The Architects have taken plenty of long road trips. In 2009, the Kansas City rock band was on the Warped Tour lineup for the entire tour. This spring the Architects signed on to be the opener for New Jersey band My Chemical Romance, a tour that took it to venues like the Aragon in Chicago, First Avenue in Minneapolis, the Center for Performing Arts in Vancouver and House of Blues venues from Boston to Dallas to Las Vegas.
Brandon Phillips, the band’s guitarist and lead vocalist, recently answered some questions about the tour.
Q. How many shows and how many miles?
A. We were on the My Chemical Romance tour for something like 34 shows and around 30,000 miles put on the van.
Did you spend the whole tour opening for MCR?
We were opening for MCR for the entire North American leg of their tour. There were a few off-day shows where we headlined in New Jersey and Florida and Alabama, but the bulk of our eight weeks on the road was spent with MCR.
What was the reaction from their fans, generally?
Their fans were exceptionally good … not good, great to us. There were a ton of them who showed up, front row, and knew all the words to our songs. They clap, they cheer, they dance, they sing along. Those kids know how to have a good time at a show.
Were new songs written? Will we hear any of them Friday?
There are a slew of new songs written, a slew more to write, but not one of these ladies is ready for the white-tablecloth date just yet. If we started playing them live, there would be an implied commitment, and I’m not ready to get married to any of these songs just yet.
What does time like this on the road do to a band like yours, which has done this many times before?
Ideally, time on the road like this makes you a better band, keeps you tough and trim and keeps your trigger-finger itchy. We knew that in order to do this tour right, we’d need to step up our game and be better and more consistent and leave more out on stage every night for a longer duration than any of us had previously been used to.
If there was a change … or some chartable growth, it was mostly measured in terms like, “OK, we rocked in Oakland and Seattle; let’s keep that up for the next 30 shows. Not to pull back the curtain too much, but we tried to put a headline level of swagger into an opening set.
| Timothy Finn, The Star
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