Crown The Empire, a band armed with the recent debut of their album The Fallout are currently on the Vans Warped Tour, taking their high-energy, visually stimulating show around America before they come to Australia for the first Warped events in over a decade! We caught up with vocalist, Andy Leo to talk about their tour, where the best cheese steaks are and his dream of holding a kangaroo.
Hey there, Andrew, how are you doing?
Doing well, man, just got done with closing out Warped Tour for the day, chilling outside, it’s really loud and stuff but I’m ready for this interview, you know what I’m saying?
How’s the Warped Tour been going for you so far?
Crazy, crazy, man. Really awesome. Honestly a lot better than what we expected, you know, for the first year, playing the smallest stage, but we’ve been packing it out and it’s been awesome meeting everybody and doing our thing.
And you’re getting to join them on the way down to Australia.
Yeah I’m so excited, man.
Tell me a little bit about how the Warped Tour works for you guys. Are you kind of in a bunch of buses, do you all travel by yourselves – how does it all work when you travel around America for such a long period of time?
We all travel in buses together, some bands share; luckily we have our own RV. Everybody just rides together, from day-to-day everybody goes in, parks next to each other and we just do our thing. There’s five stages, I think, so, yeah.
I’m guessing it’s a unique way to see America. Have you been getting to places you’ve never been to before?
Yeah, I’ve been getting to a lot of states that I haven’t really seen, a lot of the North East, it’s been pretty cool, you know?
Do you get to eat a lot of the food along the way, taste a lot of the delicacies and if so, do you have a favourite place to eat in America?
I definitely have a few places that we go to, in Philadelphia I always get the Philly cheese steak, I go to Jim’s I think it’s on South Street in Philly and it’s phenomenal. I get diarrhoea every time I eat it but you know what? It’s totally worth it. It’s like a once in a blue moon sort of thing, you know?
Yes, in Philly they have the two cheese steak places on opposite corners and they sort of have that rivalry, do you know of those ones?
Oh, there’s so many.
Well it’s going to be good to get you down here in Australia, have you guys toured here before?
No, never been. None of us have ever even seen it, so we’re very excited.
What are you hoping to experience when you’re down here?
I know you guys have a lot of scary spiders I’m pretty sure?
Yep.
So some really big spiders and snakes? I don’t know about snakes but I just want to see a kangaroo. I don’t know if that’s almost racist to say but honestly I just want to hold one. Can you hook me up with that? Is that possible?
It certainly is, in Sydney there’s a zoo where you can go do just that.
That’s the dream. That’s the American dream.
Just to make it clear we don’t jump around in their pouches or anything, you don’t want to go anywhere near them.
Of course not, life would be too good. Nothing that awesome is real.
Musically, what’s coming up for you guys? You released your album last year and what’s next?
Yeah we released The Fallout in November. Fortunately we got a lot of good feedback from it and a lot of good tours, luckily we got the Warped Tour, everybody could go out and see a show. For the next record, we have a couple of ideas we’re writing and stuff like that, a couple of ideas here and there, a couple of demos, but nothing really serious. We plan on recording early next year, and until then we’re releasing some videos on YouTube just of what we’re doing on Warped Tour and of any cool stuff that we’re doing, and we also have a music video for a song that comes out next month.
Cool, what can we expect from it?
We’ve got a different director. It’s got a cool story to it, it’s not as theatrical as our other ones but it’s going to be really awesome.
Fantastic, well we can’t wait to see you guys down here and I imagine we’ll get to hear that song when you come down.
Definitely, definitely.
Really appreciate you taking the time and I hope the rest of the Warped Tour goes well for you.
Definitely. Have a good one, thank you so much.
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Tickets to Vans Warped Tour Australia go on sale tomorrow at 9am!
http://www.vanswarpedtouraustralia.com/