We asked Gil Sharone from Stolen Babies some questions on the band itself, what they have in store for the rest of the year and how social media affects bands these days.

To start off what’s the name of your band and who plays what?

My band is called, Stolen Babies.
The members are:
Dominique Lenore Persi: Lead Vocals/Accordion
Rani Sharone: Bass/Guitar/Vocals/Programming/Percussion/other various
instruments
Gil Sharone: Drums/Percussion

We’ve had additional members in the past and take touring members out but the
three of us our Stolen Babies.

How did you get started?

Dominique, Rani and I had a band years ago called The Fratellis… it was a 12-
piece theatrical group that played crazy-jazzy-cartoon-carnival type music.
One of our songs was called, Stolen Babies. When it was time to move on from
The Fratellis, we decided to keep making music as a smaller group and that’s
when Stolen Babies started.

So how is the local scene in LA?

As far as I know there is no local scene in LA and if there is we aren’t a part of it.
We aren’t really a part of any scene in general.
There’s a lot of bands that think if they play the Sunset Strip every weekend
they’ll become huge rock stars and never tour outside of that bubble… it’s like
every band for themselves out there.
When we were coming up years ago there was some sort of a scene where the
venues were booking local bands that fit together and made a good package.
We’d play the strip and hand out flyers all the time. It was good to pay dues and
get our name out but those were the very early stages of the band.
We don’t play LA too often these days.

You recently were special guests at a show here in New Jersey at The Stone Pony with
Lacuna Coil, Coal Chamber and etc, how was that?

It was awesome. We had a killer time playing that show. Great crowd and sound
and the staff at the venue was real cool too.
That whole tour with Lacuna Coil, Coal Chamber and Sevendust was amazing for
us. I remember the show at the Stone Pony was one of my favorites.

Do you guys have any plans this summer, such as going on tour, releasing any new
material?

Yup… we’ll be touring more, finishing up two videos for songs off of our new
album Naught and also working on new material. We have a lot of stuff on deck.

You guys have been together for several years, yet you don’t get the notoriety that you
deserve as oppose to some bands that have been together for maybe 1-2 years, what’s
your thoughts on that?

We aren’t concerned about that… there’s so many different factors that come in to
play with that stuff. We’re in control of what we do and how we want to do it.
We decided to take a hiatus that went on for a while back in 2008 and that slowed
things down for us but we expected that. The fact that we came back out last year
and have gotten such killer tours and building such a strong buzz is awesome. It
seems like people are ready for a band like us… something unique and real.

Of course these days Facebook/Bandcamp/Soundcloud are some of the main social
sites for bands to get their music out quicker and to interact with fans better, yet it
seems especially with Facebook that bands are graded by how “popular” they are
depending on their Facebook likes by labels and sometimes fans, do you think that
hurts bands in general?

I think it’s cool to see up and coming bands have a smaller amount of “Likes”
on FB and then watch their numbers start to grow… it’s not like how Myspace
was where bands would buy “friend adding” software to make their band look
bigger than they were. I’ve seen unknown bands with hundreds of thousands
of “friends” on Myspace and 3 people show up to their shows. A lot of that stuff
is bullshit and hype. We don’t buy “likes” or “fans”… as our numbers on FB
start to grow, we feel proud of it because they’re true fans that are interested in
following the band. Something like that could only help a band.

Do you guys plan on playing in New Jersey/Tri-State area again anytime soon?

For sure, we’ll be back to the east coast within the next six months probably.
Anyone interested can sign up on our newsletter off our website to get tour
updates and any other news. http://www.stolenbabiestheband.com