INTERVIEW: Kick and the Hug Share What Makes them Tick
- https://youtu.be/xnZsnu4v7g8
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I grew up outside of Philadelphia in a little town called Phoenixville. I don’t know if I ever “decided” to become an artist. My father was a drummer at some point in his life. I never heard him play, but I did find remnants of his drum kit in the basement when I was in 5th or 6th grade, from that moment on...I have been making noise, and from that moment on have probably also been trying to make the noise resemble music as best I can.
- (Well, we haven't had any gigs or airplay as of yet, so… 😂) I suppose nothing I’m going to say is new…someone in your band has to be a consummate networker. Its as simple as that. Meet people, explain your mission, don’t be needy or groveling, and be genuinely appreciative if someone offers you some help.
- LOL ! Hell yes. We were actually going to name the band, “The Mistakes,” but someone had already taken it. We try to practice the concept of mistakes, so they become normal occurrences and aren’t so jarring. If everything were perfect, it would be boring. Mistakes are fine.
- Haven't toured in a long long time, for a number of reasons, but the last time we were out…uh, lets just say, “what happens on tour, stays on tour." No, we met a lot of great people. Early on we had no budget for hotel rooms, and we spent plenty of nights in our van. Our drummer became very adept at befriending people with big houses at closing time. We were in New Hampshire somewhere, playing a college bar…but it was super cold out. I mean, like zero, and we had no place to stay. The club is closing, the gear is mostly loaded out, most of the patrons are gone and we all started moaning about the cold night we had in front of us…and the drummer looks over at the bar, and says, “I got this.” And ….sure enough, he did. We all had cozy beds and couches that night.
- Well, I don't think we have enough ink to get through all of that. All four of us are very much into our studio rigs. Tyler just moved to Nashville and has taken up residence in a producer’s suite at The Hilson Studio. Mike (bass) buys equipment pretty much every couple of hours…and I just keep buying guitar pedals and interesting analog boxes that make noise. Sam (drummer) is very much a midi-man…he’s always adding new synth mods. I think he just got Omnishpere. As a band, we’re all over the map. I’m on ProTools, Tyler is on Logic. Sam uses Abelton and Logic, and Mike uses stuff from Russia that none of us have ever heard of…but he always gets a great deal.
- Aw shoot, I (we) haven’t quite figured that one out yet. We’re hoping to get much better at that this year now that we have a full record out. So far, because of the pandemic, and because of our inability to play live regularly (we live in four different cities) we’ve pretty much been relying on social media channels and world of mouth. Its a slow grind, but we decided when we put Kick and the Hug together that we weren’t going to worry about our timeline, and we were just gonna plug away at it, and if its meant to be heard, then eventually our efforts will result in a viable audience.
- Well, we’ve set a pretty ambitious goal for Kick and the Hug. We would like to play the Mad Cool Festival (@madcoolfestival) in Madrid. We would like to be on a bill with Bon Iver, Wilco, The National, Band of Horses, Local Natives, Lord Huron... Post Malone or Billy Eilish. If Billy and Post are on the bill…we know it’ll be UGE! And if the other bands are on the bill, we know we’ll be really stoked to watch the show cause we’re huge fans. Why Mad Cool? Well…we figure if we somehow qualify to play one of the coolest festivals in Europe, then we will have reached a pretty high watermark for our band…and we could walk on that stage knowing that if it were all downhill from that point on, at least we knew we took it that far. That would be a pretty cool accomplishment. Of course, with our Colorado roots, its pretty much a given that we would love to play Red Rocks with any of the aforementioned bands.
- Just super focused on finally releasing “Ladies and Gentlemen, Kick and the Hug,” and being as noisy as possible about it. We have lots of new music backed up and ready to go to release after the album runs its course, but one thing at a time,
- Playing golf. Watching other bands…and trying our best to be near the ocean.
- Release of our full length debut. A few more video releases…some are live performances, and some are alternate versions of songs from the album. We’ve done a remake of Dead Mom with a string section. Feels weird mentioning that, because the original version hasn’t even been released at the time that I’m answering this question. We have a few really interesting festival opportunities that we can’t talk about yet. Not Mad Cool though….and we are hoping to do some spotty touring that will put us in markets like Colorado, Philadelphia, NYC, DC, Baltimore, and hopefully Boston.
