Chicago-based and self-described soulful septet Lubriphonic is making its way across the country, set to land at The Broadway Oyster Bar in St. Louis on May 7.

According to the band’s lead vocalist and guitar player, Giles Corey, touring the country playing music is the fulfillment of a dream.

“We’ve been crisscrossing around the country,” he said. “It’s fantastic. It’s what we all wanted to do … I love going to new spots, new cities that I haven’t been to … It’s a great way to sample America.”

Started in 2000 by Corey and the band’s drummer Rick King, Lubriphonic is made up of seven musicians who met working in the Chicago music scene.

“We all come from different backgrounds,” Corey said. “We were all working as sidemen. You work for established acts playing an instrument behind them … We decided we wanted to start our own project.”

After Lubriphonic started making headway as a band in 2004, the band members were able to stop working as sidemen and begin playing their own music.

“When you’re a sideman, you’re following orders … It’s a great apprenticeship. It’s a great way to learn,” Corey said. “[But] when you’re performing your own music, you decide what you’re going to play … It stops being a job and becomes something you do with your heart.”

Corey believes that the band’s sound—a fusion of funk, soul and rock ‘n’ roll—comes from the different musical backgrounds each member brought to the table, and believes Chicago had a lot to do with making all of this possible.
“Chicago is obviously one of the biggest cities in the country,” he said. “It’s also in the center of the country, so you get a little bit of everything … There’s an opportunity to kind of play anything. There’s an audience for it.”

He also believes that the musical culture of Chicago has helped the band grow and flourish.

“It’s not like New York where there’s a real pressure-cooker environment,” Corey said. “I don’t think a band like us could exist in a place like New York … There wouldn’t be an opportunity for us to just grow and exist. You have to adhere to some media standard, and you don’t really have to do that in Chicago.”

Corey looks forward to continuing the band’s tour across the country, and enjoys seeing the responses of Lubriphonic’s diverse audience.

“There’s kind of a wide range of people that get into us,” he said. “There’s not one kind of type. People are different in different spots … It’s been great to come in and have such an enthusiastic response to it from an audience.”

For more information about Lubriphonic and its tour, visit www.lubriphonic.com.