Time for a Break
The decade-long, ultimate success story of Team Sleep
By Josh Bashara

Just your typical California guy

Close your eyes. Picture sunny California. You're on the beach, wind blowing and sun shining. You're in a band, but you're not the type of person who introduces himself as "being in a band" when you meet someone at a party.

You're a pretty down-to-earth, mellow guy who makes music just for the sake of making it. You grew up listening to everything from soul to old-school punk to hip-hop, which has forged your musical style. But right now, you're on the beach, surfboard in hand, and the music - albeit the love of your life - can wait. There's a killer tide today, and water looks enticing.

Oh, and one more thing. Chino Moreno - frontman of the Deftones and screamo rock star - is standing next to you' he's one of your best friends.

This is the life of Todd Wilkinson, co-founder and guitarist of Team Sleep, the down-tempo, dreamy band from Sacramento, Calif. Wilkinson will be the first to admit that if it wasn't for Chino - well, just being Chino - Team Sleep might have never left the basement and ascended to an honest-to-goodness, touring band with a major label release. Chino, who lends his crazy-unique vocal style to Team Sleep, decided to take on the side project a few years ago. And it was through his status and connections at Maverick Records - an imprint of Warner Bros. Records - that Team Sleep became a reality.

But Wilkinson isn't the sort of dude who ponders on such things for too long. He knows his music, and more importantly, knows his friends.

I think that being successful and getting signed are two different things - two different values," Wilkinson tells the MPB from his cell phone, while out on his first major US tour. "Us getting signed had nothing other to do with Chino being who he is. That made things a lot easier, but we made our record. In that way, I think we're successful [regardless of getting signed].

In the beginning

Team Sleep is a band that has been a long time in the making. It took nearly a decade for the band to get its debut album recorded, and even after that, it would be another four years before it was officially released.

It all started in Sacramento around 1994, a year before Chino Moreno formed the Deftones and released its debut album, Adrenaline. Back then, Moreno and Wilkinson were school friends who just loved skating and making music.

Together they bought a cheap four-track mixer and traded off time with it, laying down rough cuts on nothing more than occasional inspired whims.

A little later, the pair met a guy going by the name of DJ Crook, who added turntables and programmed drum beats into the mix. A casual band was beginning to form, and those rough cuts began resembling genuine songs.

Still, nothing was too formal.

"We were just fucking around," Wilkinson says, "it was never anything serious. The Deftones' they were a band - we were just playing."

And as fate would have it, Moreno's band the Deftones hit the rock world with a hammering intensity, pioneering a new sound that would later be dubbed "screamo" by fans all across the globe. The Deftones earned a well-deserved reputation as being unyielding in their pursuit to keep reinventing themselves. During the next decade, the Deftones released four albums, all of which were zealously received by hardcore fans.

And all the while, Wilkinson was still writing songs back in Sacramento. But despite all touring, all the success and all the fame, Moreno never forgot about he and Wilkinson's unspoken pact to finally make something out of their high school music project.

"Me and Chino had talked about it for a long time, but we were never really that ambitious as far as starting a band and playing shows," he says. "We were just gonna make a record and put it on the Internet or something, ya know? Well actually, some of this was even before the Internet," he says, laughing. "Everything went very slowly at first."

Slow indeed. It wasn't until 2000 that the possibility of finally releasing an album was even discussed. But in 2001, Moreno, Wilkinson and Crook made the trip to Seattle to meet with Terry Date, who had produced several Deftones albums. They recorded 12 tracks and took them home with the intention of finally building and releasing a record.

Still with no major label backing, the trio threw the tracks on a handful of cassettes and gave them away during a small, 11-date tour along the West Coast.

The unique musical soundscape of Team Sleep - coupled with Moreno's die-hard fan base - caught the interest of fans throughout the coast, which began spreading inland. Fans traded rumors of Moreno's new side-project, a slower, more "pretty"-sounding brand of music that showcased his ability to sing instead of screaming all the time. But as luck would have it, the dozen rough tracks on their demo leaked to the Internet, which led to both good and bad news for the band. The good news was that fans were digging it. The bad news, as Wilkinson describes it, was that it prompted a serious setback for their album. But how could a leak cause so much damage?

"Because people got bootlegs of it!" Wilkinson says with a chuckle. "That's one of the reasons. Another reason is that when we were working on it and it got leaked to the Internet, the momentum kind of went away. So Chino went on tour with the Deftones, and we couldn't finish working on it until he got back.

"It was also just our attitude," he adds. "We never looked at it like we were trying to be an actual band or anything. We just felt like doing stuff whenever we felt like doing it."

One might wonder how such a lackadaisical mindset could garner any sort of positive result, but Wilkinson stands his ground.

"It's more fulfilling that way," he explains. "We do what we want to do when we want to do it."

Out of the basement and into the clubs

In May of 2005, Maverick Records finally released Team Sleep's debut, self-titled album. By then, the band had recruited two new members, Rick Verrett on bass and Zach Hill on drums.

The album cover - depicting a sexy, 1970s-era brunette beauty delicately smoking a cigarette, smoke sensually swirling from her lips - speaks well of the theme and musical style of the album.

A distinct departure from Moreno's usual cut-throat, screaming intensity, he metaphorically pops a few Xanax for this album, his voice never quite rising above an "inside voice." Wilkinson and company create ambient, almost dreamlike music that lull the listener into a comfortable trance as Moreno's wraith-like vocals hover hauntingly above.

It's an elaborate and eclectic album' soothing the listener half the time and inducing a head-bobbing, down-tempo, hip-hop vibe the other. Wilkinson blames it on his childhood.

"When I was a little kid, I liked a lot of the stuff my mom listened to, like Al Green and soul music," he says. "My brother, too - he was really big into punk rock shit, and since I lived in West L.A., I grew up around that whole scene."

His brother also introduced him to the world of hip-hop, and later, he found himself drawn to emotionally-charged bands like the Smiths and the Cure.

As Wilkinson began to develop his taste in music, the musician in him was incubating in one of the best places in the country to be a local musician: the L.A. music scene.

"It's weird because [the scene] was really big and there were a lot of bands, but it seemed like everybody knew each other," he says.

Wilkinson finds it difficult to accurately describe because he was immersed in the culture, a self-described "typical California surfer-dude."

"Every music city has its own vibe, but Sacramento was kind of a gray area," he says, laughing.

He uses examples of bands that have come from there like Cake and the Deftones, and says that they're not scene-whores, like a lot of other bands. It's a blend, he says, where "everybody knows each other" and does their own thing, which is their thing, if you're trying to pigeonhole the scene.

Now finally a rock star himself, Wilkinson still insists Team Sleep is nothing too serious.

"It's just a way to make music with my friends," he says. "We were on tour for a long time, and we'd get irritated with each other sometimes. Sometimes I kind of wanted to kill everybody. But then we'd go camping together or play basketball, and it's all cool.

"It's something to do, though. I wake up in the morning and I don't know what to do other than play music or skateboard."

If Wilkinson could give advice to aspiring bands, it would be one simple thing: "fuck Hollywood," he says. "Don't look at what other people do and try to copy them. Do whatever it is you like to do, and if other people don't like it, fuck them."