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LB: Oh man...Probably Parkway Drive, but Warped Tour you can’t beat. Warped tour this past year was the best, insane, but you can’t count that because it’s just too awesome. We did a Parkway Drive tour in Australia once that was one of my favorite tours.
SOS: There is a huge line of kids outside to see you tonight, how important do you think fan interaction is? Especially on bigger tours like this one?
LB: Whether it’s a big tour or a small tour, even when we first started touring in a little 8 passenger soccer mom van, we were always just excited to talk to all the kids and the fans because at the end of the day they’re the reason we’re doing all this stuff. No matter what tour we do or how big we get we’ll always make sure we have fan interaction and make sure the fans are the number one thing at the end of the day. We’ll never push the fans away and be like “I don’t want a picture” , “I don’t want to do this”, like if they’re there we’d love to meet them.
SOS: Miss May I is a fairly heavy band, so growing up who where your musical inspirations that made you want to make the music you do today?
LB: I was really into The Used, Underoath, a lot of Hawthorne Heights, I know that sounds weird, but we’d cover songs of theirs when we started. That whole genre of music, but definitely The Used was my favorite band.
WSGAF: What was the recording process for “At Heart” like?
LB: It was really weird. It was our first time doing pre-production so we had a couple weeks to sit and write the songs and listen to them and see what sucked and throw out the stuff that sucked. We had never really done that, we had always recorded and put out a record and sold it. So this time it was nice to sit and listen to it and go to a new producer. He really helped us put a lot of feeling into the record instead of just having a perfect take. It definitely made a difference and at the end of the day the record has a lot more feeling to it instead of having just a perfect album. Which anybody can do a perfect album because it’s 2012 and computers are all over the place. So it was nice to have a more real sounding album
Speed of Sound : First off how’s the tour been treating you?
Levi Benton: The tour has been awesome, it’s awesome headlining especially doing the AP tour, which is such a mainstream magazine. It’s a really heavy tour so it’s been really awesome.
SOS: We heard you guys got to hand pick the bands for this tour, how did you guys go about that?
LB: Us and AP handpicked them, we wanted to do our first tour that’s like metal/metalcore bands. It’s awesome because we haven’t done a tour like that in a long time.
SOS: Describe your live show in one word.
LB: Headbang.
SOS: What has been the craziest show on this tour so far?
LB: The craziest show on this tour would probably have to be TLA (Theater of the Living Arts). I’d say TLA in Philedelphia. It was pretty nuts. It was pretty cool to play such a huge venue, and it was a weekend so kids were just having a blast it was awesome, like tonight. You can definitely tell the school year has started because [at shows on weekdays] a lot of kids are like “I’ve got school, I can’t really hang out”
SOS: Do you have any weird pre-show rituals?
LB: I have really weird warm ups and they sound really stupid, so everyone always looks at me really funny and I look like an idiot. Another weird one I guess is that me and some of the guys stretch together, we don’t have like a huddle thing, we just stretch and hang out before the show like “I’m excited for the show!” and little stuff like that.
SOS: What’s your favorite tour that you have ever done?