The Afterwhile

Jake Lane, Arts & Culture Editor
Published: Mon Oct 10, 2011

Photo courtesy of The Afterwhile
The AfterwhileMany acts, when bonded by the road and all of the hardships of trying to make it big, call themselves family. Few, however, are actually bonded by blood. For sister and brother duo The Afterwhile, music and family are one and the same.

The eighth and 10th children of musicians, guitarist/singer Tony and lead singer Gina Cuchetti have lived on the road since they were in diapers, playing shows from weddings to corporate parties, Las Vegas shows to small bars. For the Afterwhile, no stage is too small for their A-game or too large for them to hold rapt.

“We grew up playing a variety of different things,” Tony Cuchetti said. “Even if it’s just a 10-minute radio spot, you never know who’s listening, who you’re going to rub off on.”

Born in Detroit, Mich., Tony and Gina’s early life was spent between shows in their family’s personal Greyhound bus, two of the younger siblings in a family band.

“Starting back in the ’70s before Tony and Gina were born, our parents’ desire to put together a family music act turned into something quite enormous,” drummer Chris Cuchetti, the second eldest of the brood, explained. “We played a lot of different shows, a lot of fairs, festivals. Back in the ’80s shopping centers were the big thing, and we played with some Oak Ridge Boys-type bands, selling vinyl records off the stage.”

The act’s hard work paid off and they graduated to much larger venues.

“(Nightclub comedian) Danny Thomas discovered us and we opened for him in Las Vegas a few times,” Chris said. “By the time Tony and Gina came along we were getting a lot of popularity. They were born into it, born on the road.”

After the band stopped playing regularly, Tony and Gina formed their own act, which sometimes features just the duo and sometimes a full band, with Chris on drums.

“It depends on the venue or the location when we decide to hire the whole band,” Gina said. “We work a lot in the singer-songwriter setting, plus I do solo stuff, Tony does as well.”

Drawing from inspirations as disparate and diverse as Brandi Carlile and classic string bands, the band’s holistic approach to songwriting and years of collaboration come together to form personally driven sounds aimed at connecting with the listener.

“I go through spurts of different people I listen to, and that influences what I write,” Gina said. “I could have a Radiohead CD I listen to for a week, or feel something more soulful like Aretha Franklin. What’s cool about the songwriting process is Tony or I could bring a guitar in or sit down at a piano and start playing a melody, and everyone else will just trickle in.”

While many bands are broken by the road, the Cuchettis have built a life on connecting with an audience one at a time, and in some situations, cultivating an accidental following.

“I had somebody e-mail me on Facebook, saying she sent her cousin serving Afghanistan our album after seeing one of our shows,” Gina said. “She sent them our CD and now the whole entire troop is listening to it. When I hear something like that, I could die tomorrow.”

Knoxville is a fairly new territory for the band, but they have a connection with university athletics. Gina sang the national anthem at a Vols basketball game against Belmont last year, which the Vols subsequently won.

“We admire the area and the musical heritage,” Tony said of East Tennessee. “This is our first big trip up there.”

Following an interview with campus station 90.3 The Rock on Monday, the Afterwhile will play at Relix Variety Theatre, the Preservation Pub on Tuesday and the Gatlinburg Hard Rock Café on Wednesday. Despite playing many shows and traveling constantly, music never becomes any less vital for the band.

“Music is a physical part of you, it’s just something you physically have to do, and if you can’t, it’s a real downer,” Gina said.

Like the highway they travel, the experience of writing and playing music keeps the feeling creating fresh with every new sight and turn of the corner.

“With music you never have a choice of what you write,” Tony said. “You have to go along with the ride where it’s taking you.”


- The Daily Beacon

Music is in the genes for brother-sister team in The Afterwhile
By Steve Wildsmith (stevew@thedailytimes.com)

By Steve Wildsmith

stevew@thedailytimes.com

As the youngest of 10 children, Gina Cuchetti was doing her own thing long before reaching adulthood.

“It really made me more independent,” she told The Daily Times this week. “I remember being in first grade making my own lunch and doing my own laundry. My mom was 42 years old when I was born, so she’d already been there and back!”

Not that her parents were absent during her upbringing — if anything, the heads of the Conti Family, as the family band was known, instilled in their children a love of music and a professionalism that serve Gina and her brother, Tony, well. In fact, they’ve taken what they learned as kids in the band and as staff members at the family-owned Cuchetti/Conti Family School of Music in New Smyrna Beach, Fla., and put it into practice as the band The Afterwhile.

After making an initial splash at a few venues around East Tennessee last fall, the pair will return for a week’s worth of gigs starting Tuesday, and fans who might have gained a bit of familiarity with the band last time around might be surprised at the ongoing evolution of The Afterwhile.

“We’ve kind of gone through a couple of stages stylistically,” Cuchetti said. “Recently, we’ve been listening to a lot of folk and bluegrass and country. Two of our mutual favorites are Brandi Carlile and Ray LaMontagne. They’re very super influential in both of our writing styles and performing style, and so we’ve been focusing more along that genre.

“I still love to sing the blues and the funky, soulful stuff — that’s always fun. And I think you have to be careful because it’s hard for people to put you into a category if there’s a bunch of styles going on at once, but this style really feels right.”

Gina was 5 when the Conti Family stopped touring after 15 years on the road; by that time, her older brothers and sisters, most of whom had been raised on a tour bus, were tired of the demanding schedule but were already on their way to becoming musicians in their own right. Their parents encouraged the pursuit, but they also nudged their kids toward higher education, which is where Cuchetti broadened her musical horizons.

“In my college years, I was exposed to so much different music that I’d never really known about,” she said, citing Joni Mitchell and Eva Cassidy as two of her influences. “I went to the Berklee College of Music (in Boston), and I was surrounded by so many different styles and exposed to a lot of new stuff. Growing up, I was exposed to classic rock and Motown, but I think my training there and getting to know my own mechanism allowed me to branch off and find my ... own voice.”

It was in the mid-1990s that her older brother Tony (the eighth-youngest of the 10 siblings) suggested the two of them put a band together. They worked to secure gigs around their hometown, and fans liked what they heard — the harmonies tied so closely to their genetic predisposition toward music and a lifetime of singing together won over local crowds, and The Afterwhile began branching out regionally.

Others outside of those hoping to see a great band at a local bar have taken notice as well — Cuchetti was recently one of 120 potential contestants for the new season of NBC’s “The Voice,” and while she wasn’t selected (and unfortunately, her audition in front of stars Adam Levine, Cee-Lo Green, Christina Aguilera and Blake Shelton wasn’t televised), the experience has only made her a better performer, she said.

“To make the final auditions, the blind auditions, and sing in front of the four judges, was an incredible experience,” she said. “I was there for almost a month, and I got to work with all of these top vocal coaches. It was amazing.”

- The Daily Times