Pop duo The Score came into the spotlight after ASDA used the song "Oh My Love" in their ad. It reached No. 1 on the Spotify UK Viral Chart and No. 4 on the iTunes UK pop charts, becoming the second most played Shazam song in the UK.
Following the success of the single, the band entered into a partnership with Republic Records, and after the release of their mini-album, they played their first show at The Borderline in London.
Their sound is very similar to bands such as OneRepublic, American Authors and The Script.
The album shows off their confidence well and conveys the message to get up and dance. The duo consists of Eddie Anthony, vocals and guitar, and Edan Dover, keyboards and producer.
These guys are going to be great - their music is great, the live show is amazing and they are charming in every sense of the word.
How It All Started at The Score?
In 2015, The Score appeared on the pop scene seemingly out of nowhere. The duo were unsigned when their first single "Oh My Love" was released earlier that year.
Just six months later, after appearing in the UK's national supermarket campaign, the song reached number 43 on the UK Singles Chart and number 17 on the iTunes Chart and became the most requested song on Shazam for all of 2015.
The band was quickly hooked up with Republic Records and released their debut album 'Where You Run?' in September. The lyrical writing skills of Eddie Anthony (vocals/guitar) and Edana Dover (keyboards/producer) are evident, partly through years of playing and writing for other musicians.
Let's go through the facts by which you can understand the group well:
Eddie, Edan and Kat Graham
The boys were first introduced by a mutual friend at Universal Motown and were asked to work with Kat Graham while she was working on her debut album for Interscope records. They wrote "Wanna Say", the second single from her first album, Against The Wall.
The two didn't want to start a band until they met each other.
They were completely content writing lyrics just for other creators before they started working together. Edan once said, “Eddie and I had no idea we wanted to be stars when we first met. This was not our intention.
Eddie did the pop lines with the melody and lyrics and I did the big production. We were working on songs hoping that we would start playing with pop artists."
Even though they are a pop group, Edan never listened to, never followed the trends in pop music.
Dover had an idea. “My background in jazz,” he says. “I grew up playing/learning jazz piano. I basically completely stopped doing popular pop music and only cared about jazz. It wasn't until college that I started listening to or writing different kinds of music. I was only into jazz, funk, fusion and soul playing in jazz clubs in New York."
Being a jazz pianist was very important to Edan
If you've ever watched the movie Whiplash, you've probably wondered how real it is compared to fiction in the jazz scene.
Dover testifies to the intensity of competition. “It's really scary to play in a jazz band because you're surrounded by such amazing musicians,” he says. “I started Jazz early in my career so I played with all these amazing, more experienced players.
If you've seen [Whiplash], there's a lot of truth in that, that everyone is here to make music and the genre is very competitive. Pop music is a little more hospitable."
The band started playing at the Rockwood Music Hall... Playing a lot..
Rockwood Music Hall is a New York City venue on the Lower East Side that has been around for many years. When Dover and Anthony first formed The Score and the first gigs began, Rockwood consisted of two stages: small and large. And with the help of these two scenes, one could trace the growth of the duo. At first they were small, then they grew to a large one.
"The first shows were definitely awkward... We started playing in a small room where there wasn't a lot of room," says Anthony. Dover notes that it was something like Wednesday at 8 pm. “But a year later we moved to a bigger room and started on Thursday at 8pm.”
The Score: On the same stage with an idol
Anthony says he was at the Bottle Rock Music Festival in Napa in May 2016. “We were backstage when we got there and unloaded our gear and everything, and we were in our tent and we heard Stevie Wonder's Sir Duke playing and we thought it was just a track on the loudspeaker.
But we thought, "Wait, this sounds live," and that was Stevie Wonder's sound check. And it's kind of surreal because we'll be on that stage too. It's kind of crazy to play on the same stage as one of our music idols.
On Friday we had a 2pm slot and there were still a lot of people and it was amazing to see people's reactions to the songs we just created in our head. They were played only in the studio, and then decided immediately to the mass. It's amazing that so many people are responding positively to our music."
Edan is super forgetful
Probably each of us has used the phrase “damn, I forgot (a)” more than once, but Dover uses it regularly. Always forgets or loses something while on tour. “I do so many stupid things.
One day I left my laptop or lost my keyboard stand and yesterday I had to buy another one. When you go on tour, you have to learn how to be responsible, like having a checklist and making sure you have all the little things. You might think that the game is where things go wrong, but really, it's all the little things."
Edan learns from his mistakes... though not always.
“I feel like every single show I'm constantly paranoid about something going wrong,” Dover admits. “There was one time we played a show at South By Southwest (SXSW) where [something went wrong] with my laptop.
I was going to collect all the singles with all my sounds on a laptop in order to do a presentation for Republic Records in South By. And it would seem that everything is fine, he did everything, but no! It all disappeared somewhere and all my sounds for all the songs disappeared ...
I literally didn't have time to do anything about it. So we just fought and I just played the regular piano. Since then, I've made sure I have backups of everything!"
Album of ups and downs
This may sound a little hackneyed, but as Anthony put it, the new album is "about the ups and downs in the band." Even just to take the song "Unstoppable" - the first single from this album, in which, if you drip, there is a cool meaning.
“We wanted to write a song about how we all struggle in life at different times, whether we're musicians or doctors or whatever. We've all fallen at some point, but we can all feel invincible if we really want to."
