The Evolution of Boss Lady and the Company

February 2009

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Written and Photographed by Joel Mora

Matt Lazar sits behind a drum set in a room scattered with recording equipment, framed Jimi Hendrix and Pink Floyd albums, and two futons. He starts tapping a drumbeat, and soon Nicholas Greene adds to the rhythm with his bass.

The two members of Gainesville four-piece band Boss Lady and The Company are giving a demonstration of their new sound.

It seems weird that I could get an idea of what a band sounds like with only half the band playing.

After a minute of hearing the jazzy-rock sound that already makes the band stand out in the local music scene, Greene steps on a pedal, and suddenly it sounds like an electronic beat coming out of Pharrell Williams’ synthesizer.
“We’re trying to be different,” Greene said. “We started out getting a good foundation, and now we’re working on sounding original with a groove, something dance related.”

Boss Lady and The Company are writing and recording new material for an album that will feature their musical growth. Evolution seems to be a theme for the band not only in their music but also in their history.

The band was known as The Company before singer Danielle DeCosmo joined Greene, Lazar and guitarist Steven Unrue last summer.

“I was doing the singing for a while, but I don’t like it too much,” Greene said.

The band heard DeCosmo singing for the first time one night when it was playing at the old Reggae Tuesday at The Side Bar.

“She was singing ‘The Great Gig in the Sky,’ and we were like ‘Damn, that girl can sing so well; she is so much better than me,’” Greene said.

DeCosmo was playing in another band, but The Company wanted her to join it. It was hard for DeCosmo to take the members seriously being that she is 26 and the age of the rest of the band ranges from 19-21.

“I got a couple singing lessons from her, and then I asked her to jam with us,” Greene said. “We got her to learn some originals, and we were like ‘Be in our band,’ and she was all for it.”

Adding ‘Boss Lady’ to their moniker created the next step in the band’s evolution.

Like many bands, Boss Lady and The Company started out playing covers and started developing its danceable jazz-rock.

When Greene showed me some of the band’s old songs, he winced at what he believes are unpolished compositions. But it’s hard to be content with an evolving sound.

“I don’t think we’ll ever be too satisfied with ourselves. Once one thing is done, it’s like ‘Where do you improve next?’”

The band’s new goal is to add more hip-hop beats to its songs.

“I’ve been listening to a lot of [The] Neptunes and rap beats and working that with what we’ve been doing,” Greene said. “My main thing is to make everything to where people want to dance.”

The writing and recording process has also evolved. At first, most of it was left to Greene, and now the entire band participates.

“We’ve all come up with chord progressions for at least one of the [new] songs,” Greene said. “I think of the new ones as a group project.”

Instead of writing the song and then recording it, one of the members will come with an idea and record it, and then the other members add their own ideas and record it. Sometimes the originally recorded part won’t end up in the song, but it will have the same original idea.

But don’t expect to find the new CD on local music shelves anytime soon. The band is taking its time writing songs.

“[Songs] come here and there; we are not consciously trying to shove songs out,” Greene said. “We can write a song quickly if we wanted to, but we’re trying to have more to it than that.”

If you can’t wait that long to get the CD, you can hear the new material at Thai Fusion Café every Friday. Playing a show every week at one venue isn’t normal for many bands, but Boss Lady and The Company uses the opportunity to tighten its sound and gain fans.

“It’s cool that we can go to Thai Fusion [Café] and have people bumpin’ and grindin’,” Greene said.

For drummer Matt Lazar, playing Thai Fusion Café is about variety.

“The thing about playing Thai Fusion [Café] is that we can go play some covers, play some originals and have fun, but if we do something at like Market Street, we stick to doing originals,” Lazar said. “You can’t play the same stuff all the time.”

The only thing that holds back the evolution of Boss Lady and The Company is marketing. It relies on word-of-mouth, which is why you will not see any fliers with its name posted anywhere.

“We could probably be more heard-of if we spend more time advertising ourselves, but for the time spent advertising, I’d rather be playing,” Greene said.

The band hasn’t done any shows outside of the city besides one in Jacksonville, which hurts it in trying to get exposure. The members feel skeptical about touring.

“My main thing is just trying to find somebody to manage us,” Greene said. “I want someone to set it up for us because if we do it, I want to do it right. If I could do it and not spend my tuition money on it, it would work out.”

The band is just hoping that the dedication to its sound, its performance and to each other will grab people.

“We focus more on writing music and getting really tight, and we pride ourselves in being the tight, don’t-screw-up kind of band,” Greene said. “Hopefully our music will make people get off.”