Page 11 - ION Indie Magazine MarchApril 2018 Issue

SS: Two of the albums you released have hit the Billboard Heatseekers charts. As a DIY band, that, in itself, is
awesome.

KO: Yeah. That’s the kind of awesome that even my parents recognize, they’re like, “Wait a minute…that’s pretty
big!” We’re like, “Yeah, and we did it just with our fans!” You know, we don’t have some record label pumping
money into what we do. It’s completely REAL…like we have real Facebook and Twitter and Instagram numbers.
It’s kind of cool. It makes us really proud and it makes us try harder because we know that we have a connection
to all the people that like our band -- and it’s a real connection and we want to keep providing them with cool
stuff.

SS: As an independent band, you know things can be tough. I know that there’s a lot of saturation out there
of people that are DIY. How do you stand above the pack?

KO: I have no idea. I mean, I think you know, all that we can control is the entertainment that we provide…and
you know, just our end of things. If it’s something as little as doing our mail order. We do a lot of shipping of like
tee shirts, and CDs and records…

SS: And bake cookies…

KO: LOL. Yeah, I bake cookies. But we always try to add something personal so that people know that it’s not a
machine and that we’re real and when they listen to the song, you know, hopefully they can imagine us as
people, not just these characters that are make-believe. And I think that it’s all the way from us packing up a tee
shirt and signing a sticker to the person that we are on stage. We’re not a theatrical band. We’re just Luis and
Kelly and Ricky – or whoever’s drumming at the time. We’re all very real and at the end of the show we go to
the merch table and we talk to everybody and we sign everything. For us, I think that has become the key to
what we’re doing, is just knowing our fans. Because we create better stuff knowing our fans -- and I think our
fans actually care about us at this point…they know our kids’ names. There’s not a barrier between us. Which I
think back in the day that’s the way it was expected to be and in a lot of ways that would be so much easier. But
I think it’s a lot more fulfilling for us this way too.

SS: You know, times have changed over the years with the music business. For those other artists out there
that are mastering their craft and want to get their music out there, what advice would you give them?