Lydia Interview: ‘If I Live To Be 65 That’s Going To Be A Problem For Everybody’

“Going back to touring, did you guys have any rituals or things that you did to get ready for the show?” I ask.

“You mean like before we went onstage?” Leighton asks.

“Yeah.”

“We all like to give group hugs for about four to five minutes. Just really flesh to flesh like…” Leighton says wryly.

“Also if the venue doesn’t have a sauna, we won’t play,” Matt adds.

“We’re a hard group of guys to work with,” Justin smirks.

“We should have more rituals, or something,” Leighton tells the group.

“We don’t have any. We don’t do anything,” Justin laments.

“We try not to see each other,” Leighton says.

“My thing is to like pace around back and forth, stress out, and like …” Justin says.

“If I can see him as little as possible before we go on,” Leighton says while pointing at Justin.

“We all walk around hooting and hollering to warm up our voices and stuff, but I don’t know if that counts as a ritual,” Matt adds, trying his best to come up with a good answer.

“We don’t have any good rituals…We should have something like interesting. Let’s get on that,” Leighton reiterates.

“For a while, we were ‘Oh yeahing,’” Matt says.

“I don’t know it’s a little out of our character to have rituals. We’re all such random people,” Matt says.

“We are random. Sorry, I wish we had a better story for that. We don’t have rituals,” Leighton says.

“We’re lying to you right now. We all wear cloaks, and stand around in a circle and chant,” Matt says with a smirk.

“So you’re a cult?” I ask.

“Pretty much,” says Leighton.

“Nice.”

After establishing the band’s cult status, we move on to discuss the coming months.

“Now that you’re done with the tour, what are you doing now?” I ask.

Justin Camacho playing the guitar at the Fonda Theater (Photo by: Rosemary Vega)

“Chilling, making music,” Matt says.

“Chilling with our girlfriends and living life,” Matt says.

“We got some stuff coming up in the spring, but until then I think we’re just laying low,” Justin adds.

“We’re headlining a tour that starts at the very end of February,” Leighton says. “I don’t know if I’m allowed… It definitely starts at the end of February, just can’t say what it is yet.”

The tour Leighton mentions is the recently announced Illuminate tour, which begins at the end of February. The guys will tour across North America playing the album from start to finish.

“It’s going to be exciting. It’s going to be a good year. This year went by so fast,” Justin says.

All Matt has to say is, “2013…”