Every once in a while you hit the jackpot with something completely unexpected.  By combining pop melodies, youthful swagger, and a love of classic R&B, L.A.-based trio Everybody Else blew me away with their self-titled debut record.  Most power-pop bands get by on hooks alone, but Everybody Else, who took their name from an obscure Kinks song, succeed because of the quality, diversity and accessibility of their songs.  They're equally at home with the sexy bounce of "Meat Market" as they are with the Raspberries power chords of "Without You" or the acoustic balladry of "Button For Punishment." 

I recently spoke with Carrick Moore Gerety, the lead singer, songwriter, and guitarist of Everybody Else, whose confidence and intelligence belie his 24 years.  I could have talked with him for hours about his record collection, but instead, we focused mostly on his band.   

I was looking at the influences on your MySpace page and just about everything you list as an influence is in my record collection.  

We're definitely into a lot of old music, but also a lot of new music, too.  Some people have criticized the fact that they couldn't put us into a genre, and that's what I like most about us, actually. All the artists I admire kind of created their own genre and, if you're original enough, you're gonna do something that doesn't quite exactly fit anything.

Calling it classic power-pop is a perfectly good tag. 

I've had a problem with power-pop, partly because people have always used that to describe my music, and, in a vacuum, that makes sense because it's pop and it's got some balls to it.  But what scares me is that everything that's considered power-pop is sort of only appreciated by music nerds and never became huge, music that's really brainy and won't become accessible to the masses. 

Yeah, I'm a big fan of The New Pornographers, but lyrically, they're so dense and obtuse that you can't get to the emotion of it.  But you guys, and I think this is where your R&B influence comes in – with the economy and structure of classic soul – you're keeping the emotion in the songs. 

Definitely.  We're thinking people and we listen to all sorts of obscure music, but we didn't want to make music that you had to be sophisticated to appreciate.  Obviously, sophisticated listeners will hear more music history and listen to the lyrics more carefully, but I didn't want to get pigeonholed into that power-pop nerd genre.

There are people in there like Jellyfish, who are awesome.  Jason Falkner is another example.  To say nothing bad about them, but I didn't want to get cast into that scene because I'm really into hits.  I always wanted to write songs that rolled off our brain with ease and that you didn't have to work too hard to appreciate.