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    Artist Spotlight: The Shadowboxers

    Atlanta-derived pop outfit The Shadowboxers descended on Columbus Saturday night for a much-anticipated show at The Basement in the Arena District.

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    Founding members Adam Hoffman (vocals and guitar), Matt Lipkins (vocals and keyboards), and Scott Schwartz (vocals and guitar) met while they were first-year students at Emory University in 2008 as each sought an outlet to create music.

    “Emory isn’t a music school; there’s a classical music program, but outside of that, there isn’t much,” explains Schwartz. “So the three of us all had similar tastes, and we had all had experiences in high school that were similar to being in bands, or just songwriting. When we found each other — two of us were in a class together, two of us were in a singing group together — we all quickly identified that we shared [the same] interests. It made it really easy for us to join up and start playing.”

    In 2013, the trio added drummer Cole McSween and bassist Carlos Enamorado to round out their rhythm section.

    Spending the majority of their first year as a band writing and developing their sound for live shows, The Shadowboxers received a breakthrough when they entered the Emory Arts Competition, a contest showcase comprised of ten finalists entries chosen by committee from hundreds of student applicants. The band’s submission, an original composition titled “Not Again,” landed them in the competition by a technicality. They hadn’t been selected initially, but had received an erroneous invitation to attend the finals from the committee that went unrealized until Hoffman, Lipkins, and Schwartz showed up at the event. The committee permitted them to participate, and they eventually won the competition’s $3ooo grand prize.

    As the band cemented their success as collegiate circuit performers, the band’s members continued to work on making the transition from being three individuals writing and playing music to operating as a true collaborative unit — something Hoffman says has been an ongoing evolution.

    “Honestly, it takes time. We’ve been a band now for eight years. When we got started, it took us awhile to figure out what the difference was between going on stage and playing songs and putting together a show and a performance. What we were doing before was interesting and captivating in a way, but making it something more than just a collection of songs has really been trial and error.”

    One of the band’s immediately noticeable signatures is its impressively tight vocal blend, and it’s unusually close for a group of singers who aren’t related. Lipkins says it was the aspect of the band’s identity that took the least amount of work to develop.

    “It came naturally over time, really. Adam and I were singing in an a cappella group, and Scott and I were singing in rehearsal rooms at Emory for so long. So we started having two separate blends, and then we came together. From there, it was really just a time thing – being around each other and knowing what ranges we fit in naturally. It wasn’t something we felt like we had to work on.”

    Schwartz concurs. “From the beginning, the thing that we found that we liked about the three of us together was our voices together. That was kind of the moment we kind of knew we had something special was when we put our voices together and it sounded really good. Like Matt was saying, it sure took time, but there was an instant realization that we all identified. And that was sort of the beginning of the band. It was like, ‘Okay, let’s use this as a weapon, and let’s craft all of our music, whether we go in a folk direction, a Crosby, Stills, and Nash direction, or in a soul direction, let’s always use this harmony as our thread between whatever we do.'”

    In 2010, The Shadowboxers got an even bigger break when Schwartz had a chance meeting with the Indigo Girls’ Emily Saliers at a Passover Seder in Atlanta. At her request, Schwartz played a few of their songs, impressing her enough to attend one of their shows the following week. In 2011, Saliers invited the band to tour her and Amy Ray and serve as their backing band, which they did through 2013.

    What happened next was the stuff of musical dreams. The band uploaded a video to YouTube of them singing a cover of Justin Timberlake’s 2013 single “Pusher Love Girl.” A few days later, Timberlake found the video and posted it to his Facebook page and personally reached out to the band to learn more about them — a moment that has since turned into an unexpected creative partnership.

    “It’s been pretty amazing, actually,” Hoffman affirms. “When he first met with us and he told us he sort of wanted to take us under his wing…he discovered us because he saw us doing what we do, so he wanted us to continue to do what we do organically, to give us the space, time, and the feedback to really figure out who we were and what our identity was.

    So we literally holed up in a studio for a couple of years; we would write, record, demo the song, send it to him, he’d send feedback, and that’s really how it went. We would take the songs on the road and fine-tune them, as Scott was saying, and the next step was when we got in the studio with him was to really learn the method he takes when he records his own records. It was pretty amazing — and a lot of that is, you know, tricks of the trade and secrets that you just don’t know about without him in the room. He has helped us to take these songs, trim the fat, and hold [them] to the highest standard.”

    According to Schwartz, their work under Timberlake’s tutelage will result in the band’s first full-length album (a follow-up to their eponymous 2011 EP) in the near future, using their current tour as a test ground for new material.

    “We were in the studio most of June recording with [Justin] and just sort of developing a release frame for that music right now.”

    One of the band’s new challenges is to translate the arduous work they’re now doing in the studio with Timberlake to a live format suitable for touring, which may seem a bit counter-intuitive given the band’s almost strictly live roots.

    “We’re on the road playing those songs for the first time,” Schwartz exclaims. “And a lot of the songs are totally new or revamped in some way. We’re really excited about it.”

    “For the majority of our career, we’ve done it backwards from what most of our generation’s artists do it,” Hoffman clarifies. “Most bands and artists start in the studio or their bedroom, and then they have to figure out how to play that stuff live. We probably played three-hundred shows before we got into a studio. Over the past three years, we had to learn how to record.” Hoffman believes that their extensive experience on stage will help ease some of the burden. “Given the amount of shows we’ve played over the years and the amount of touring we’ve done in our career, [the process has] actually been pretty easy. The songs we’ve recorded — we know them front-to-back, we know all our parts, we know what we recorded, and we just kind of put them together. We have an amazing rhythm section that we’ve been playing with for three years, so they all just come together easily.”

    Schwartz hopes their current tour is going to take the shape of great things to come for the band.

    “It’s a sneak peek of what’s going to hopefully be a pretty big release that we’re going to plan pretty soon, so we’re more excited now for this tour than we’ve been for a tour maybe ever in our career.”

    For more information, visit theshadowboxers.com.

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    Grant Walters
    Grant Waltershttps://columbusunderground.com
    Grant is a freelance writer for Columbus Underground who primarily focuses on music and comedy. He's a Canadian transplant, born and raised in Winnipeg, Manitoba, and schooled in Vancouver, British Columbia. Grant is also the co-author of two internationally acclaimed books: "Decades: The Bee Gees in the 1960s" and "Decades: The Bee Gees in the 1970s." He has also penned numerous articles and artist interviews for the nationally recognized site, Albumism.
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