Oblivious Signal is a female fronted rock band that originated in Deerfield Beach, Florida in 2007 and consists of vocalist, Cristina T. Feliciano, Nick Orisino on guitar, Greg Andrews on bass, and Jason Talley on drums. For years they’ve had a huge presence in Florida with a fan base that is ever growing. They’ve been waiting for their chance to blow the rock scene up and now is that time. They’ve recently signed with Pavement Music and are destined to do great things. Cristina is a powerhouse vocalist and the band members are so brilliantly talented; you can’t go wrong with this band. Though I’d been in the dark about this band until recently, after listening to their sound, I was shocked that I’d not already been listening to them. I am glad to have had the opportunity to get some firsthand knowledge from them today.
Just an hour or so before they were scheduled to go on stage in Rochester, New York, Cristina took time out to speak with me about their new album “Exordium” and the excitement of life on tour right now. Through our discussion today, I found that we both have no problem wading through tons of mud to see some kick ass bands play on festival stages and that through it all, metal music can be extremely entertaining through the executions of a Mariachi Band. We shared our memories of muddy shoes and just what we were willing to go through to get them clean and dry for day two of the Rockville Festival. Cristina’s shoe/tour tip is: hotel showers are perfect for cleaning mud off your shoes and to who needs a dryer when you have a hair dryer that works just fine. TGI Fridays’ restroom sink however, was my laundromat.
Interview with Cristina Feliciano – Oblivious Signal
By: Leslie Elder Rogers
Metal Exiles: Tell me a little about the feelings of the band right now with the new album being
released today.
Cristina: We’re pretty excited. For us it’s been a long time coming. It’s been four years in the making so now that it’s finally out, it’s a big weight off our shoulders. Now it’s all the promotions and everything else but we’re pretty pumped and psyched. We like seeing all the pictures of the fans posting online of their selfies with our album. We’re just having a blast.
Metal Exiles: I wasn’t familiar with your band until I received the information a couple of weeks ago and I thought “how in the hell did I not know of this band”? The album sounds great and the videos I’ve seen are awesome.
Cristina: We’re getting that a lot right now. Pavement is really pushing us hard. We work really hard as musicians so it’s always great to have that extra oomph, you know. We love hearing people say they’ve never heard of us before and where have we been. We’re like “We’re here now, so definitely listen”.
Metal Exiles: What do you feel got you guys here to this sophomore album release?
Cristina: Oh, just a lot of dedication and a lot of hard work. That’s all it is. We’ve been hustling for several years just trying to get our music out there. We had opportunities. We met with different labels and everybody that we met with wanted to change us to be a regular cookie-cutter band that they kicked out there and would market and stuff and that’s not us. We finally found Pavement and they were happy with the direction we were taking in the music. It was us and they didn’t want to change us. Tim King is our direct A&R and he’s in a band himself so he understands. He understands that we’ve worked so hard and the last thing we want to do is become a pop group. So, it’s just a lot of hard work and dedication and making sure that the music was right and the timing was right, and here we are.
Metal Exiles: So Pavement was your obvious choice?
Cristina: Yes, they didn’t want us to change anything about us or anything like that. They give you suggestions and you work with the label. I like having that partnership feeling where it’s like they’re not just telling you what to look like and what to wear or what to write or what to do. You have that creative freedom 100% of the time and you don’t have that with a lot of other labels so that is something that we are very happy about with Pavement.
Metal Exiles: The album is titled “Exordium”. What’s in the name that made you pick that for the title?
Cristina: It means new beginnings and for us it was that this venture in our life was a new beginning. It was a big step in our careers, for all of us. We all come from different backgrounds and from different places in the music industry. We’ve been working at this for over 8 years and with our bass player for a little over 4 years. We wanted to name the album what it really was. This is our new venture. This is what we’re doing and all the stuff that happened in the past; all the heartaches and everything; we’re just gonna leave it all behind and keep on trucking and be positive about everything.
Metal Exiles: This album has a lot of moods and feelings. You can see that and feel like even in the videos like “Crash”. What were you going through when penning Exordium?
Cristina: Oh man. I was going through a lot of things. A lot of the songs are based on a lot of personal experiences. “Crash” is about a friend of mine that passed away in a car accident when he was under the influence. “Madeline” is about my old neighborhood that I used to live in. I grew up there and all my friends are either in jail or have committed suicide and they’re just not around or made bad decisions in life. When I was writing this album, I took all those feelings lyrically and I put them into Nick’s instrumentation. The guy is amazing. He’s a great guitarist. So Nick would come up with some great melodic riffs and I would just pour all these feelings out just into the lyrics for it so it’s like musicians’ therapy. It’s like putting all of your personal experiences and everything in one album and wrapping it with a bow and giving it to everyone else who’s going through the same thing and telling them “hey, there’s a light at the end of the tunnel”. You don’t always have to stay stuck at the bottom. You can rise up.
Metal Exiles: Do you personally do most of the writing or is it a collaborative effort?
Cristina: Nick does a lot of the instrumentations so he does a lot of the guitar riffs and everything. He comes up with that. I have an in home studio so what we did with this album was that if he’d come up with an idea, he come over to my house and we’d go in and record it and build upon that. I have a book that I write all my lyrics in and I’d go through it and I’d find out what song, what lyrics I wrote that matched it and him and I would play around with some of the words and see how they’d fit and we’d go from there. As far as lyrics go, that’s mostly me except for the song “Decode” which Nick actually came up with the chorus for. He showed up one day for practice and said he’d thought of the coolest lyrics in the shower so we rearranged some stuff and there goes the song “Decode”. Everybody puts in a little bit of something into the band. I wouldn’t even try to tell you how to play bass. Thank God Greg is here to do all these crazy bass lines and Jason doing everything that he does. I mean, without it, there would never be any music.
Metal Exiles: What kind of headspace do you have to be in to find the conviction to sing as if your life depended on it?
Cristina: It’s funny, and this goes back to our old album “Into the Night”, we actually brought over one of the songs we cut from that album. It was called “12am” but we changed it to “Medicine”. Basically the song is about when like late at night your brain takes a different view and approach to everything. It’s kind of like when the crazy in you comes out and the emotions and everything come out because during the day people walk around and have this front; they’re busy and they work so they’re trying to live life. When you’re at home by yourself and you’re sitting in that silence, that’s when everything comes out; all the thoughts that you don’t want to think about. You think about all the things that have happened in life that you wished you didn’t have to go through. What I did was put all those emotions to paper and I realize that writing is like musicians therapy. I realize that I’m not the only one going through all this stuff. There are a lot of people out there that are going through a lot of it so that’s where a lot of those lyrics come from; that kind of insanity that you go through when it’s late at night, two in the morning kind of thing.
Metal Exiles: You are tour in with Flaw at the moment. What are some of the experiences you’ve had on tour with them so far? Have there been any memorable moments?
Cristina: We’re having a blast with these guys right now. They’re great. When we first started kicking off on this tour we actually had some RV problems. We wondered how on the very first day everything breaks down. Our brakes went out, we had to replace those really quick and those things are not cheap for an RV. I mean, they weigh as much as me. Thank God our drummer is very mechanically inclined. I couldn’t even tell you how to put a car battery in. He was able to fix everything up for us to go. We get up here and “Flaw” and “Seasons After” are the most humble people ever. They were helping us out; showing us the ropes cause’ we’re still the rookies in the game. It’s nice. It’s been a good experience. We’re still trying to figure out who wrote ‘many kisses dear” on our trailer but we’re having fun.
Metal Exiles: What can we see from you guys as you vamp up promotion for Exordium?
Cristina: We’re going to be hitting the road again in August. Those dates are being solidified right now. We have plans for the rest of the year to keep promoting the album. Right now we have a few that we’re doing in Florida, Alabama and Georgia; the Southeastern part of the United States and we do our CD release party June 6th in Melbourne, Florida with all of our fans over there. We had a thing where we wanted to see where our biggest fan base was so we could do our release party there and Melbourne was definitely the winner.
Metal Exiles: With that thought in mind, what is life like on the road for Oblivious Signal?
Cristina: It’s interesting. I’m here in an RV with three guys that are like my brothers and of course the fourth, our roadie/security, a huge looking dude that scares everybody. It’s a lot of fun. You get used to all the different smells, good and bad. I get my own little private bunk on the top cabin which is cool. I have a little blind thing I can use when I don’t want to see anything but it’s a lot of fun getting to spend quality time with the guys. I’ve known these guys forever but we still learn new things every day. I just found out that Greg has over a hundred songs of Michael Jackson stuff on his iPod. So, yeah, it’s a lot of fun. You get to know what buttons to push and what not to push and what ticks people off and not to go there again. It’s funny because one of the other bands asked us if we always argue and we were like “yes”. This is how we are. We argue with each other but at the end of the day we’re like family. We’ll all sit down and we’ll all be like nothing happened throughout the day. It’s been like that for eight years. That’s’ how we knew, when we got Greg our bass player as a new addition, when he put up with all our craziness, we knew he was the one. We have a rule in the band; no sensitive people.
Metal Exiles: I read a little about your heritage. Do you also do your songs in Spanish?
Cristina: We’re working on that right now. We’ve had some requests for it. Actually on our first album, “Into the Night”, we had transposed all those songs into Spanish and we got an amazing reaction from it. I’ll be honest, we didn’t think that we were gonna get the request from this album for it like we have so due to fact that we do have an in-home studio and we have the flexibility to go back and do that, I think it’s definitely something that’s going to be in the works toward the end of the year.
Metal Exiles: That would be awesome. Having that type of diversity, most rock bands can’t say that so it would be something that sets you apart from the others.
Metal Exiles: Should we expect to see you guys at some festivals soon?
Cristina: We’re hoping. We might be doing the Warped Tour again this year. We did it last year. It’s a different type of field for us. Now we’re kind of getting used to more of the all ages crowd. We’re used to playing to 18 and older. When you’re getting started as a band, most of the venues are 18 and older. I’m the biggest potty mouth so I have to do a lot of monitoring. We’re having fun being able to reach out to different demographics though.
Metal Exiles: Going back to the album, I know that all of the songs mean a lot to you because of personal experience but do you have a favorite that truly means the most to you and if so, why?
Cristina: The song “Home’ and the song “Medicine”. Those are both my favorite songs. I think right now just because personally I’m going through a lot of stuff and you leave a lot behind when you go out on the road. Not everybody understands when you leave so “Home” is definitely one of my favorites right now. I dedicate that to the people that I love and care about. It’s not easy doing what we do as musicians and it doesn’t mean that you stop loving your friends or your family or anyone else; it just means that you’re following your dream. The song “Medicine”, it’s because of that mindset for me being on the road. I know I sound really emo-famous but you get into that mindset when you get lonely. I mean I love the band to death but I miss my dog. I miss my family. I miss all of that but when I’m on stage every day, it makes everything worth it. I feel like the song “Medicine” is like my mindset when everything settles down, like it says “give me shot of that medicine and make the pain go away”. Sometimes I take too many shots of tequila…my poor band guys. It’s just that aspect that musicians go through that a lot of people don’t see because they just see the glamorous life. So, those are my two favorite songs right now because they just hit home with me with what we’re doing right now and kicking things off in our career finally at this stage.
Metal Exiles: This has nothing to do with music but what kind of dog do you have?
Cristina: I have a beagle. I have a 14 year old lemon colored beagle. I actually got him from the producer that did our first album. He got really busy and I was doggy sitting. I told him I’d been dog-sitting his dog for about a year and he asked me if I could actually keep him. I said “of course I’ll keep him; he’s kind of already my dog”. He’s awesome. He’s the greatest beagle. He doesn’t howl. He only barks when he wants your attention or when you’re ignoring him. My parents have him right now. We’re Puerto Rican so my mom is cooking for him; breakfast, lunch, and dinner and snacks in between just like he’s a human. He’s going to be so big when I get back. His name is Buster. I’ve had him for almost three years now. He’s the man in my life right now. When people ask if I’m seeing anyone I tell them no, I kind of already have a man though; he’s furry…and they’re like “What”?
Metal Exiles: What kinds of tips do you have for bands that are trying to get themselves up and going in this business?
Cristina: I think the one tip I have is that I am a big advocate for school. I have my Masters in Business so my biggest thing for bands is that each individual needs to remember to have a back-up plan. As much as you want to make it in music in life, you want to have that back-up plan. If you’ve got an education, you can use a lot of those same skills in running the business in the band so you don’t have to depend on outside people running your business. Definitely make sure you have a solid back-up plan and go to school. Also, the second thing is to save money. It’s expensive, it’s definitely not cheap. Everybody likes to think that things are like they were in the old days where a record label gave you a billion dollars and you were on the road. It’s definitely not like that anymore. There are a lot of expenses and a lot of things that have to be covered. Like I said, we had to change brakes right before the tour. That was a big hit for us right off the bat, so yeah, just save money. Third, if you’re gonna do something in a specific genre’, you have to be as good if not better than your competition in my opinion. If you don’t find yourself there yet, just keep practicing to get there but don’t make a fool of yourself going out there and restarting a song at a venue three or four time cause’ you messed it up.
Metal Exiles: Who are some of your biggest influences, bands or artists that helped you decide that this was something you might want to do with your life?
Cristina: I like two different artists. The first one I wish I could do what she does. She is multi-lingual. Her name is Laura Pausini. She’s an Italian, Contemporary singer. She sings in Spanish, English, Italian and a whole bunch of other languages and tours all over the world. I think she’s phenomenal. That really influenced me to put myself out there lyrically because her lyrics are very emotional and very powerful. The other artist, believe it or not, is Flyleaf with the original lineup, with Lacey. I used to work at a skate park when I first started doing music. I used to play for surf and skate ministries all over Florida. I saw Flyleaf one day way before they were signed and they were touring. It was a little rough for them in the show that I saw. A lot of people came out. They were just doing the local thing still and their trailer broke down and they had all these issues but they were so positive about it and they still delivered a killer set. I remember seeing Lacey kind of bummed out in the back room and I was thinking in my head “man, I’m doing music right now and I really want to do this type of music but do I want that type of life”? I thought about it a minute and was like “hell yeah, I definitely wanna do it”. It’s funny, years later they ended up getting signed and doing all these big tours and big shows and I knew that’s when hard work pays off. It was cool because whenever I see that band, I always go back to them stressing because their trailer broke and all that stuff, seeing where they came from and be where they’re at today, even if it’s with a new singer. It’s awesome. It shows that a new singer can bring a different aspect to the band and still be successful.
Metal Exiles: If you could pick a band or bands you would like to tour with or collaborate with, who would you choose?
Cristina: Seether and Breaking Benjamin! I love those bands. I got Breaking Benjamin at Rockville this year and I caught Seether the year before. I even have video of me crowd surfing the massive crowd from one end to the other end.
After an absolutely awesome interview, I recommend everyone give this band your attention. They are ready to put their dukes up in battle and kick some freaking ass. I can’t wait to see what they are capable of.
Band website: www.oblivioussignal.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ObliviousSignalMusic
Twitter: https://twitter.com/ObliviousSignal
Watch their video on YouTube: http://youtu.be/-F6CoY3HzpM
Just an hour or so before they were scheduled to go on stage in Rochester, New York, Cristina took time out to speak with me about their new album “Exordium” and the excitement of life on tour right now. Through our discussion today, I found that we both have no problem wading through tons of mud to see some kick ass bands play on festival stages and that through it all, metal music can be extremely entertaining through the executions of a Mariachi Band. We shared our memories of muddy shoes and just what we were willing to go through to get them clean and dry for day two of the Rockville Festival. Cristina’s shoe/tour tip is: hotel showers are perfect for cleaning mud off your shoes and to who needs a dryer when you have a hair dryer that works just fine. TGI Fridays’ restroom sink however, was my laundromat.
Interview with Cristina Feliciano – Oblivious Signal
By: Leslie Elder Rogers
Metal Exiles: Tell me a little about the feelings of the band right now with the new album being
released today.
Cristina: We’re pretty excited. For us it’s been a long time coming. It’s been four years in the making so now that it’s finally out, it’s a big weight off our shoulders. Now it’s all the promotions and everything else but we’re pretty pumped and psyched. We like seeing all the pictures of the fans posting online of their selfies with our album. We’re just having a blast.
Metal Exiles: I wasn’t familiar with your band until I received the information a couple of weeks ago and I thought “how in the hell did I not know of this band”? The album sounds great and the videos I’ve seen are awesome.
Cristina: We’re getting that a lot right now. Pavement is really pushing us hard. We work really hard as musicians so it’s always great to have that extra oomph, you know. We love hearing people say they’ve never heard of us before and where have we been. We’re like “We’re here now, so definitely listen”.
Metal Exiles: What do you feel got you guys here to this sophomore album release?
Cristina: Oh, just a lot of dedication and a lot of hard work. That’s all it is. We’ve been hustling for several years just trying to get our music out there. We had opportunities. We met with different labels and everybody that we met with wanted to change us to be a regular cookie-cutter band that they kicked out there and would market and stuff and that’s not us. We finally found Pavement and they were happy with the direction we were taking in the music. It was us and they didn’t want to change us. Tim King is our direct A&R and he’s in a band himself so he understands. He understands that we’ve worked so hard and the last thing we want to do is become a pop group. So, it’s just a lot of hard work and dedication and making sure that the music was right and the timing was right, and here we are.
Metal Exiles: So Pavement was your obvious choice?
Cristina: Yes, they didn’t want us to change anything about us or anything like that. They give you suggestions and you work with the label. I like having that partnership feeling where it’s like they’re not just telling you what to look like and what to wear or what to write or what to do. You have that creative freedom 100% of the time and you don’t have that with a lot of other labels so that is something that we are very happy about with Pavement.
Metal Exiles: The album is titled “Exordium”. What’s in the name that made you pick that for the title?
Cristina: It means new beginnings and for us it was that this venture in our life was a new beginning. It was a big step in our careers, for all of us. We all come from different backgrounds and from different places in the music industry. We’ve been working at this for over 8 years and with our bass player for a little over 4 years. We wanted to name the album what it really was. This is our new venture. This is what we’re doing and all the stuff that happened in the past; all the heartaches and everything; we’re just gonna leave it all behind and keep on trucking and be positive about everything.
Metal Exiles: This album has a lot of moods and feelings. You can see that and feel like even in the videos like “Crash”. What were you going through when penning Exordium?
Cristina: Oh man. I was going through a lot of things. A lot of the songs are based on a lot of personal experiences. “Crash” is about a friend of mine that passed away in a car accident when he was under the influence. “Madeline” is about my old neighborhood that I used to live in. I grew up there and all my friends are either in jail or have committed suicide and they’re just not around or made bad decisions in life. When I was writing this album, I took all those feelings lyrically and I put them into Nick’s instrumentation. The guy is amazing. He’s a great guitarist. So Nick would come up with some great melodic riffs and I would just pour all these feelings out just into the lyrics for it so it’s like musicians’ therapy. It’s like putting all of your personal experiences and everything in one album and wrapping it with a bow and giving it to everyone else who’s going through the same thing and telling them “hey, there’s a light at the end of the tunnel”. You don’t always have to stay stuck at the bottom. You can rise up.
Metal Exiles: Do you personally do most of the writing or is it a collaborative effort?
Cristina: Nick does a lot of the instrumentations so he does a lot of the guitar riffs and everything. He comes up with that. I have an in home studio so what we did with this album was that if he’d come up with an idea, he come over to my house and we’d go in and record it and build upon that. I have a book that I write all my lyrics in and I’d go through it and I’d find out what song, what lyrics I wrote that matched it and him and I would play around with some of the words and see how they’d fit and we’d go from there. As far as lyrics go, that’s mostly me except for the song “Decode” which Nick actually came up with the chorus for. He showed up one day for practice and said he’d thought of the coolest lyrics in the shower so we rearranged some stuff and there goes the song “Decode”. Everybody puts in a little bit of something into the band. I wouldn’t even try to tell you how to play bass. Thank God Greg is here to do all these crazy bass lines and Jason doing everything that he does. I mean, without it, there would never be any music.
Metal Exiles: What kind of headspace do you have to be in to find the conviction to sing as if your life depended on it?
Cristina: It’s funny, and this goes back to our old album “Into the Night”, we actually brought over one of the songs we cut from that album. It was called “12am” but we changed it to “Medicine”. Basically the song is about when like late at night your brain takes a different view and approach to everything. It’s kind of like when the crazy in you comes out and the emotions and everything come out because during the day people walk around and have this front; they’re busy and they work so they’re trying to live life. When you’re at home by yourself and you’re sitting in that silence, that’s when everything comes out; all the thoughts that you don’t want to think about. You think about all the things that have happened in life that you wished you didn’t have to go through. What I did was put all those emotions to paper and I realize that writing is like musicians therapy. I realize that I’m not the only one going through all this stuff. There are a lot of people out there that are going through a lot of it so that’s where a lot of those lyrics come from; that kind of insanity that you go through when it’s late at night, two in the morning kind of thing.
Metal Exiles: You are tour in with Flaw at the moment. What are some of the experiences you’ve had on tour with them so far? Have there been any memorable moments?
Cristina: We’re having a blast with these guys right now. They’re great. When we first started kicking off on this tour we actually had some RV problems. We wondered how on the very first day everything breaks down. Our brakes went out, we had to replace those really quick and those things are not cheap for an RV. I mean, they weigh as much as me. Thank God our drummer is very mechanically inclined. I couldn’t even tell you how to put a car battery in. He was able to fix everything up for us to go. We get up here and “Flaw” and “Seasons After” are the most humble people ever. They were helping us out; showing us the ropes cause’ we’re still the rookies in the game. It’s nice. It’s been a good experience. We’re still trying to figure out who wrote ‘many kisses dear” on our trailer but we’re having fun.
Metal Exiles: What can we see from you guys as you vamp up promotion for Exordium?
Cristina: We’re going to be hitting the road again in August. Those dates are being solidified right now. We have plans for the rest of the year to keep promoting the album. Right now we have a few that we’re doing in Florida, Alabama and Georgia; the Southeastern part of the United States and we do our CD release party June 6th in Melbourne, Florida with all of our fans over there. We had a thing where we wanted to see where our biggest fan base was so we could do our release party there and Melbourne was definitely the winner.
Metal Exiles: With that thought in mind, what is life like on the road for Oblivious Signal?
Cristina: It’s interesting. I’m here in an RV with three guys that are like my brothers and of course the fourth, our roadie/security, a huge looking dude that scares everybody. It’s a lot of fun. You get used to all the different smells, good and bad. I get my own little private bunk on the top cabin which is cool. I have a little blind thing I can use when I don’t want to see anything but it’s a lot of fun getting to spend quality time with the guys. I’ve known these guys forever but we still learn new things every day. I just found out that Greg has over a hundred songs of Michael Jackson stuff on his iPod. So, yeah, it’s a lot of fun. You get to know what buttons to push and what not to push and what ticks people off and not to go there again. It’s funny because one of the other bands asked us if we always argue and we were like “yes”. This is how we are. We argue with each other but at the end of the day we’re like family. We’ll all sit down and we’ll all be like nothing happened throughout the day. It’s been like that for eight years. That’s’ how we knew, when we got Greg our bass player as a new addition, when he put up with all our craziness, we knew he was the one. We have a rule in the band; no sensitive people.
Metal Exiles: I read a little about your heritage. Do you also do your songs in Spanish?
Cristina: We’re working on that right now. We’ve had some requests for it. Actually on our first album, “Into the Night”, we had transposed all those songs into Spanish and we got an amazing reaction from it. I’ll be honest, we didn’t think that we were gonna get the request from this album for it like we have so due to fact that we do have an in-home studio and we have the flexibility to go back and do that, I think it’s definitely something that’s going to be in the works toward the end of the year.
Metal Exiles: That would be awesome. Having that type of diversity, most rock bands can’t say that so it would be something that sets you apart from the others.
Metal Exiles: Should we expect to see you guys at some festivals soon?
Cristina: We’re hoping. We might be doing the Warped Tour again this year. We did it last year. It’s a different type of field for us. Now we’re kind of getting used to more of the all ages crowd. We’re used to playing to 18 and older. When you’re getting started as a band, most of the venues are 18 and older. I’m the biggest potty mouth so I have to do a lot of monitoring. We’re having fun being able to reach out to different demographics though.
Metal Exiles: Going back to the album, I know that all of the songs mean a lot to you because of personal experience but do you have a favorite that truly means the most to you and if so, why?
Cristina: The song “Home’ and the song “Medicine”. Those are both my favorite songs. I think right now just because personally I’m going through a lot of stuff and you leave a lot behind when you go out on the road. Not everybody understands when you leave so “Home” is definitely one of my favorites right now. I dedicate that to the people that I love and care about. It’s not easy doing what we do as musicians and it doesn’t mean that you stop loving your friends or your family or anyone else; it just means that you’re following your dream. The song “Medicine”, it’s because of that mindset for me being on the road. I know I sound really emo-famous but you get into that mindset when you get lonely. I mean I love the band to death but I miss my dog. I miss my family. I miss all of that but when I’m on stage every day, it makes everything worth it. I feel like the song “Medicine” is like my mindset when everything settles down, like it says “give me shot of that medicine and make the pain go away”. Sometimes I take too many shots of tequila…my poor band guys. It’s just that aspect that musicians go through that a lot of people don’t see because they just see the glamorous life. So, those are my two favorite songs right now because they just hit home with me with what we’re doing right now and kicking things off in our career finally at this stage.
Metal Exiles: This has nothing to do with music but what kind of dog do you have?
Cristina: I have a beagle. I have a 14 year old lemon colored beagle. I actually got him from the producer that did our first album. He got really busy and I was doggy sitting. I told him I’d been dog-sitting his dog for about a year and he asked me if I could actually keep him. I said “of course I’ll keep him; he’s kind of already my dog”. He’s awesome. He’s the greatest beagle. He doesn’t howl. He only barks when he wants your attention or when you’re ignoring him. My parents have him right now. We’re Puerto Rican so my mom is cooking for him; breakfast, lunch, and dinner and snacks in between just like he’s a human. He’s going to be so big when I get back. His name is Buster. I’ve had him for almost three years now. He’s the man in my life right now. When people ask if I’m seeing anyone I tell them no, I kind of already have a man though; he’s furry…and they’re like “What”?
Metal Exiles: What kinds of tips do you have for bands that are trying to get themselves up and going in this business?
Cristina: I think the one tip I have is that I am a big advocate for school. I have my Masters in Business so my biggest thing for bands is that each individual needs to remember to have a back-up plan. As much as you want to make it in music in life, you want to have that back-up plan. If you’ve got an education, you can use a lot of those same skills in running the business in the band so you don’t have to depend on outside people running your business. Definitely make sure you have a solid back-up plan and go to school. Also, the second thing is to save money. It’s expensive, it’s definitely not cheap. Everybody likes to think that things are like they were in the old days where a record label gave you a billion dollars and you were on the road. It’s definitely not like that anymore. There are a lot of expenses and a lot of things that have to be covered. Like I said, we had to change brakes right before the tour. That was a big hit for us right off the bat, so yeah, just save money. Third, if you’re gonna do something in a specific genre’, you have to be as good if not better than your competition in my opinion. If you don’t find yourself there yet, just keep practicing to get there but don’t make a fool of yourself going out there and restarting a song at a venue three or four time cause’ you messed it up.
Metal Exiles: Who are some of your biggest influences, bands or artists that helped you decide that this was something you might want to do with your life?
Cristina: I like two different artists. The first one I wish I could do what she does. She is multi-lingual. Her name is Laura Pausini. She’s an Italian, Contemporary singer. She sings in Spanish, English, Italian and a whole bunch of other languages and tours all over the world. I think she’s phenomenal. That really influenced me to put myself out there lyrically because her lyrics are very emotional and very powerful. The other artist, believe it or not, is Flyleaf with the original lineup, with Lacey. I used to work at a skate park when I first started doing music. I used to play for surf and skate ministries all over Florida. I saw Flyleaf one day way before they were signed and they were touring. It was a little rough for them in the show that I saw. A lot of people came out. They were just doing the local thing still and their trailer broke down and they had all these issues but they were so positive about it and they still delivered a killer set. I remember seeing Lacey kind of bummed out in the back room and I was thinking in my head “man, I’m doing music right now and I really want to do this type of music but do I want that type of life”? I thought about it a minute and was like “hell yeah, I definitely wanna do it”. It’s funny, years later they ended up getting signed and doing all these big tours and big shows and I knew that’s when hard work pays off. It was cool because whenever I see that band, I always go back to them stressing because their trailer broke and all that stuff, seeing where they came from and be where they’re at today, even if it’s with a new singer. It’s awesome. It shows that a new singer can bring a different aspect to the band and still be successful.
Metal Exiles: If you could pick a band or bands you would like to tour with or collaborate with, who would you choose?
Cristina: Seether and Breaking Benjamin! I love those bands. I got Breaking Benjamin at Rockville this year and I caught Seether the year before. I even have video of me crowd surfing the massive crowd from one end to the other end.
After an absolutely awesome interview, I recommend everyone give this band your attention. They are ready to put their dukes up in battle and kick some freaking ass. I can’t wait to see what they are capable of.
Band website: www.oblivioussignal.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ObliviousSignalMusic
Twitter: https://twitter.com/ObliviousSignal
Watch their video on YouTube: http://youtu.be/-F6CoY3HzpM