FROM LEFT: Michael DiPirro, Jason Ferro, Michael Faiella and Jason Briggs

Whitley Heights is more than the name of a neighborhood in LA, it’s also the moniker of a local band made up of four men who are gifted multi-instrumentalists, creative partners and, more than anything, old friends. Jason Ferro (who by day is Gap’s men’s denim director for 1969), Jason Briggs, Michael Faiella and Michael DiPirro are Whitley Heights, and with a sound that ranges from country-tinged to dirty blues, this foursome will undoubtedly be rocking (and selling out) a local venue near you soon. We talked to the four bandmates—who released their first album, Whitley Heights, on iTunes this month—about being friends and band members, how a blizzard brought them together and why fashion inevitably influences music.

How did Whitley Heights form?
MICHAEL DIPIRRO: We were vacationing in Mammoth in December of 2010.  We were slated for five days of snowboarding, and day two of our trip was met with a fierce snowstorm that closed the whole mountain down for two days. We decided to break out the guitars and start playing. We began a flow of ideas that prompted us to take all the steps leading up to our new release.

JASON BRIGGS: I think we wrote three or four songs that day. Ferro was the one who said enough talk. We are making an album. From that point on we were Whitley Heights.

You just released your first CD as a band. What was the process of creating it?
JASON FERRO: It took us about seven months to write and record it. The four of us are all songwriters. Having four songwriters in the band adds an amazing edge cause it really teaches you to be open to new ideas and broadens your musical spectrum.

MICHAEL FAIELLA: Music is a conversation. You contribute to a conversation, or you shut up and listen to the person speaking. That’s the way a great song is created.

Whitley Heights refers to a neighborhood in Los Angeles. Is that what the band is named after?
JF: Yes.I moved into a historical Spanish house in the Whitley Heights neighborhood of the Hollywood Hills. All the boys moved in and took it over, and the rest was history. The house is where we came together as a band and decided to really take our music seriously.

MF: The living room was set up as a studio, and all we did was play and cultivate songs. There was lots of energy in that room—it was a great time for us.

Your sound swings from blues to ballads to country—is it a conscious choice to veer away from one genre?
                                       
JB: It’s funny because when we decided to make this record we were thinking something a little more sonic and electrified, but in the end we fell back into what we have been doing for years: acoustic guitar-driven songs that start with our living room jam secessions. I think we're really just playing the music we grew up listening to—trying to pay homage to the masters.

JF: Everyone brings their own musical flavor to the table, and we try to make it all fit.

How are music and designing similar? Do they influence each other all?
JF: Music has always influenced fashion—look at the past decades of music and you will see the different fashion trends that music helps give birth to. I love the fact I can design a collection that at its very core is derived from a feeling I get when I’m listening to music and thinking of what that image would look like—fashion gives music its eyes.

Can we see you play anywhere locally in the near future?
       
JF: We are planning a CD release show at Hemingway’s in Hollywood in January, and then we will start booking a tour.

What would you tell people to expect out of a Whitley Heights performance?
                                      
MD: Lots of singing and dancing. It’s sure to be a good old-fashioned hoedown.
  

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