Recently Crewys sat down and talked with Andy from Illinois hardcore band Kingmaker. We talked about their new album, touring, and guilty pleasures. Check out them out on their upcoming tour with So Many Ways and Lakota De Kai this May.

First off, What’s your name, what do you do in Kingmaker and what is your guilty pleasure band/artist?

My name is Andy, I play guitar for the band. I think it’s safe to say we have a few guilty pleasures as a band collectively, which usually only get played on tour - most played would probably be Ride the Lightning.

You just got back from a Southwest US tour, do you have any fun memories from that?

It was an interesting tour for us because it was the first time we’d been out in almost 4 years without a merch guy or tour manager, so it was just the five of us, which made for a lot of hilarious situations. It was a pretty tame tour overall, though. We played a fest in Austin called Death by Southwest that was at a venue called The Music Ranch. We were all sort of expecting somebody’s farm outfitted with a small stage and some tents, but we were greeted by a massive property that appeared to be something like a hippie commune. It started raining early in the day, and the ground was dirt and sand everywhere, so the fest got real sloppy real quick. We were scheduled to play at 11pm, then moved to 12, then moved to 1:30AM, before they eventually asked us to play at 4:30pm because they would have to shut the show down due to the weather. Pretty much everything was covered in mud and the roof of the stage kept collapsing and dumping water on the stage. All of our clothes and gear were covered in mud for the rest of the tour.

On that tour did you play any new songs from your upcoming release ‘The Cradle’?

Yes we did, and we will continue to play new ones on our upcoming tours. We usually switch up which new song we play every night.

Speaking of your new release, does it have a release date yet?

Not yet but we are moving towards one. We’re hoping for June or July of this year. It’s a long wait for us, some of the material on The Cradle has been in the works for almost two years so we’re very eager to see what people think of it.

What song is your favorite to play live?

Mine would have to be the Serpent’s Song. It’s a great song to headbang to.

Where is your favorite place to play?

We love playing house shows, and I wish we were able to do it more often. Every once and a while we get make a stop in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma where there is a “venue” called Rudy’s House. It’s a tiny dilapidated home in the suburbs with a very small, very hot cement room that we play in. There’s nothing like that place. The Miramar Theater in Milwaukee is also a favorite. We’ve been playing there since we first started and it’s got a homey feel.

Do you have any weird tour stories?

An unbelievable amount. On our first tour in 2011 we played in a little town in central Missouri, we were sharing our van with the band we were on tour with so there was 11 of us crammed in our 15 passenger. We pulled up to the venue we were playing and nobody really knew what to say. It was essentially a shack in the middle of a dirt field. While we were unloading our trailer and getting gear set up, we noticed that along with the kids that started to show up, there was also a growing population of real big guys on real big motorcycles with patched up MC vests. We cautiously continued our regimen while we watched them gather and start drinking heavily, among other things. I asked one of the members of a local band what the deal was with the motorcycle gang, and he told me, “Yeah my whole family is part of this gang and this used to be their clubhouse, so don’t disrespect it. They’re just here to make sure people are paying to get into the show”.

At this point there was 15-20 MC guys and their crackhead girlfriends. They came into the tiny shack when the show started, already belligerent, and fucking with everyone watching the bands. Then they started asking around to see who’d be interested in spending sometime with their “girlfriends” (prostitutes). They were getting more and more aggressive as the night went on, and it started to get scary right before we played. When our bass player politely declined the hooker offer, a MC guy got in his face and started screaming shit like, “What, she ain’t good enough for you?”

We played our set at lightning speed and got out of that place as fast as possible. When we got on the main road of the town just a few minutes later we got hit with the mother of all rain storms and had to hide out in a Wal Mart because the wind was too strong to drive in. At least the bikers got stuck in their shitty little clubhouse.

What is your favorite place to eat either on the road or in your home town?

On this last tour we got really into a fast food place called Cookout, we’d never had that before as it’s only near the south/souteast.

What is your favorite movie?

THE WARRIORS!

And lastly, who inspired you to play music?

Personally, I was put into the band program at school in 4th grade to play percussion. I played drums (terribly) for about 3 years before getting bored of it because it was hard to be creative on the drums by myself. I couldn’t write any music and I didn’t want to play drums for some terrible music that somebody else wrote. I wouldn’t say I was inspired to play music, just introduced to it. After that it was just always a part of my life and my skill and interest in it grew with me as I got older. Honestly the most inspiring thing I’ve seen in my short, short music career was watching O’Brother at Lollapalooza in 2013. They had the 11:30 AM slot on one of the smallest stages, and the show they played was the best performance I have ever seen. All I could think about was “I gotta sound like that!”.