Until recently, Arnel Pineda was best known as the lead singer of Filipino band The Zoo. Their first album, Zoology released last month in the United States, but the video of the band started popping up on YouTube almost a year ago.

Most notable are the band’s faithful covers of classic rock band Journey. So notable, in fact, that Journey guitarist and founder Neil Schon was so struck by the performances that he immediately contacted Pineda to audition for the band.

Happy ending? On December 5, 2007, Pineda was announced as the lead singer of Journey.

Neil Schon says:

We feel reborn. I think there’s a lot of chemistry between the five of us. At first we were going to go into the studio and just write 4 songs, but now it’s escalated to a lot of great new and diverse material. The stuff sounds tremendous. Everyone’s so stoked about it. We feel very fortunate to have found Arnel.

Can anyone say Rock Star?