|
 ...ok, so maybe it was just me and my friend Jeff doing horribly sung versions of pop music during our freshman and sophomore years at JMU. But it was fun! Gentle Beans started from four people. Friends 'Gentle' Jim Lunsford (named for his gentleman-liness) and 'Gourmet Bean' Meredith Geary (named for some reason i can't remember) provided the name without really knowing it. 'Sofmor' Steve Syckes (so named because i had many female friends ...who were 'sofmors' in High School) and 'Jungle J' Jeffrey Cretz (self-named after the Jungle Juice he discovered one night at a party) combined their friends' two nicknames after a hilariously awkward situation where Meredith fell for Jim when he was hitting on her. Problem was Jim was not trying to woo the good Gourmet, he was just being his normal gentlman self. Jeff and I started Gentle Beans as the name of our Photo Company. Basically we just took stupid and funny photos of ourselves. But then we evolved. During our freshman year at college, pop music ruled. I got all tangled up in it and it was probably my idea to record some versions with Jeff and I singing. I descovered the actual instrumental of *NSYNC's "Bye Bye Bye" on Napster, and that was our first track. (It was the big hit of the day. Gentle Jim Lunsford even learned the dance routine!) We liked what we heard so much (although listening back it's horrendous) we decided to do another tune. "Bye Bye Bye" was an uptempo from *NSYNC, so the opposite would be a slow tune from Backstreet Boys. "Show me the Meaning of Being Lonely" was chosen! Seeing as it was not released as a single yet, therefore no instrumental track was to be found, I made the music myself. To this day it is the only Gentle Beans song I refuse to listen to. The others I can just stand. We tried a third song, this time by Britney Spears, a track called "Crazy" but we never got to finish it before summer break came along. I either deleted or somehow lost the audio we had completed for it, and it remains the long-lost Gentle Bean track. When Jeff and I returned to JMU in the fall of 2000, we remembered how much fun we had recording our crappy vocals the semesters before, so we thought it'd be great to complete a whole 'album' worth of these types of songs. And that's exactly what we did! To learn more about our album, click on the cover at the top of this page. But like all good things, Gentle Beans couldn't last forever. Although to this day Jeff is up for recording more Gentle Beans tunes, I lost interest during my year off of college that started in the fall of 2001. I was getting more into the songs I was writing myself. (This bled into Gentle Beans in the form of our two original songs "Life on the Street" and "I Never Know Where you are.") With their only album hot off the CD burners, Gentle Beans was no more. |
|
Music Home