Sidestage: ‘Howl’ is an album that encompasses a wide variety of musical genres.Who would you say your influences are, as a band? Tom Conrad: Typically, we pull our influences from specific songs. Not so much from one artist and their career. For us, inspiration comes from anything like Nirvana to Curtis Mayfield. Sidestage: What’s the writing process like for you guys? Who comes up with what? Do you tend to build a song off lyrics first, or music first? Tom: Sean [van Vleet, lead singer & lyricist] is a pretty prolific writer. He’ll record about a dozen rough demos to get the idea across at a given time. Max [Steger, guitarist] and I then shuffle through and find the ones that tend to stick. We begin as a band to flesh out a skeleton of the song and fine-tune it as much as possible. Sean usually finishes lyrics soon after. Sidestage: Empires just finished their first tour. How did it go? Do you have any plans for other tours in the near future? Tom: Our first time out east could not have gone better. We’ll be taking part in a few Steel Train and Dear & the Headlights Midwest dates this November. Sidestage: Obviously the internet has played a significant part of Empires’ success so far. What made the band decide to go down the route you did, in terms of releasing the album for free online? Tom: It made the most sense being the position Empires was in. Howl was conceived entirely on our own and we could do whatever we wanted with its release. Being such a new band, the most important thing for us was to get our music out as easy as possible. Sidestage: Do you think you would have done things differently if you,Tom, didn’t already have a substantial online following? [Tom has his own photography blog and website, and a legion of hardcore followers, mostly because of his previous role as guitarist for The Academy Is...] Tom: Not really. That has not affected our decisions on what’s right for Empires. Sidestage: Are Empires aiming to get signed any time soon? Tom: Our focus is growing Empires organically and as naturally as possible right now. There is no rush to get into a contract when it’s not stopping us from writing, recording or performing live. The more we can do on our own, the stronger we will be, but I think we’ll want to find a home soon.
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