The idea of leaving college and the “responsibility” of the world behind to pursue your dream of being in a band seems like nothing more than a high-school cliché, applicable to the artsy music major who scribbles lyrics incessantly, whose yowls echo through the dorm. The success stories you hear about college bands that make it big seem like just that — stories. It isn’t often that you witness first-hand the actual process of growth and development that bands must go through to reach that level of success. Charlottesville, home to U.Va, is a mecca of up-and-coming bands and has seen several promising artists emerge throughout the past year — but none more promising than the rising pop band Tim Be Told.

Coming together as a full band a mere nine months ago, TBT has already garnered rave recognition from local music lovers and industry reps alike. After winning U.Va’s 2008 Battle of the Bands in the fall, Tim Be Told spent the rest of the year playing various venues on the East Coast, culminating at U.Va’s Springfest last weekend, where they opened for L.A.-based rock band OK Go.

I snagged my chance to catch up with the band — frontman Tim Ouyang, guitarists Andrew Chae and Luan Nguyen and drummer Jim Barredo (bassist Parker Stanley was unavailable) after the show. With two U.Va alumni and a current U.Va fourth-year, the band is firmly rooted in the U.Va’s culture — a fact confirmed by the large turnout of U.Va students to support the band’s rising star.

The Campus Word: So tell me, how did Tim Be Told come about?

Tim: Basically, me and Andrew had a mutual friend — his college roommate — who ended up hooking us up and said, ‘You guys should consider playing together,’ so… Andrew was in California at the time, so we actually talked on the phone and said, ‘Do you wanna give this a try?’ While that was going on, I asked Luan to join up with us as well, we were going to school together at U.Va. So then Andrew came over and it was just the three of us starting out. Jim and Parker signed on with us later.

TCW: Why did your friend think you and Andrew would be a good match?

Tim: Well, he was my best friend from New Jersey, and we had sung together back in the day. Andrew is an amazing guitarist, so he told us we should consider it. I hadn’t even actually considered doing music after graduating, but after there was a prospect of starting something, I decided to go for it.

TCW: What did you guys all study?

Tim: I studied architecture.

Andrew: I studied poli-sci at Wheaton.

Luan: I’m still a fourth-year and I’m studying Chem.

Jim: I was in Accounting at McIntire [School of Commerce at U.Va].

TCW: How are you inspired? Who and what are your musical influences?

Tim: I tend to be more in the pop genre. I really like soul singers… Alicia Keys, Christina Aguilera, Donny Hathaway, Gavin DeGraw, John Legend, Sara Bareilles… I have a lot of pop influences, but I’ve also really been getting into jazz and I grew up playing classical piano. The way we were working at first… I guess me and Andrew had never played in a band before, Jim was actually the only one who had actually played in a band, so we didn’t really know how the process worked, so it would usually be me coming in with a song I had written — we’re still doing songs I had wrote in high school — so I would come in with a song I had wrote and we’d just kind of play through it. As we’ve been developing as a band, I’ve been coming in with a song and these guys with their different musical backgrounds would be like, ‘Why don’t we try this?’ and it’s really cool to see how a song evolves and how it changes. It was cool to record an album first, when we were starting out, then you see our live show now and there’s so much more depth and flavor to it that it’s a cool process now. I come up with a song and it completely changes from when I visualized it in my head. We’re considering recording an EP in the future, but for now we’re focused on getting shows.

TCW: Tell me about the Springfest experience.

Jim: We played at U.Va’s Battle of the Bands about two months ago and won, and that was kind of like the prize — we got to play Springfest. It worked out that we got to be the opening act on the main stage. I had a blast playing yesterday.

TCW: Was it different from anything else you’ve done?

Tim: I’ve never played on a stage that huge before and when we came in and saw it, I was like, ‘We’re playing on that?’

Luan: They had 18 speakers on each side of the stage.

Tim: It was definitely cool, I felt like a little kid. It was definitely not something… I don’t think we expected to be playing shows this large this quickly just because we just started out and we were just starting to get a handle on how to book shows. We’ve just been really fortunate meeting the right people and just having really good friends who help us out and try to hook us up.

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