Many towns have a Main Street; a thoroughfare that links its other tributaries to keep drivers from getting lost. But West Palm Beach-based pop/rock band Mainstreet Dreamers was not named for any such predictability.
Geographically, West Palm Beach is just listed on the quartet’s Web pages as a central location. Bassist Morgan Beers lives further north in Jupiter; guitarist Jared Lee much further south in Weston. Lead singer Julia Formica and drummer, percussionist and vocalist Brooke Geissler split the difference by residing in Delray Beach.
Stylistically, the band is essentially a lineup of solo songwriters that got together specifically to play cover material instead. And many of their song choices — from the Romantics’ “What I Like About You” and Guns N’ Roses’ “Sweet Child O’ Mine” to Lenny Kravitz’s “Are You Gonna Go My Way” and the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ “Dani California” — range from nearly as old to even far older than the band members (Formica and Lee are only in their early 20s; Beers and Geissler in their mid-20s).
“We love playing covers,” Beers says. “We can’t get enough of it. I’m also a big fan of famous bands covering tunes, which has become popular. So we decided to purposely become exclusively a cover act.”
While many bands start with singers and guitarists looking for a rhythm section for completion, Mainstreet Dreamers avoided that norm as well. Beers and Geissler came up with the idea while studying music together at Florida Atlantic University.
“Brooke and I played in jazz band together as far back as high school,” Beers says. “We tried to start this band in early 2014, but we were still in college and getting slammed with our classes. We weren’t able to gain any traction until about a year later, after we’d graduated.”
The four band members’ day jobs would also be impossible to predict, from audio technician and bridge operator to retail associate and musical educator. Even the group’s name wasn’t contrived.
“We were sitting around a table, brainstorming and shouting out whatever came to our minds,” Formica says. “After bouncing words around for about a half-hour, going from one word to the next, I came up with the name that stuck.”
Both Beers and Geissler graduated college with musical degrees in sound engineering, and it shows. The bassist’s tone is resonant and thick, yet with ample clarity, and his nimble playing displays that past experience playing jazz, some even on acoustic upright instruments. Ditto Geissler’s drum tones and creative percussion setup for quieter gigs like the Brewhouse Gallery in Lake Park — where she splits the difference between drums and percussion by playing a customized snare drum with her hands and a customized pedal to mimic a kick drum.
“She puts a thin wooden head on her snare drum,” Beers says, “and uses a foot pedal that looks like a block of wood, but has a contact microphone in it. And she equalizes it to sound like a kick drum. It’s all quite amazing.”
Beers and Geissler also engineered the post for singers and guitarists that yielded Formica through the South Florida Musicians page on Facebook. The rhythm section likewise found original guitarist Davey Pitruzzello, who performed with the quartet from its inception in December of 2015 until October, when it became too much in conjunction with his primary job.
“Davey is a music teacher by day,” Beers says, “and it’s his first teaching job out of college. He felt he needed to give it his full attention, and we totally understood.”
Enter Lee, who’s only set to turn 21, but displays a style well beyond his years.
“Jared is the son of Julia’s mother’s co-worker,” says Beers, exhibiting the six-degrees-of-separation theory. “It sounded like a story we’ve heard a hundred times, but then he came to the audition and blew us away. He teaches at the School of Rock, and has been a great addition.”
Lee’s primary influence is 70-year-old guitarist David Gilmour, the incredible stylist who inimitably melded blues and progressive rock elements into Pink Floyd’s sound from 1968 until the band’s retirement in 2014
“Every note he played was perfect,” Lee says. “And when you add in his songwriting, you practically double how instrumental he was to the Pink Floyd sound.”
Timeless influences are a recurring Mainstreet Dreamers theme. Beers cites 63-year-old bassist Billy Sheehan, known for his work with Mr. Big, David Lee Roth, and Steve Vai. Geissler is drawn to 25-year-old California rock band Incubus, and its uber-talented drummer Jose Pasillas. And some of Formica’s sources harken back to the Woodstock era.
“I love Joni Mitchell, Carole King, and Sheryl Crow,” she says. “My passion is songwriting, so I love singer/songwriters.”
A guitar-playing composer fronting an all-cover band only as a vocalist is another unpredictable element. But in addition to her stellar vocal range and phrasing, Formica’s compositional prowess came in handy in creating another paradox — the all-cover band’s all-original three-song EP, Nashville Session.
“Julia, Davey and I had never been to Nashville,” Beers says, “so we decided to take a week and visit. We went to a place we’d heard that we had to go to, Soulshine Pizza Factory, and met an engineer from a studio there called Jay’s Place Recording. He invited us over to record, and the symmetry was too much to ignore. We had to do it, but we knew that to record covers would’ve missed the point. So we learned Julia’s originals in our hotel room beforehand.”
Mainstreet Dreamers’ all-covers song list is currently shifting to include more current, yet hardly mainstream, material.
“We’re looking at bands and artists that are more of our generation,” says Formica. “So people can expect to perhaps hear some Black Keys and Alabama Shakes in the near future.”
See Mainstreet Dreamers at 9 p.m. on Dec. 16 at Igot’s Martiki Bar, 702 Lake Ave., Lake Worth (561-582-4468); at 10 p.m. on Dec. 17 at O’Shea’s Irish Pub, 531 Clematis St., West Palm Beach (561-833-3865); and at 10 p.m. on Dec. 23 and Dec. 30 at the Blue Anchor, 804 E. Atlantic Ave., Delray Beach (561-272-7272).