Exclusive Interview with Sydney from
By Jen @justjenrees
Echosmith are the band to watch right now. They are taking the world by storm with their hit single “Co ol Kids”. I interviewed Sydney, (vocalist and keyb oards) in Germany. They are a young hardworking band that have played Warp ed , b een to the Philippines and are now in Germany. What a fantastic summer this has been for you and looks likely to be a great rest of the year as well! First Warped Tour, then the Philippines and then more tour news. A great to start to what is shaping up to be a great career in the music industry. You have achieved success pretty quickly, has it seemed like a whirlwind time for you? Sydney: It seems like it’s fast to a lot of people but we’ve been a band for almost 7 years. We started super young but we’ve been working so hard for that whole time. It’s gotten a lot crazier the past year though that’s for sure. I’m writing you from Germany right now, which is hard to believe. A few questions about Warped Tour, I have read awesome reviews of your sets in each city and that you are one of the hottest acts to watch. Aw thank you. (blushing) Take us through a typical day at Warped, I think our readers seem to think that
it is all glamorous, can you set us straight? Ok it’s not glamorous hardly at all and that’s the funny thing about doing this as a job, sure it’s super rewarding but it’s more work than glamor on most days. We would get up every day around 8am and put posters wherever we could, (they only allowed 10 because the year before we did 150 every single morning) and then we would chalk every entrance saying our band name and the set time. (See the pic on next page). Funny part is fans didn’t know us the year before but this year they did and fans would gather around. It was a lot of fun! Then we’d go run to breakfast or shower real fast and then someone from our label would pick us up at like 9:30am and we would go the radio station and play 3-4 songs and meet everyone and sometimes do a fan meet and greet till around 11:30 or 12pm. Then we will go out to eat somewhere. This was for sure one of the highlights for us because we love food a lot! By 1:00pm we would get back to Warped and then we would have a signing for 30 minutes and then run to 2 more signings after
that. So around 3:30pm we would finish those and get ready for our set on the Journeys stage. The set time is never the same but most of the times we had were after 5pm. After our 30 minute set we take 15 minutes and wash our faces and clean up to then do a fan line for 2 hours. Our fans mean everything to us to we made sure that we met and hugged and signed and took pictures with every single person. We would only leave when there was nobody left. Then by like 8pm we’re done and we would chill on the bus and laugh and eat dinner with friends, usually asleep by midnight. We seriously didn’t have a day off the entire summer till Aug 6th and even on weekends our schedule was just like that. Doesn’t sound glamorous does it? But we love it and are super grateful we get to do this. Sydney, as a female do you think you were treated differently at Warped, than your other band members? I have seen a few interviews about the way females are treated differently by crowds and bands and was interested if you had any stories you could share. Yeah I do, all girls have the usual thing of guys trying to hit on you and flirt and stuff like that, but it’s more about people invading your space as a female where they think you owe them something. One time this guy asked me to meet his girlfriend because she had something really important to tell me in our fan line, so I go over to the side and she come up and kissed me and ran off. That was weird! Most people on Warped tour from the staff and other bands were really cool though. In general it’s how you carry yourself that helps avoid weird situations. Even though I’m only 17 I make sure people know there’s boundaries with me from the get go. Did you meet any of the bands that have had an influence on you or that Photo: Jonathan Weiner
you were a huge fan of? We met Reel Big Fish who we think are a lot of fun. We didn’t get to meet that many bands this year as we were so busy. What was your biggest highlight of Warped overall? The fans for sure. We heard story after story of fans who are somehow deeply affected by our music in real ways. It’s just hard to explain what that does for us to hear that something we wrote matters to someone and actually makes their life better in some way. It’s really a beautiful thing!
VMA’s After Warped you went to the VMA’s and met some pretty cool musicians, Sydney you were pretty happy to meet Taylor Swift. How rad was that for you? Any other artists that you met that you admired? That was a really fun experience for sure. Taylor is such an inspiration for all of us as somebody really owning their own career and doing it their own way. She was so sweet and knew our songs and had a lot of complimentary things to say. It was surreal for sure! Other than that how was the night for you? Please tell us all about it! We walked the red carpet and met lots of fellow artists like 5SOS, Katy Perry and Al Roker. Al Roker is seriously one of our favorite people we’ve met. He’s hilarious and genuine. Katy was amazing too. The 5SOS guys were cool but our meeting was super fast.
Philippines You recently completed a tour of the Philippines; you seemed to have fun according to your Facebook page. How
many shows did you play there? We played 2 shows, an acoustic show at a mall and a full band show at the only indoor festival called “Bazooka Rocks”. We have a special place in our hearts for the Philippines; they are some of the nicest and warmest people in the world. They knew every word of every song and were just so kind. They would find us everywhere, from our hotel to a mall to restaurants they would be there. It was one of the most fun experiences we’ve ever had. You were interviewed on SiriusXM Morning Mash Up. (readers can listen to that here). What else did you get up to over there? Other than making fun videos with security guards! Did you have any time for sightseeing? We didn’t get to sight see (sad face). We hope to next time and we definitely will come back there. We loved messing around with the security guards. You often on Facebook do a “caption this” pic, are you amused by some of the answers? Yes, our fans are creative and so funny. They make us laugh a lot!
guitar part and everyone writes lyrics. We grew up in this very creative household where we just always created so it’s never been something hard to do, we just decide to do it and out it pours. Some songs can take a long time and others can take 30 minutes, it just depends on the song. “Cool Kids” took a long time, we did lots of tweaks and that one really felt special so we took our time. We had no idea it would be the single, people just responded so much to that song that it did something on its own. Who came up with the idea of the Cool Kids video? When filming was there any funny stories you can share? Mark Pellington the director pitched the idea to us and we loved it. It’s directly taken from our song and we really wanted the point to come across that everyone matters and that when you accept yourself and be yourself that’s what makes you cool! I hope you are having a well deserved break! We aren’t we’re in Europe right now doing promotion. But we were in Hawaii for a few days like 2 weeks ago and that was a nice break. Thanks Sydney! Wish you well for your future.
Can you tell us about your writing process? Is it a whole band approach or is it one person? It’s always the full band, we never write the same way and any idea can come from any of us. Graham is great at melodies, and sometimes Noah will have a super cool Photo: Jonathan Weiner