Artist description 5 piece pop/rock/country band with lush vocal arrangements over a guitar,bass,keyboard bed.

Music Style AAA

Musical Influences Beatles,Elvis,The Who,Tom Petty,Led Zeppellin

Similar Artists Blue Rodeo,The Guess Who

Artist History After being in a string of moderately successful bands throughout the 1970's, Claude Dubé, a graduate of McMaster University (BSc.), moved to Los Angeles in 1980 to pursue a music and songwriting career. Rather quickly, he found himself playing the Hollywood circuit with the band London (which eventually would spawn Motley Crue). After London disbanded, Claude partnered with producer Ron Payne (Minute Men, Dokken, White Trash) and for 3 years he honed his production & writing skills. The two went on to release an album together as well as an EP. In 1985 Claude returned to Toronto with his family and regrouped with some old friends and band mates that helped begin his career. Playing again with his brother Dan Dubé (bass), Nick Holden (guitar/vocals), and songwriting partner Dennis Decker (lead guitar) underscored his homecoming and was immediately gratifying. Finding the right drummer who shared the same passions as Dubay was drummer/songwriter Kevin Camilleri, thus forming the Dubay Band as it exists today. In 1990, the band created their own label, Limozine Records, to house the bands original recordings. Within six months they recorded Bonjour and contracted The Music Broker's to promote the first single My Michelle. Music Broker Chris Alecock sent an unmixed version to Bob Potter (Led Zeppelin, Paul McCartney, Emmylou Harris) and was taken aback by the single and offered to perform the remix. The Music Broker's tracked the single nationally with over a dozen stations picking it up including airplay on Torontos Q107 and Hamiltons Y95. With all of the exposure and consistent gigging, Dubay went on to win Y95's Basement Rock competition and sold over 3000 copies of Bonjour. With their second album, Emoceans, the band decided to put their songwriting into a higher gear and take a more thematic approach to the creation of their album. As the title would suggest, Emoceans is an intensely touching and heartfelt album. Recorded at Hamiltons Grant Avenue Studios (Killjoys, Gordon Lightfoot, Parachute Club), it did not take long for Joe Radio to track airplay for the first single, Ocean of Tears, on campus radio. Into My Life, the second single from Emoceans, was given an additional promotional push with a video featured on Much Music. The attention prompted features on Torontos CITY TV (Breakfast and Lunch Television) as well as numerous cable television shows and radio programs across Ontario. With the success of Emoceans, Dubay re-invested the rewards back into the music and created their own Symphony Place Studio (SPS), the band's own 1000 square foot digital recording studio. The band's third effort, Take Note, was recorded and mixed at SPS and launched with Dubays biggest publicity campaign to date. The single She Talks It Out was tracked once again by Joe Wood, and was featured on nearly 30 radio stations nationally. Take Note took on a life of its own once it was further released in Europe by Austin, Texas based, BSW Records, garnering Dubay their first favourable radio play in France, the Netherlands, Germany and beyond. By 2000, Dubay had performed over 500 shows in the Golden Horseshoe at legendary venues including the El Mocombo, The Diamond, and The Gasworks. They have shared the stage with some great Canadian artists like Alannah Myles and The Tea Party. They have performed dozens of corporate shows for the Hamilton Tiger-Cats, the Hamilton Bulldogs, the WWF, Camp Trillium, and twelve municipal events for The City of Hamilton, including a Canada Day Festival for over 40,000 people! Dubay is a band that loves to play for their fans. In 2001, they are ready to embark on yet another chapter in the Dubay band saga with the upcoming release of the bands fourth and most adventurous album of their career entitled Earth School. Recorded at the recently upgraded SPS (produced by the band and mixed at Penguin Productions by long-time friend and road manager Mark Mallet), Earth School is as thoughtful as ever in typical Dubay fashion. The theme of this recording follows the bands quest for spiritual answers, surrounding life and the afterlife. They intend on releasing the disc in November (2001), and have hired the services of veteran promoter's BLR Entertainment (Canadian Music Week, Earth Day, Adam's Rib). The CD will be sent to various music and trade publications nationally for review. The band intends to promote and publicize the event on the internet (www.dubayband.com), radio and television. While the bands back catalogue is being downloaded internationally on the Internet via www.mp3.com among others, the band continues to create solidly crafted and thoughtful music for future recordings. The Dubay saga has only just begun and the band will continue to ride the wave of their own success as long as the fans continue buying their CD's and attending their shows. Look out for Earth School at a retailer near you!

Group Members Claude Dube,Dany Dube,Nicholas Holden,Kevin Camilleri,Dennis Decker

Instruments Vocals,Guitar,Bass,Drums,Keyboard

Albums Bonjour,emoceans,Take Note,Earth School

Press Reviews In a pop music world ever hungry for the next big thing, it's often difficult to discern hits from hype. However, there are some artists who prefer to follow in the footsteps of their heroes and focus on the craft of songwriting regardless of popular trends. Dubay is a band that focuses on the traditional rather than the trendy. Taking the nod from bands like The Beatles and The Rolling Stones (that were as much about songwriting as anything else), Claude Dubé leads his 'family band' into the new millennium with a brand new album, Earth School, that lends a thoughtful word, a lilting melody and a powerful pop presentation to a world gone awry. This, the band's fourth release, shows Dubay's determination to make it and on their own terms with their most mature release to date. With the tragic events of September 11th 2001, lead singer, guitarist, keyboardist and songwriter, Claude Dubé ponders the prolific timing of this album that specifically ruminates the questions of life, love, war, technology and our very existence on a whole. It's at least topical if not timely. "Sometimes in the music business, it seems like you're always playing catch up," explains Claude from his home just outside of Hamilton, "but it seems like this time we really hit it on the money. The whole theme of questioning our regular conceptions of life couldn't have been more pertinent." "The title Earth School comes from the philosophy that we're all here to learn. We have a short life on this planet to learn something from our experience and then what we do with that after that -- no one really knows. Since our last record three years ago, we've collected a lot of songs that represent thoughts and feelings recapping our lives. We didn't set out on a quest but when you look at the songs put together you can see the definite connection." Earth School has a structure that embodies the spiritual, technological, emotional, political, environmental and topical concerns of life in general and addresses them in a way that is empathetic and progressive while uncompromising in its pop sensibility. Comparisons to Canadian treasures like Prism, Saga, Gowan, or Chris De Burgh are easy to make while it might even be easier to see how their music is as universal as that released from international artists The Alan Parson's Project, Steely Dan or even Pink Floyd. The latter's symphonic influence is most resonated with the album's final track. Full of grandiose textures and a wash of sound, the title track Earth School, offers the heartbeat of the world without a lyric to convey the emotion. The track is what encapsulates the theme of the album on a whole. Earth School is a concept album but we never set out to do that. These are just thoughts and recollections of the people and places we've seen over the last few years and things that we've done. If you believe that, you live your life and you choose to learn from it. I was raised a Roman Catholic, but if you start exploring all the different religions in the world you start to wonder who's right and who's wrong. You start to realize the whole planet is on some sort of spiritual quest and each individual is searching for some answers. To his credit, Claude has learned a lot over the last two decades. He knows how to be in the right place at the right time. After graduating with a BSc in Psychology from Hamilton's McMaster University, Claude sought out his fortunes in Los Angeles. As a result, his résumé reads like an early eighties hit list. He's worked with some incredible talent (as an engineer for Toto among others) and even helped to launch the nascent Los Angeles band London with his vocals - a band that would go on to later spawn the metallic monster acts that would rule the heavy metal scene of the late eighties, Wasp (Blackie Lawless) and Motley Crue (Nikki Sixx). "I went to LA after McMaster. I got some auditions and the first one I got I was #102 in the line up and I ended up getting the job. It was for this band called London. We did a few months in Hollywood and basically at the end of it we got dropped like a rock. I got to play with both Blackie Lawless and Nikki Sixx and when the band split up they both asked me to work on their projects but I thought heavy metal was dead in 1980. I've got to laugh because for the next five years they cracked the market pretty good." But, as a humble family man with bigger things in mind, Claude returned home to Hamilton to regain a lost sense of reality in the glitz of Hollywood. He found that foundation with his friends in Dubay and they haven't looked back for eleven years. Together with brother Dany on bass guitar, grade school buddies Nick Holden (guitar) and songwriting partner Dennis Decker (lead guitar), they formed the basis of a family band that would dominate their lives from here on out. With the addition of Kevin Camilleri, (drummer/songwriter) the family band was complete; hence Dubay, a play on the last name Dubé. "For the last eleven years, these guys have been my best friends. and for a band to stick together with the original members for so long is unheard of these days. When you work with people you like the music comes easy." And on Earth School, the listening is almost as easy. It's an album that is as much a wonderful soundtrack to use for relaxing as an intriguing word play meant to provoke thought and coffee shop debates. The songs run the gamut from the effects of the technologically driven world wide web on Internet Dot Com, "In this time that we have all of this information about life, the after life and everything else shows the power of all of this collective thought bringing it home.", to the prospects of the global village and man's inhumanity to man on Peaceful Warrior. "This fits with the American attitude today. We want peace and nothing more however if we're pushed we are at war." But it probably is most poignant when it explores personal introspection on songs like Elevator Man, "It's a song about getting in touch with your own inner self" or the worldly love song Alone. While you're here on earth, you want to share it with humankind to get a good reflection of what your worth is. It started out as a love song but it mutated into a whole different thing. This worldview is something that has always been a part of Claude Dubé and his band's make up from the very beginning. If you were to throw a handful of darts at a map of the world you might pierce Montreal, Los Angeles, Amsterdam, Lake Louise, Mount Pleasant, Michigan and Hamilton, Ontario and they might simultaneously represent those places the individual members of Dubay have traveled. A scattered collection of points on the map that might seem random unrelated points of geography but in fact are the touchstones of the lives of these musical philosophers. Similarly, at a superficial glance the world is seemingly chaos. but there is a structure and a purpose or at least there are those that want to offer that hope. The question is finding it and Dubay helps with seemingly asking all the right questions. They are a group of five best friends who have grown up together - and now bring their own sense of cohesion to this world full of calamity through their love, their lives and their music. "I was a premed student trying to find a cure for cancer but music was always a means to express myself since I was 15. It brought me to places where nothing else could. I would like to be remembered as a humanist who wrote about mankind and all the possibilities that lay before us -- Someone who really set out to do something good for mankind. We would like to touch people with our music."

Location Hamilton, Ontario - Canada

Copyright notice. All material on MP3.com is protected by copyright law and by international treaties. You may download this material and make reasonable number of copies of this material only for your own personal use. You may not otherwise reproduce, distribute, publicly perform, publicly display, or create derivative works of this material, unless authorized by the appropriate copyright owner(s).