The band is about to embark on a northeast tour. What can we expect from this run?

So this is our single release tour. So we’re going to be pushing the single a lot, trying to get people to buy in. It’s also kind of a New England tour so we’re going to Connecticut, Boston, Pennsylvania, New York, D.C, and then back down to Charlottesville for kind of a homecoming. We’re gonna hit Roanoke as well, and Richmond. It’s going to be, hopefully like you mentioned, adding onto the momentum of this past year and getting the single out there as well.

Is this the first time you guys are going to be hitting up a lot of these cities?

Yeah. I’ve never been to Boston before. Or Philly, or Manchester [laughs] I only went to New York for the first time back in February with the band so, it’s all new stuff for us.

You enlisted your friends to back you as The Wildfire. What made you want to start performing with this group of guys?

That’s a great question. We were in undergrad together at UVA and I kind of drafted them to be in my band, we’ve changed names since the first time we started playing together. But they’ve kind of been with me the whole way. We started the band coming out of college and had a really good response from the shows that we played. I was kind of the songwriter behind everything and now I write stuff and we work out arrangements with the group. We just mesh really well. We have great chemistry. These are the kind of guys that, if my car breaks down somewhere 100 miles away, they’ll come get me. So I trust them to not only be great bandmates but to be friends as well. We definitely click.

What’s the origin story the band?

So we met in undergrad in a student recording group called O Records. I was the president of it for a couple of years, so it was kind of a good position to be with because I could kind of hand select who I wanted to be in the label and I picked these guys to join the label and then picked them to be in my band. And yeah, we started playing together. I think the first show we ever played was this frat party called Surf & Turf. It was just ridiculous. My bandmates ended up taking their shirts off and like there was like a beer slip and slide. We had, it was just kind of like Animal House. It was, you know, really silly. But we’ve grown a lot since then. We’ve played some better shows since then.

What’s in store for the future for you guys? I know you’ve got the EP and a few singles, but is there a full album in the works?

Yeah absolutely. We’re hoping, within the next year, to release a full album. We’ve definitely got some material ready for that and I think we might pull one or two things from our previously recorded EP and single. But we are really anxious to get a full length out. We just weren’t quite ready material-wise. We had a lot of people pushing us for new recorded material, so we have this single, which we’re hopefully going to get some stuff out of. But a full length is definitely on the horizon, hopefully for 2015.

What else you have planned in the live arena? What’s the plan after this tour wraps up?

We play all the time locally. We’re big in Charlottesville, and we play shows in Richmond, Roanoke and all the surrounding areas pretty frequently. Two or three times a week. We’re going to be getting into Harrisonburg soon, which is where James Madison University is, so we’re excited about that in December. But our homecoming show at the end of our tour is going to be at The Southern which is in Charlottesville, and that’s a pretty established venue here that we have had the privilege of playing a couple times now. It’s like a 300 person room and it’s very intimate and that’s the kind of place where you have your core friends and family come out and it’s just a really good vibe in there. The sound is amazing also. So that’s one of the, that’s technically part of the tour still so we’re really looking forward to that one as well.

With all these shows, have you guys noticed an increase in the local turnout over the last couple of years?

Yes. We actually have fans now who come out independently of me begging them to [laughs]. We still have those people that are our close friends who come to every show because they love us, but yeah, we have people come out and see us here who really enjoy our music. They buy our CDs and they buy our merch at the shows and they’re doing it on their own accord, not because of me asking them to. So that’s pretty great.

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