cooder’s high school days in Los Angeles. “Joachim always had different bands and he’d have me come and sing with them once in a while. Then when we were like 17 we started a proper band, but I just sang and didn’t play anything.”

Then multi-instrumentalist Jared Smith came along. “When the three of us were coming up with this band, I said I’d play keyboards. It was kind of intimidating for me to play keyboards at first; I knew I could do it, but I didn’t want to be stuck behind a keyboard. They were like, `We could get you a keytar!’ There weren’t any bands I knew that had one, so it was kind of a crazy idea. I bought a Moog Liberation, which is kind of a beast, really heavy and difficult to use. Then I ended up getting a Midi-controller, but now I’m back to the Moog.”

For the completely uninformed, a keytar is basically just a synthesizer designed so you can hold it more or less like a guitar. It’s an &nbspsort of thing: Devo had one and various hair metal bands used them. Rest assured, Hello Stranger sounds like neither. While synthesizers are featured, they somehow take on a more organic feel than your typical electro-band.

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