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Published Thursday, May 15, 2008 2:07 PM
Updated Thursday, May 15, 2008 2:08 PM

 

Berkeley County native hits the big time

If you want to know the recipe on how to become an overnight sensation, just ask Moncks Corner native and 1994 Berkeley High School grad Chad Wolfinbarger.

First you change your name to a more marketable Chad Wolfe, pack up your guitar and head west.

Then you toil in the trenches for a dozen or so years, playing your songs for anyone who wants to hear them, and then deal with the endless string of rejections until you wonder if you could get a job writing graffiti much less a job writing a decent song.

Finally, after years of knocking on doors, someone likes your song, thinks it fits and scores it to a hit movie featuring two of Hollywood’s hottest stars.

Voila, overnight success.

“I’m Not Over,” a song by Chad Wolfe and his band Carolina Liar, has garnered some serious airtime on radio stations across America, MTV and iTunes, as part of what is being dubbed the biggest comedy of the summer, What Happens in Vegas, starring Ashton Kutcher and Cameron Diaz.

For Wolfe, all of a sudden he’s living the dream.

“Every day is like a new adventure for us,” he said. “It’s amazing. We wake up each morning with something new and different happening. It’s wild.

“We’ve been going non-stop ever since we found out our song was included with the movie. Everybody wants to talk to us now. Everybody wants to hear our song and hear us play it.”

The song ‘I’m Not Over’ beat out some pretty heavy hitters to make the soundtrack, bands like rock icons U2 and the Rolling Stones.

“We really didn’t know about the song being picked to be included with the movie,” Wolfe said. “One day we got a call and were told to go to the Fox lot and play for them. When we came in to play and they said, ‘You know you’re the biggest problem in the world for us right now. You have a song that’s a part of this movie. This song beat out a U2 and Rolling Stones.’”

‘I’m Not Over’ is a song Wolfe co-wrote with Tobias Carlton, a song that came together almost by accident.

“It’s how things like this happens,” Wolfe said. “We got a call one night from the producer Max Martin. I’d written a song for him with Tobias that he liked. He came to us and said if you could write two more songs like this one I could do something to help you out. He encouraged me to try and write a couple more songs and we came up with ‘I’m Not Over.’”

Even then the song hadn’t yet become the version you hear in the movie.

“In the past my songs were more the acoustic singer-songwriter type of song,” he said. “What made this song different is in the production of the song. It took a different twist when we got into the production phase of the song in the studio.

“We got a good producer who just kind of kicked butt with it and gave it that unique sound that caught everybody’s ear.”

Wolf, who graduated from Berkeley High School in 1994 as Chad Wolfinbarger, started playing guitar while a student at Berkeley Middle School. The guitar was a gift from his aunt.

“I started playing guitar while at Berkeley Middle. I was complaining about having to play the trombone (in the BMS band), so my aunt gave me a guitar she had originally given to my uncle who never played it. So I took the guitar and started playing, then my uncle came over and taught me how to play Honky Tonk. I’ve been going ever since.”

Wolfe never did consider abandoning a career in music for something more conventional over the past dozen years since moving west to devote his full time to his craft.

“There’s no such thing as an overnight sensation,” he said. “It’s a hard living to make.

Right now it’s really fun. All the hard work is starting to pay off.

“I started off in this playing the coffee shops and places when I first got started and whether I made it big in the business or not I don’t think I’d have ever done anything else.”

Hearing his song on the radio for the first time was a moment scripted right out of a Hollywood movie, standing on a street corner and hearing your hit song for the first time coming out of someone else’s car radio.

“It’s funny hearing your song coming from somebody else’s car,” Wolfe said. “We were outside a store in L.A., and I heard our song coming out of this guy’s radio blaring at full blast. I started screaming to the other guys in the band, ‘There’s our song! There’s our song!’ It was an amazing thing to hear. It really is a dream come true.”

The band got its name Carolina Liar from Chad’s penchant for telling stories and the old Southern adage, “Never let the truth stand in the way of a good story.”

“I had moved to L.A. and I’d tell stories about Moncks Corner and this little section of the South where I grew up, 17A and 176, and all the crazy things that happened there. My friends looked at me and said you are such a liar, that’s all people do in the South is tell stories.

“When we were trying to come up with a catchy name for the band and my friends were calling me this liar from North Carolina. I said I’m not from North Carolina, I’m a South Carolina Liar. As soon as I said Carolina Liar I knew I had something and checked the Internet for domain names and no one had it, so here we are.”

What’s unique about Carolina Liar is the internationality of the band: A Lowcountry Southern Boy and guys from Sweden.

“It’s me and a bunch of guys from Sweden,” Chad said. “It’s another one of those crazy things that just fall into place.”

Band mates Erik Hääger, Johan Carlsson, Rickard Göransson, Jim Almgren Gandara and Max Grahn join Wolfe to make up Carolina Liar.

“We really connected right from the start,” Wolfe said.

Good things keep happening for Chad Wolfe and Carolina Liar. Their first CD, Coming to Terms on the Atlantic Records label is due out May 20.

The band hits the road on Tuesday for a tour they hope will eventually bring them east.

We’re hoping that some dates will take us into South Carolina and perhaps Columbia,” he said. “I hope we can free up a day and come back to Charleston and come home and see my family and old friends and say hi to everyone.”

For Chad Wolfe, it’s just one more day living the dream.

To hear I’m Not Over and learn more about Carolina Liar, visit their website www.carolinaliar.com