If you haven't heard of CRUISR yet, you're missing out. They're currently killing it as direct support for PVRIS's 2016 North American Tour.
In fact, they had some time to chat with me about tour life and music. It's all a beautiful mesh of amazement, adventure and even disaster. Let's hear what vocalist Andy States had to say about it all.
1. For those who don't know, who/what is CRUISR?
CRUISR is basically a project that started as a solo project, that evolved into a band later on. It’s kind of hard for me to just define our band. I’m Andy and I sing and play guitar. Jon plays drums. Right now on tour we have our friend Wesley Bunch on bass and then Bruno is our guitarist who also has another project called Former Belle. That’s his baby.
2. What message does your music send out to your listeners?
I think it varies. I mean, each song kind of has its own message. A lot of our songs are about escaping the pressures of everyday life and trying to get away. Other songs are about, just relationships and love and love-hate relationships. Every song kind of has its own meaning, but I think overall the band is there to make you feel good. It’s like a lighthearted, summer-y sounding band.
3. So I hear you're on tour with PVRIS and Lydia. Can you talk a bit about that?
It’s just been an awesome tour for us. It’s been different than our usual ones. I think that on the previous tours we’ve gone on, we’ve been with bands that are more similar to us, and bands like PVRIS and Lydia are a little bit different than us. That’s been a really amazing experience for us ‘cause we’re getting exposed to a whole different group of people. You know, the fans of PVRIS aren’t the same fans that we’ve played to before, so we’re meeting and making a lot of new fans on this tour. So that’s kind of the best thing about this tour. Obviously the other bands on this tour are great, fun to hang out with and good people, so the tour has been a pleasure for us in that regard.
4. What's your best memory from this tour so far?
Ooh. I think probably the best memory is the individual shows each night. The other night we played in Detroit where we got this insane response from the crowd. For us, the best time is that kind of a reaction on stage playing music and getting to interact with people and meet new people and getting to share our music with people. That sort of trumps everything for us, and that’s the most fun part about it.
5. What's your weirdest/worst experience from this tour so far?
We saw Flavor Flav DJ’ing when we played in Las Vegas, and he was just sort of DJ’ing for a bunch of old people and no one was dancing. They were just watching him DJ like he was an animal in a zoo. It was very weird. The worst experience was when we were about to leave for the beginning of the tour. Our transmission went out and we had to miss the first three shows of the tour while we waited for our transmission to get fixed. We were kind of like, stuck in Philly at the beginning of the tour, which is where we’re from.
6. Do you remember your first tour? How does it compare to your current tour?
Yeah, the first tour we went on, oddly enough, was with The 1975. It was a very different experience on that tour ‘cause we were just trying to learn, and on that tour I think it was very much about getting comfortable in front of large audiences and learning how to play for that big of an audience and entertain them. I think that first tour was very much about getting better and learning how to play, but this tour has been much more refining and I think we’ve been making a lot more fans on this tour too because we’ve got our songs and our live performance more figured out now. To me that was the biggest difference, I think. Also that first tour was kind of crazier than all the other ones. They [The 1975] have an insane fan base, so it was a totally different experience.
7. What is some advice you would give to any touring musicians out there?
The number one advice I can give is don’t underestimate the difficulty of not just making music, but also getting people to hear it and getting it to people. I think it’s harder to get people to hear your music than it is to really make your music. I would say to anybody that’s working on music, don’t underestimate things like promotion and PR and don’t underestimate how much you can excel with your band if you’re willing to take that kind of stuff seriously and put work into that.
8. Give us one reason why anyone should check out CRUISR!
I think the one thing is that all of our songs are just really, really catchy. I think anybody that listens to us immediately gets songs stuck in their head. I would say just check us out online and take a listen and you won’t regret it. It’s feel-good, fun music that’ll brighten your day.
On that note, here is CRUISR’s most recent song "Take That." Andy lives up to his words when he says it’s summer-y, feel-good, catchy music. Give it a listen and keep up to date with these wonderful boys via Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube!
