Okay, this is Rita, I'm at House of Music with Scott Lucas. You guys are hopefully playing a lot of new music from Hey Keller. Will we hear most of it? Yeah, that's the plan.
They like play, if not the whole record, maybe like nine songs or something like that. As many as we can stuff in there. That's the idea. So I was seeing some of the reviews out there on the record, and Jim DeRigato gave it 3.5 stars.
Have you seen that? I didn't see that he rated it. Do you read your CD reviews or record reviews? Sure, yeah.
I really appreciate the ones that are well written and not the ones that come off like somebody's blog. But I like them. Well, so far they've been pretty positive for this record. So it's under your guys are playing the Metro.
Anything different for that particular show? It's going to be kind of a 25th anniversary show? Yeah, we've got a couple of things in mind for that. But yeah, that's basically almost to the day, the 25th anniversary of it.
So it's pretty exciting for us. So you're not going to give us any hints? No, no hints. We've got Big Dish opening up the show, and that'll be a lot of fun.
And then afterwards, we're just going to go next door and spin records and stay up all night. So Big Dish, I was surprised to see them on the bill. Are they back together like officially? Are they recording you music?
No, no, not officially. They're just playing the show. That's it. That was pretty cool to see that.
So you guys are also participating in a record store day. What are you guys going to be at? We're going to be at the reckless on Broadway. Are you guys doing a set or just signing?
Sorry, I'm going to play set. That'll be very cool. So I actually previewed the record on Spotify. And just wondering what your thoughts are on streaming services.
There's so many out there. And what are you thinking? I mean, people are listening. Are they buying it after they listen to it?
I mean, what are your thoughts on these kind of services? Do people buy records out to listen to them on the radio? I hope so. At least two in the old days, I don't know how it is now.
Yeah, I'm not so sure. Maybe, maybe not. I mean, maybe their royalty system isn't so great. It'd be nice to fix that.
But I don't know. I mean, I'm not much of a streaming guy. I don't think it sounds as good. That was my big problem with Netflix, too.
Getting into it so it looked as good as Blu-ray. Right. Do you have control over how long you leave at Amazon Spotify? Is that something you control or the record company?
I think we could take it off if we wanted to. Yeah, it's totally something that's up to us. There is one of our records that's not on it. And that's just because I didn't realize it was up to us.
Okay. So you guys were using Pledge music for this particular record. I know that Jill Sobel did something like that. She did a donations from fans for her 2009 record, California years.
She had fans singing on it. So how did this all come together for what you guys wanted to do? The idea was just brought up to us to do it. And I thought it was like, what is it?
What's the big one? Kickstarter. That was like a Kickstarter thing. And I was like, I don't want to do that.
And then I realized it was more about people were pre-ordering the record. And then I was like, oh, that's cool. So it was sort of like giving us the money up front. And then there were things that people could buy things if they wanted to buy them.
Like guitar pedals and things. And so it was something like, we weren't asking for donations. We weren't asking people to give us money for nothing. So then I felt like, okay, this could be interesting.
And it really worked out well. I feel like I think people enjoyed it. And we enjoyed it. I was end up doing, there was something on Fox News where you guys went to someone's home.
Was that something, was like a listening party or a actually play there? Right. So what we would do is we'd show up at your house with a copy of the new record and a case of beer. And we'd just crank it up and hang out and listen to the record.
And that turned out to be a lot of fun. You know, there was a lot of ideas with this record where we were just sort of thinking of different ways to do things. That was actually the one I saw was a bit of a glon. I got you guys to start a lot of them.
Was that the only one you did? We did about 15 of them. Right. So we had like a little tour.
And by the end of it, we were just so bloated. And we just had like, our liver hurt. You know, it was just, it was terrible. Yeah.
Sounds a little rough. I'm just wondering like after Brian left the band, you went ahead and found Ryan as your new drummer. What was that process like? You have to like audition people and what did you do?
It was no auditioning. Like Ryan was the only person I thought of. And that was it. You know, it wasn't.
It was easy. So like within like a month or two, we were back playing shows. How does it change how do you guys play? I mean, now you have a new drummer who kind of has a different style.
Does it change your song or like a when you're playing on stage? The basic idea is to say, you know, play heavy songs with you know, and the drummer hits your drums, you know, and that's that's the thing. And but you know, everybody that I play with has different things that you kind of have to have to use to or adjust to. And so that's we just spent like a year touring a lot just to sort of get tight with each other before we decided to make a record.
That's a great idea. Who did the artwork for H.E.K.E. Color? It's pretty cool.
A friend of ours filled life from he lives out in LA and yeah, he did a great job on record and it's one of my favorite covers that we've ever had. Was that something you gave him an idea or he just came up with? We had this we had the title and we didn't have many ideas and he had done a couple of sketches that were really cool and they just weren't quite right. So we gave him this idea to I was like, all right, how about something that's like a cross between Richard Ramirez and the guy who is in the ghost world that hangs out at the convenience store.
So that's what he came back with and it was perfect. It was great. All right. You also came out with another record earlier this year awesome mix tape number two.
How did you go about picking out the songs that you wanted to cover? Songs that we liked and also songs that we could figure out our own way to do or that would you know, that they would be pointless covers. You know, it's not much reason to do a song exactly like the song you're covering. Yeah, you definitely brought a new life to Ario's Speed Wagon so I appreciate that.
That was a really tough one and it wasn't until we figured out that I should sing lower than a pyre that you saw in Candida. And then I was like, oh, this is great. But for a while there I was like, I don't think we can hold this song. Well, one band you introduced me to was Soulside with that song, God City.
That was a great song. I love the cover. I mean, I don't even know the original. I'm a band that I think they run to Squirt Records.
Yeah, great. Great thing. I'm assuming they exist anymore. They exist anymore?
They don't. I don't know if they're going to be playing reunion shows or something, but most of the guys ended up in girls against boys. And so, you know, another terrific band, but that's still sad. It was really terrific.
Oh, is that Candida's set list tonight? No, we have played it a few times. Okay. We've played it a few times.
Okay. Okay. Sorry. That'd be cool.
I know we were doing reviews, movie reviews for the Chicagoist. Yeah, are you going to do that now while you're touring or no time? There's really no time to write. I enjoy writing, but I don't know if I enjoy the actual process of writing.
It's not too easy for me. And after all those 25 years of local age posts, I'm tired of writing for a while. Also, you guys are touring until July. Are you guys planning on touring Europe?
We'll see what happens after we're done with these couple months. We're definitely interested in doing something like that, and I think it's about time that happens. So we'll see what happens. I know you're pretty busy with local age.
Any plans for your other project, the Scott Lucas and the Mary Mann? There are no plans, but I think this would happen sort of slow down. I've been just so into this and making this happen. I haven't thought about anything else.
My last question is, if local age ever decided to collaborate with a female artist, it would appear? Well, we have a couple of times. We've done a song with Shana Keel from Solomon. We've done some stuff with Simee from Suffragette.
With somebody you'd really want to work with, didn't have a chance to get it. I really like Angel Olsen. That would be cool. Doing something with you on chat would be like a dream come true.
I'd like to do some Brianna. That would be great. Fun. So thanks so much for taking that time out to talk WXAD.
We appreciate it. Of course. Thank you.