Whatever happened to Remy Zero? The band that originally hailed from Birmingham and were picked to be part of a Radiohead tour two decades ago on the basis of their demo went on to have a handful of their songs pop up in movies and TV, from “Fair” on the Grammy-winning soundtrack to Garden State to “Save Me,” which served as the theme for Smallville for 10 seasons.
The band broke up in 2003 but reunited a few times in 2010 in memory of their drummer Gregory Slay who died that year of complications from cystic fibrosis at the age of 40. But Remy Zero lives, if only because lead singer Shelby Tate legally changed his name to Remy Zero in 1990. And he brings the same pop tunefulness and familiar sound to his new band Cheshires, named after the fictional grinning cat in Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
There are other traces of Remy Zero, the band, in Cheshires as well. Louis Schefano, who was original RZ drummer before Slay, is the writer and singer of this new Cheshires track we’re proud to premiere, “Wish Soething Would Happen.” Rounding out the trio is multi-instrumentalist Leslie van Trease, a frequent touring musician with Remy Zero.
Tate wrote most of the songs on the new self-released Cheshires album, but it is Schefano who spent some time in bands like Little Red Rocket which became Azure Ray and was part of the Birmingham scene that created the band Verbena, who sang and wrote three songs on the LP, one of which is this dreamy pop tune that sounds like something out of classic Zombies and deserves to be some TV show’s theme song.
“I believe in luck,” he sings. And like a bunch of cheshire cats, the melody makes us smile.
