Egypt Central

The Red Eye Militia is under construction right now. We are in the process of setting up the infrastructure for how we want to do it. It was talked about a little earlier than the band was actually ready for it to be. So, now we’re regrouping, and we’re truly setting it up to have it be what we initially conceived it as. The idea is that we’re building our own army, and the one cool thing about being a part of something like that is that you’re not just going to be somebody who is handing out flyers or posting posters or anything like that. You’re actually going to be a part of the Egypt Central family through being a member of Red Eye Militia. We’re just trying to get it set up and run the right way.

The one with Cold? It was awesome. We’ve been Cold fans for a long time It was very exciting to have the opportunity to go out with them and not only being able to tour with them but being able to watch them play every night was an awesome experience in itself. And we met some awesome bands out on tour. We became really good friends with the guys in Kopek, from Dublin, Ireland, and they’re absolutely fantastic.

For me the coolest thing was that I always wanted to play The House of Blues in Anaheim, and that was the first time we actually had the opportunity to do that.

Right.

It’s going really well. We’ve been friends with those guys for a long time. We actually kind of all started out together years ago. One of our very first tours nationally the two bands went out together. We've grown up in the music business together. So to have a chance to get back together to do a run, it’s been really cool. We had a band called Kyng out with us for a while—Kyng and Finding Clyde—and then Kyng just ended the other night, and they're starting their next tour. We have tonight in Ft. Myers and then tomorrow night in Panama City Beach at Club La Vela. That’ll end this tour, and then we start with Hinder on the first.

Everything really happened pretty fast. Once we got together, we were pretty much locked ourselves in the room and we wrote. After our eighth show ever as a band, we got signed to Lava/Atlantic and Jason Flom. We went out to L.A., made our first record with producer Josh Abraham. It was just on fire. [People at the label] were freaking out talking about how good the record was, how many singles were on it. It was like all these pats on the back. And then, two weeks after that the mergers went down, they were cutting everybody, and they weren’t going to proceed with releasing the record. So, we were put in a position where we could either take the money and run or we could take the record. Well, we believe in the music, so we took the record, thinking, “Hey, no big deal, dude. We still have Josh as a producer on it, so we’ll get it out there and find a new home for this thing.” Unfortunately, in the time that it took to get the exit deal done, the industry kind of took the same hit. There’s no money coming in, so the budgets that were used to make this record and what it would cost to be able to sign with the override that was in the contract was just too high of a price. I mean, everybody flew us in for showcases, everyone loved the record, and then you go to sit down and talk numbers they would go running for the hills. So, it was either change the band name and write a new record or let it rip on our own, so we put it out on our own online and started touring. The next thing you know, we hook up with Dave Cash and Fat Lady Music, and they told Warner Brothers, “Look, we really wanna put this thing out. We believe in it.” It was about five years after we actually made the record that the record finally came out. It was awesome, the success "You Make Me Sick" and "It Makes Me Down" had, and we toured for two and a half years to try and establish the band. Then when it came time to get ready for the second record, there was a whole other set of hurdles to even get to that. So, we’re ecstatic that we finally got this new record out. It was an awesome experience making the record with Skidd Mills, and we’re very happy with the early success that we had.

Well, for us what the White Rabbit actually signifies is that we chased this industry and followed the lead of other people. Unfortunately, when you’re the artist in this, you have to surround yourself with people who help take your career further, who you’re trusting to take a leadership role on your behalf and get you where you hope to be. Just like any other walk of life, there’s some people that will misconstrue things and run you down dead end paths, lead you in the wrong direction. We were being distracted all the time and being told that things are all good, and we’re moving in this direction. In reality, it was all just one big façade. We were being blinded and lied to, and it was an awakening for us. We felt like there were so many people in the world that had that happen to them, that have chased that rabbit down the rabbit hole. You get down there some time, and it’s not as pretty as it looks from the outside looking in. It was a coming of age, so to speak, of us realizing what was going on around us, who was doing what, and finding the strength to make those necessary changes in order to keep our career moving forward.

Well, we had a lot of trouble trying to figure out what we were going to call the band, because we had very different influences growing up. I think ultimately one of the strengths of the band is that we do come from multiple backgrounds like that. But therefore, when you’re first starting out you kind of have your own idea of what the band’s going to be. So, what we decided to do was just pick a name that wasn’t based around how we sounded then or how we planned to sound in the future, because we realized early on that one of the best parts about music is that you can always evolve. So we picked a name that would always remind us where we started, where we came from, and no matter what—good or bad, whether it was major success or a major fallout—to not let any of it change us. It's just a street in Memphis [laughs].

If you’ve been to eight shows, you know that it doesn’t really matter to us whether there’s ten people or 10,000 people in front of us. We get up there, and we go crazy every single night, because we really enjoy playing our music for people. If there’s one person in front of us, we want to make sure that one person has a good time. It’s just not in us to not enjoy playing. We move the way that we do and put on the show we put on, because that’s just how we are. Even back in the day when we were in our band room, we would put 100% out, even in practice with no one there. Definitely, I would say there’s a change in all of us, which all comes down to the fans and people coming out and supporting us for so long and constantly telling new people about us. It seems like our fans have just stayed in the fight with us, and I think that makes us feel different. It lets us know that everything that we believed in is real, and they believe in it too. We’re all getting it done together.

The Hinder tour starts on the first. We do Hinder for a couple of weeks, then we’re going out with Red Jumpsuit Apparatus after that, and then we’re gonna take a couple of days off in the middle of November and have a nice couple of days at home, because we haven’t had any time at home since February. After that, we’ll be hitting it pretty hard. We’re doing a lot of Christmas shows at a lot of radio stations and things like that. So, everyone should just keep checking in on Facebook and with EgyptCentral.net. We’ll be constantly posting new dates.