For Palm Coast's Rain City Drive, Welcome to Rockville show is 'bucket-list experience'

PALM COAST — When Rain City Drive performs at Welcome to Rockville at Daytona International Speedway, it’ll be a homecoming, of sorts, for band members who played for their first audiences nearly two decades ago on makeshift stages and in school auditoriums about 25 miles north in Flagler County.

“Growing up around here, seeing the Speedway and knowing it’s such a cool place, you just look at each other and say, ‘We’re going to be playing that?!’” said Felipe Sanchez, the band’s guitarist, who met future Rain City Drive bassist Colin Vieira when they were both students at Indian Trails Middle School in Palm Coast. “It’s crazy.”

It’ll be the second consecutive year that Rain City Drive is on the bill at Welcome to Rockville, the four-day heavy-metal festival that returns to the Speedway’s mammoth infield May 9-12 with a lineup of at least 150 acts on five outdoor stages. The band is slated to perform at 2 p.m. Friday, May 10, on the festival's Garage Stage.

The band is no stranger to festival settings, with bookings already under its belt at the Louder Than Life music fest in Louisville, Kentucky, and Aftershock in Sacramento, California, among the other concert festivals presented by Rockville’s promoter, Los Angeles-based Danny Wimmer Presents.

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“They usually don’t book bands at the same event two years in a row, so we’re proud of that,” said Vieira, 33, a 2009 graduate of Flagler-Palm Coast High School who now shares a home with Sanchez in a neighborhood not far from where he grew up. “Playing in Daytona Beach is definitely a bucket-list experience for us.”

For Rain City Drive, Palm Coast roots extend to present-day

Although the band’s management, Shelter Music Group, is based in Los Angeles, and Rain City Drive formed initially as the band Slaves in Sacramento, the band’s creative home base is now the professionally equipped studio in a converted garage just off the kitchen in Vieira’s Palm Coast home, along a quiet neighborhood street.

Often, Vieira and Sanchez share music files and ideas digitally with the other members, who live in far-flung spots across the country: Singer Matt McAndrew, a former second-place finisher on the seventh season of “The Voice” is based in Los Angeles; drummer Zack Baker in West Palm Beach; and guitarist Weston Richmond in Salt Lake City.

When the band convenes for rehearsals, it’s in Vieira’s home studio in Palm Coast.

“We call this the home base,” Vierira said. “This is where we rehearse; this is where we write the songs. There’s a lot of history here. It seems right to give it some love.”

Rain City Drive music is a force on Spotify

Those songs have put Rain City Drive on the map internationally following the release of the band’s well-received “To Better Days” album in 2020, the year that also marked the name change from Slaves and the departure of that band’s lead singer Jonny Craig.

In 2022, Rain City Drive returned with an eponymous sophomore release.

The band’s music has generated more than 969,000 monthly listeners on Spotify and “Talk to a Friend,” a single off “To Better Days,” is approaching 40 million streams on that digital platform.

“Frozen,” the first single from the band’s next studio album, was released this past fall, with more new songs to be unveiled throughout the summer ahead of an anticipated fall release. The band is working on mixes of the new material with Grammy nominated Los Angeles-based producer Daniel Braunstein.

It’s a rock-star reality that night have been reserved for only the wildest daydreams when Vieira and Sanchez were hustling for gigs at whatever unlikely venue might have them during their days at Flagler-Palm Coast High School.

“There was really nothing to do here when we were growing up,” said Vieira, 33, who was born and raised in Palm Coast. “That’s why we started doing these bands, but there was really no place to play.”

Palm Coast teen bands had to hustle for places to play

Vieira’s band, Magnolia, found a hospitable, if unlikely, spot to perform at the now-defunct Thrillz Arcade, a video-game hangout in a strip mall off U.S. Highway 1.

Sanchez, who graduated in 2008, also played there in another band, Pathway to Providence.

Occasionally, the teen bands would make the trek to Daytona Beach, where they would play long-ago spots on Seabreeze Boulevard that included the Metal Lounge or the Coffee Connection, but the biggest event was an annual multi-band showcase on the auditorium stage at Flagler-Palm Coast High.

“They would have 1,000 kids that would come to those shows,” Vieira said. “It was like Woodstock for us. When I look back on it, I’m blown away because I think the people that came to see us really thought we were rock stars.”

Among those in the early teen audiences was Ashley Amaral, 32, a Palm Coast photographer who now works on Rain City Drive’s media team.

“I was obsessed,” she said, recalling that Vieira and Magnolia performed at her Sweet 16 birthday party. “The era was emo (music) and all these boys were playing music. Every one of my friends was in a band. We would get dressed up and go to a show, that’s just what you would do.”

Bygone Palm Coast music scene also produced other stars

In addition to Rain City Drive, the Palm Coast music scene of that era also produced a handful of performers that have built internationally known music careers.

The list includes Mat Musto, known professionally as Blackbear, a musician, singer, songwriter and record producer who has co-written hits for Justin Bieber (“Boyfriend”), teamed with singer-songwriter Mike Posner in the alternative hip-hop duo Mansionz and logged 15.5 million monthly Spotify listeners.

Josh Cobb, 38, owner of Rockbot Studios in Jacksonville, is another music industry veteran who emerged from the Palm Coast scene to transform his high school garage band, My Getaway, into a nationally touring act.

Comprised of older, more accomplished teen musicians, My Getaway was a band that became a role model for Vieira and Sanchez.

It’s hard to pinpoint what Palm Coast offered to inspire so many young musicians, Cobb said, other than the spirit of possibility.

“I remember specifically one of my first semesters as a junior at Flagler-Palm Coast that somebody passed me a CD and it was a band, Heroes At Last, that was a bunch of kids same age as me,” he said. “I thought, ‘Wow, this is like a real band, original music, and it sounds like a CD I would get at the store.’

“That opened my eyes to idea of being able to do this. It seemed like something that was attainable.”

Neither Vieira nor Sanchez had a Plan B if a music career didn’t materialize.

“This was the only thing that gave me happiness on this level,” Sanchez said. “I felt like a weirdo until I got into this, looked around and saw all these other weirdos just like me.”

Vieira nods his head in agreement.

“I knew it seemed like a longshot,” he said, “but I always thought that if I could make enough money just to pay my bills and do this, it would make me the happiest of anything I could do.”

This article originally appeared on The Daytona Beach News-Journal: Welcome to Rockville band Rain CIty Drive has roots in Palm Coast