We were able to have a sit down with Anthony of This Wild Life at their headline show in London with As It Is (see our review of the night here) and we chatted about tour life and their next record.
So this is your third headline UK tour, How does it feel being so popular over here as you’ve been over here three times and have been a band for such a short period of time?
Yeah, it’s crazy, tonight we are playing London and London was the first place we ever sold out a show, including the states so that’s very weird, it’s awesome, it’s like the coolest thing awesome to think we had never played a sold out show back home but we came over here and do it here. Support has allowed us to come over here. From January and September 2014 and now, its amazing and we are super stoked to be able to come and play out here, this place is awesome and the weather has been lovely!
What are your favourite places to play in the world?
In the world? Erm… touring is kind of weird, you just drive around and then only see the venue, so you don’t do as much as you would think, Australia is beautiful, I love coming here and we just did South Asia, I went to Singapore, which was one of the coolest places I’ve ever been in my life – it’s a 30 miles island with like 5 million people, we had a tour guide showing us around telling us facts. Obviously our hometown, we play this venue called Chain Reaction which is a 400 cap room – when I moved to california at 19 I went to shows there all the time and Kevin’s been going their since he was like 13 onwards, so to play there and people show up is just crazy.
Is there anywhere you’ve not been that you want to tour?
Mainland Europe really bad, we’ve been here 3 times, and we just cant make it over there, it’s so close I just want to ask someone to take a chance on us so we can get over there. I know we have some fans over there, I don’t know how many, I just would love to get over there. It’s the main one we want to do now.
You guys recently got off tour with New Found Glory, how was that touring with such a huge band in that genre?
When we started, we were a pop punk so being a pop punk band you have to love New Found Glory. That’s a band we were both truly obsessed with when we were young. We were gonna do another tour and we were sat at practise and we got a message from our manager saying that tour was cancelled, we were like are you kidding me? That’s another two months off, we have already had a month of that’s too much time at home, I think he was pulling our leg because 5 minutes later he texted saying that the New Found Glory offer came in. We both just stopped playing and we stopped practise that day, we were so in shock and so happy, we were just texting him like “are we really going on tour with New Found Glory?” he was like yeah yeah it’s all happening and then we went home. We continued to just not practise. I was so happy man, I asked them so many questions about like touring with Blink and some of my favourite pop punk bands, they were some of the nicest guys I’ve ever meet in my life they were really knowledgeable, they were okay with giving a helping hand, cause they’ve had so much experience and we are so new, it was great to get some good words and good advice on touring and road and just other stuff that helps.
How is it being on Epitaph Records?
I couldn’t ask for a better label. I feel like a lot of labels get bad names, especially now days, I don’t have one bad thing to say about them. They’re awesome, they’re super creative they’re jsuta great label, They’re very fair, if there is anything you need help with, they’ll sit down and explain it to you, they’ve had so many great bands that we love, especially with Kevin, they’re like the ultimate southern california label, they had Offspring, Rancid, Bad Religion, so for him was a dream come true.
Is it odd that you differ so much from the other bands on your label?
Nah we prefer that, we prefer it for pretty much everything we do, in music, we don’t want to play show’s with acoustic bands, we don’t truly listen to that much acoustic music in general, we grew up listening to Dashboard Professional and that was 10 years ago and now we listen to City and Colour here and there, other then that we don’t listen to acoustic bands. So when we tour we want to tour we want to tour with bands we listen to, I want to go out with Like Moths To Flames or Volumes, I listen to them like all the time, it might not make sense, but that’s what I wanna do so I can watch my favourite bands every night. We want to go with Pop punk and Metalcore bands cause that’s our thing.
In releases to come, are you considering writing some heavy stuff?
We are kind of on the feeling that we got this way and people like it so maybe we have something going here writing acoustic. We could easily just stick on some guitar or drums and we will add stuff, but completely changing our style isn’t going to happen, we might just add some more instrumentation because music progresses but we aren’t going to just start writing heavy stuff. Even though for Kevin it would be a dream come true, he’s always talking about Kevin Jordan side project he want’s to start where he plays everything and screams, he would be stoked, but I would not.
Have you started writing for a new album?
I don’t really do anything lyrics or melody – that is 100% Kevin. I just write music and I am writing pretty much 25/7 it’s my favourite part of the music, I’m pretty sure I wrote something yesterday before the show actually. We are always writing, we aren’t the type of band to go to a CD with only a few ideas.
Last but not least, what are your personal favourite songs you have written?
I think we would each be different, I’m going to like the song’s I’ve written musically, I really like Concrete and 405, I wrote all the music for that song, those are probably my favourite songs of Clouded because I’m selfish and I wrote all the music for them haha!
