Band founder, manager, fiddler speaks with Royal Purple:

By Ben Holzhueter

Country/rock band Scarletta performed at 7 p.m. Sept. 5 in the UC Down Under.

Nathan Stoop, the trio’s founding member, tour manager and fiddler spoke with the Royal Purple about the show and gave some insight on the band.

Royal Purple: Is touring colleges something you were interested in or something that just kind of happened?

Nathan Stoop: A little bit of both to be honest. We’ve been on the road for a couple of years now and worked with a couple of agencies in the past that focused more on just the club circuit, but we wanted to branch out. A lot of our music is very relationship based, and it’s a high-energy show. It definitely appeals to that younger crowd. And that’s our age too; we’re all mid-20 range, so we’re just doing what we love and presenting that music to those who get it the same way that we do. Doing the colleges was an opportunity that was presented to us, and it was something we wanted to get on board with, and it’s worked out very, very well for us since we have.

RP: How did the band come together?

NS: I actually put the band together myself. It was a concept I had and had thought about for a long time. I feel like there’s not a lot of harmony bands in country music anymore. I don’t want to say a lost art form, because there are some great bands like Little Big Town, Lady Antebellum that are doing a great harmony based presentation, but there’s not a lot of bands like that. I met Benji in Nashville a few years ago. He was working as a solo artist at the time, and I pitched him the idea of what I wanted Scarletta to be. We worked for a while with another lead singer, and we ended up parting ways. We just wanted to go in different directions, and that happens sometimes, but we met an incredible girl named Emilee Allan who has stepped in. We just did a new record with Emilee. The whole tour this fall is with her, and we’re very much excited about releasing this new music with Emilee. The three of us are rockin’ strong right now.

RP: Have you been to this area of Wisconsin before?

NS: The actual town of Whitewater will be a first, but we played a show at Oak Creek last night, and we have toured pretty extensively up in this area. Last year, we did a two-week radio tour that focused a lot on Iowa and Wisconsin.

RP: Did you get a chance to have a college experience?

NS: I went to college in south central Michigan for a couple years. I was a music major, and I actually dropped out to start touring full time. I got an offer to start touring with a band full time, and it was the right opportunity for me. It opened up a lot of the doors that I was wanting to go through later on, so I started touring full time when I was 21.

RP: What’s the best thing about performing in a small venue like this?

NS: Anytime you get to play in college towns, in particular, it’s always cool. We get to do a lot more one-on-one interaction with the kids. At clubs, you don’t get that, but with colleges we’ll come in and hopefully, they know a little bit about us, and they’re curious and want to know more. We’ll go and eat in the cafeteria with them and get to hang out before the show, and then any time after the show that the people want to stay and hang out we’re always down for that. It’s a little more of an intimate, personal interaction that we can get with people then in some other venues.

RP: How would describe your sound? Is it country/rock?

NS: It is. It’s more on the pop/rock side. The cool thing about what we do is we have two lead singers that kind of trade back and forth depending on the song. Benji is a phenomenal lead singer, as well as Emilee, and some of the material that we’ve written is for Benji.

RP: Why should UW-Whitewater students come see the show?

NS: It’s going to a good time, first of all. We’re very fun, loving people. We’re very down to earth; don’t be afraid to come up and talk to us ever. We love that interaction and meeting new people. It’s a high-energy show; come ready for a good time. We like to have fun with what we do, and we hope that shows.