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From the Introduction to At Last! The Gestalt Story, by Cass Dwyer:
With the benefit of hindsight, it's easy to suppose that every member of Gestalt was practically perfect right from the start. This was not the case, as they will be the first to tell you. Even months before that first meeting, Suncat was a spoiled, self-obsessed little princess from an Unaffiliated aristocracy. Kaichang was so paranoid when the two first met that she wouldn't play her guitar with anyone else in the room in case they told her father. Verneen was so overshadowed by her "famous" weather-girl sister that her parents worried that she actually couldn't speak. Orville seemed destined for a life of mediocrity spiced with the occasional bar fight. And Tollain, having fought his way clear of a crippling congenital debility and produced three albums that nobody understood or cared about, seemed to have shot his bolt.
Tollain: Not much change there then.
Musically, in fact, none of them were star material. The Truesingers had beautiful voices and could play, but their stagecraft was rudimentary, their tunes often predictable if not clichéd, and Kaichang's political sensibilities, let's say, could have used a bit more honing. Korynn Mitwoch had undoubted skills at arranging and performing, but his personal eccentricities made him unbookable. Orville had the nickname "Bandbreaker" in the dressing rooms of venues all across the octant. Tollain's music was inaccessible because he refused to take that one step across the gulf between him and the listener--to put himself in the listener's shoes, as it were. Separately, they were nothing.
What happened? Magic.
With the benefit of hindsight, it's easy to suppose that every member of Gestalt was practically perfect right from the start. This was not the case, as they will be the first to tell you. Even months before that first meeting, Suncat was a spoiled, self-obsessed little princess from an Unaffiliated aristocracy. Kaichang was so paranoid when the two first met that she wouldn't play her guitar with anyone else in the room in case they told her father. Verneen was so overshadowed by her "famous" weather-girl sister that her parents worried that she actually couldn't speak. Orville seemed destined for a life of mediocrity spiced with the occasional bar fight. And Tollain, having fought his way clear of a crippling congenital debility and produced three albums that nobody understood or cared about, seemed to have shot his bolt.
Tollain: Not much change there then.
Musically, in fact, none of them were star material. The Truesingers had beautiful voices and could play, but their stagecraft was rudimentary, their tunes often predictable if not clichéd, and Kaichang's political sensibilities, let's say, could have used a bit more honing. Korynn Mitwoch had undoubted skills at arranging and performing, but his personal eccentricities made him unbookable. Orville had the nickname "Bandbreaker" in the dressing rooms of venues all across the octant. Tollain's music was inaccessible because he refused to take that one step across the gulf between him and the listener--to put himself in the listener's shoes, as it were. Separately, they were nothing.
What happened? Magic.