There’s nothing like a story with a little musical accompaniment, courtesy of Nether Land, the band you’re about to read about. Here’s “Keep On” cued up for you!
“Life is what happens while you’re busy making other plans,” is a quote made popular by John Lennon; it applies to another musician you probably haven’t heard of: Joe Willis. Maybe you don’t know his work, but your kids might appreciate it. No, he’s not in a kids’ band like The Wiggles, he’s co-owner of City Threads, a kid-only clothing company.
But this story starts as a love story, and one with an unconventional rock and roll lifestyle twist to kick things off.
Joe Willis and Shayna Samuels had gone to the same high school together in Southern California, and then by coincidence the same college, UC Santa Cruz up the coast in Northern California. They didn’t spend time together in high school, but by Joe’s sophomore year the two had started dating. Joe was in an instrumental funk band and was living with two of the six bandmates. Things with Joe and Shayna got that interesting twist when one of Joe’s roommates got fed up with their other one; and to resolve the problem Joe’s roommate turned to… Joe’s girlfriend.
“The guitarist couldn’t stand the sax player. He just really couldn’t stand him. The sax player didn’t even know, so he actually asked [Shayna], she was my girlfriend at the time, ‘Hey, do you want to move in?’ and she was like, ‘Okay.’… They sort of worked it out on their own. And she asked [me], ‘Is that cool?’ and I’m like, ‘I guess.’ [laughs]… So all of the sudden we’re living together and we’ve been together maybe six or seven months. So we had the band playing, we played in the garage, my girlfriend was living there, it was a crazy year.”
Joe and Shayna were happy and loved to spend time together, even doing the little everyday things together, “She helped me move into my house before we lived there together… We just like running errands together. It sounds crazy, but we wouldn’t mind doing that.” They got married in their early twenties and were back in Los Angeles pursuing their separate dreams – both relative long shots in two competitive fields:
Joe had gone through USC’s Thornton School of Music program for Scoring for Motion Picture and Television. He’d landed a part time job working for a professional composer who was creating the music for the TV show “Charmed.” Joe made ends meet as a piano and guitar music teacher who would travel home to home. He had training, education, and a foot in the door – in an intensely competitive field with zero guarantees.
Shayna had partnered with an old friend and had started a clothing company. But Shayna’s business partnership hadn’t worked out, and she was going forward on her own with a little help from Joe whenever he had some spare time. Shayna hit big on a hot trend and had gotten some orders, but wasn’t set up yet to fill them. Joe tells it, “It was called City Threads because we used to embroider ‘New York’ on hoodies for kids, which at the time – this was around 2000 or 2001 – everyone was wearing those blue hoodies that said ‘New York’… We were doing them for kids and no one else was doing them for kids.”
But Shayna was still new to business ownership and the clothing industry herself; Joe had even less experience. But they they had a golden opportunity in front of them with the kids’ hoodies and decided to do it together. Joe quit his composer’s assistant and music teacher jobs to take another venture with a different kind of risk – working with a spouse. “People were always like, ‘How do you guys deal with each other? I could never work with my wife. I could never work with my husband. Because we’d just fight all the time.’”
Fortunately Joe and Shayna loved – and continued to love – spending time together, because that’s what it took to learn everything – “[The ‘New York’ hoodies] sold like crazy right off the bat. And we had no idea how to make any clothing, neither of us had any experience or schooling in clothes… It was probably about a year just driving around in our car, every single day; we didn’t have an office yet, we were just working out of our home and just figuring out how to make stuff… I just remember how hot it was. It was probably like 100 degrees, we were driving around in the car all day, listing to the radio, just going from place to place to place. We had to find and embroiderer, we had to find a sewer, we had to find fabric, we had to find a cutter. And so we go to these places and we ask everybody a zillion questions and nobody would know; like everybody would just be annoyed with us but for the most part they tried to be helpful. And that’s how we learned it, that’s how we found everything, just by being as annoying as possible because we had to get stuff done.”
They created then expanded a successful clothing company and are today in the process of raising their three children. But what about the band? It stayed together as much as most bands can survive through all the bandmates’ marriages, kids, and careers. They put out six EPs, one single, and one live album over the 20 years. If you want to hear them, here are a couple more samples of what a part time group of talented musicians can do, in the band they named Nether Land:
Breaking Out
Bring You Down
But seven produced works in 20 years is slow going, even with the ‘other plans’ called life getting in the way, including many of the bandmates now being parents. “Drummer’s wife’s pregnant with kid number two, our singer just had her third kid – So for a while it was moving at a snail’s pace.”
Things are different now. Not so much for Nether Land, but for Joe. Around 2008 City Threads took on an online sales partner and also grew their kids’ underwear line – and sales went up.
The success afforded Joe enough financial cushion to cut through the steps and stages usually associated with a struggling band’s development and go ahead and fund the studio time for the band’s next album. “We were a very democratic band, we always talked together and it would take forever, so this time I’m trying to write and arrange it all and ask people to come andrecord, and then that would be the next incarnation of our band… I was just going to fund the whole thing and have everybody come in and play on it. Instead of rehearsing and doing shows and waiting, you know, doing them every two years; we don’t have the time for all that anymore. And everyone’s sort of getting tired of it because you know when you have a band you hope something’s going to happen and nothing ever happens. You spend all this time playing and recording and like, it doesn’t lead to anything… and people started to get frustrated with the process. So I said okay, let’s make it easy. I’ll just write everything, everybody’ll get together and we’ll record and we’ll take it from there. So there’s no… there’s no like, yearning all the time, like people have in a band… I guess in a collaboration everyone brings their own dreams and the way they want it to go and sometimes, and also if you’re writing songs, people want different things out of the song. And [these] people are three of my best friends, so I love them all, and I love even getting in a room and doing that. But I think we all felt like it was just not very productive. And people started to get really frustrated with the timeline and things not happening and there didn’t seem to be any future in it for all the effort that we were putting into it.”
For anyone who has to wonder ‘why?’ make another album, Joe articulates the desire nicely, “I love the idea of you have an idea in your head, you know, like a song or something you start, [and] you get it out. And I love the band part because you start to know the people in your band and what they’re capable of. So you come up with an idea, and so for instance right now
I’m writing songs I really want this singer particularly to sing. And I just want to hear it realized, I want to hear what it sounds like. I want to hear the guitar player playing it a certain way and I know he can do it because we’ve been together so long, we know each other so well. I guess I want to see that fully realized, and that’s what I want to put my money behind; I almost don’t care what happens with it I just sort of want to hear it, I guess, just taken to its fullest extent.”
Joe and Shayna have three kids and their own business, City Threads, that produces 99% of their products in the USA, and nearly all with US-sourced fabric. There are only two imported pieces: the twill baseball cap and wharf hat, though even those are dyed and finished here.
So what’s next? Another lines of clothes? A world tour with the band? Or something else life sends their way while they’re trying to decide on those plans?
You can keep up with the band at: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=UUruGy3XoCV19YUenGPSimYQ
Purchase tracks through: https://netherlandband.bandcamp.com/album/keep-on
Or check out what City Threads is creating at citythreads.com.
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