Interview: Allstar Weekend

Tommy2: What’s up it’s Tommy2 and today we’re in Minneapolis, MN for the opening night of Allstar Weekend’s 2012 Tour. How are you guys doing?

Cameron Quiseng: Wooo! Yeah, Michael’s awesome.

Zach Porter: Michael is the most excited he’s ever been I think.

Cameron Quiseng: Michael is just shaking with excitement.

Michael Martinez: Yes Cameron, yes.

Tommy2: Did you have a nice drive out here?

Cameron Quiseng: Yeah, it was an awesome drive.

Michael Martinez: Oh yeah we drove the whole way.

Cameron Quiseng: Slept!

Michael Martinez: We drove the bus, Cameron pushed it from the back.

Zach Porter: Actually, it’s not even our bus. We hijacked it from some other tour.

Cameron Quiseng: We’re pirates this tour.

Zach Porter: Some other tour in Reno, Nevado was playing a show and we kind of went on with guns and took over.

Tommy2: Now you said “we drove.” When’s the last time you guys actually drove to a show.

Cameron Quiseng: Well Michael drove like what, 2006 before you in the band.

Michael Martinez: Well me… I didn’t have insurance. I’m not insured with the van when we first drove because I had too many tickets, so you guys take it away.

Cameron Quiseng: Zach and I drove, it was the whole time.

Zach Porter: We did a bus… a van tour last May in Canada. So, we still do it some times. Sometimes if it’s a local show in San Diego we wil drive.

Michael Martinez: Oh yeah, we did do that. Less than a year ago.

Tommy2: So Michael was that a hint of advice to guys that are in bands that don’t want to drive? Just get a lot of tickets.

Michael Martinez: Get some tickets man, get some tickets.

Tommy2: So what can we expect tonight… a bunch of new music?

Cameron Quiseng: Oh yeah!

Zach Porter: This is ah, we’re gonna play nineteen songs tonight.

Tommy2: Can you do that? Is the voice ready… the golden pipes?

Cameron Quiseng: It might be illegal, I don’t know.

Zach Porter: We will see.

Michael Martinez: Tommy you know how are awkward shows go. If we pull it off, we’ll pull it off. We’ve actually added this wheel on the tour where a fan can spin it and it has all these random covers and random old songs and stuff like that.

Zach Porter: It’s recycling like 26 songs and every show is going to be different which is cool. I think since you know obviously a lot of our fans travel to different shows, we want to make it different and want to cool for people that have seen us before and have seen multiple shows on the tour. So no show is going to be exactly the same cause the wheel. We’re going to switch in different shows every night. And it’s going to make it exciting and make it something that is different and rewards the people that come to different shows.

Tommy2: Now does this wheel have an official name or is it just the wheel?

Cameron Quiseng: It’s just the wheel.

Tommy2: I think you can do better than that?

Cameron Quiseng: On our set list it says ‘the wheel’.

Michael Martinez: No it doesn’t even say ‘the’, it just says ‘wheel’.

Cameron Quiseng: It says, ‘wheel’ – we’ll figure it out.

Michael Martinez: I like to call it the wheel of torture cause some of the songs on there are just annoying and…

Zach Porter: Some of the back catalog old Allstar Weekend songs.

Cameron Quiseng: Yeah, they sound punk rock.

Tommy2: So you do it for the fans?

Cameron Quiseng: We do it strictly for the fans. That one was all for the fans.

Tommy2: Did you guys enjoy the VIP today?

Cameron Quiseng: Oh yeah, it was a lot of fun. It was really cool.

Zach Porter: We hadn’t done it yet, so it went well for the first time.

Cameron Quiseng: We didn’t know what it was going to turn out like you know we kind of just winged it, but I thought…

Zach Porter: Was it wung or wing?

Cameron Quiseng: It’s not wung it.

Zach Porter: I’m just gonna shut-up.

Cameron Quiseng: But uh, yeah, so it was really fun and fans were really cool. I think like the girls that come in the VIP are really excited and you know we get to play some songs. Not just acoustic, we play like full band songs. They get to ask us questions, today like Zach had a girl come sing a song with him.

Zach Porter: That was fun, she was so nervous.

Cameron Quiseng: She actually sounded alright.

Zach Porter: She did!

Cameron Quiseng: And then after we’re done playing the songs then we do our normal meet and greet, you know where they get to hang out…

Tommy2: You said ‘the girls’ there. Cause you were right there. It was 74 girls there, and me.

Cameron Quiseng: And you! Hey that’s good for us. We enjoy that.

Tommy2: Nothing’s wrong with that.

Cameron Quiseng: Nothing’s wrong with that.

Tommy2: And I enjoyed getting to find out who your personal favorites from Harry Potter were.

Cameron Quiseng: Yeah…

Tommy2: Except for Michael, (he) seemed a little clueless.

Michael Martinez: Ughh!

Tommy2: Nearly Headless Michael.

Cameron Quiseng: Well first off, Michael doesn’t read unless it’s books about aliens.

Michael Martinez: I watched the last one on my computer.

Zach Porter: Really?

Cameron Quiseng: The last one was pretty epic.

Michael Martinez: Cause someone else was watching it. So…

Tommy2: Dude, you gotta read the books though.

Michael Martinez: I haven’t read a book in seven or eight years.

Cameron Quiseng: No, you read the Alien book.

Michael Martinez: Yeah, but that doesn’t count.

Cameron Quiseng: What do you mean? It’s a book… you read it!

Tommy2: What, was their pictures? It was a pop-up book.

Cameron Quiseng: The only time I’ve ever seen Michael read aside from that Alien book is like magazines. And he looks at the pictures, he doesn’t read the magazines.

Zach Porter: I was shocked that he was reading that book. He was reading the crap out of that book.

Cameron Quiseng: I was shocked that he was reading.

Tommy2: Now the last time you guys were on Tour it was with Selena Gomez and you had a couple of other big ones. I remember seeing you in Altamonte Florida at the Red Hot Boom which was absolutely nuts.

Cameron Quiseng: Was that the first show?

Zach Porter: No, it was that one…

Michael Martinez: July.

Cameron Quiseng: Oh yeah! That was sick.

Tommy2: On the float. It was like 20,000 people screaming to your music.

Cameron Quiseng: That was crazy, and the fireworks too!

Tommy2: Yeah! Would you rather be playing in the larger venues or the clubs?

Cameron Quiseng: It’s a different show.

Zach Porter: I’m really excited that we’re doing this tour. We’re headlong and we’re doing the clubs again cause that Selena (Gome) Tour was huge and like it was cool and everything and we had a great time but like, I’m just stoked to be back doing this again, it’s been awhile and it’s refreshing. It’s like, I don’t know… we’re definitely not burned out, and this is a change of pace. I’m just excited to be back in this environment again cause…

Michael Martinez: We like playing back and forth too. Like when it’s huge like Red Hot Boom, it was awesome you know, so it just was different on the Selena (Gomez) Tour cause we played like only five songs, so…

Zach Porter: Five songs and it was very big and no intimacy really.

Tommy2: A little predictable is what you’re saying?

Cameron Quiseng: Yeah, when it’s a huge audience you can’t… you connect with everyone, but it’s different than locking eyes with that one person that you see in the front. You know you can see each individual fan in a club and I think it makes it way more intimate and sometimes more fun for the fans. But playing arenas was just as fun because it was this huge stage and this huge crowd.

Zach Porter: It doesn’t mean it’s better too. So I feel like we’re going to bring some stuff we learned there to this.

Tommy2: Okay… now just a little over a week ago, you guys kind of shocked the world here with the news that you were leaving Hollywood Records. What does the future hold, are you guys like looking for a new label or are you guys just ready to do like what you’ve been doing the last three years just withou a label?

Zach Porter: Yeah, that’s kind of where we are at right now. We don’t really like necessarily want to sign right now, we’re kind of taking it slow. You know it’s a transitional period for us overall and we’ve been lucky enough to do what we’ve done so far and although we’ve been signed, a lot of it like the promotion we’ve done ourselves, you know. Everything on Facebook, all of our tours we’ve booked, it hasn’t been Hollywood and so it’s not gonna be that much different really. And I think it’s cool an the fact that we have a fan base that will still come out and see us, it makes it cool and it makes us have more power and makes us have the ability to do things we couldn’t do before.

Michael Martinez: A lot of times people think when you’re not on a label you can do whatever you want and I just feel like… not like we can do whatever we want, but we have like more freedom to like, just… we feel like we’re in control of it – everything now, and that feels good to us and it’s not putting any stress on it where we need a label to handle that I guess, how we felt.

Cameron Quiseng: I mean if the right opportunity presents itself then we’ll go with it, but for now we don’t need it.

Zach Porter: Yeah, it depends. We don’t want to… you know, we did it once and we don’t want to do that again. Like a thing like Hollywood, so, if it’s a different thing, then maybe but I mean, we’re not – we don’t need it right now. We’re happy where we are.

Tommy2: And you guys definitely have the fan base where you could just keep on going doing the same thing… I mean it’s only gonna grow. Like you’ve definitely got the fans that are loving it every time it comes and then of course the other great thing, you can change your plans faster. You don’t have to pass it through anyone.

Zach Porter: We’re gonna put out more music. Over the next couple months you know we’re releasing a single at the end of January…

Michael Martinez: 27th.

Zach Porter: And all through the next couple of months we have so many songs that no one’s heard and we’re gonna, while we’re writing a new record show people those songs we’ve never showed them before because… we call the shots now.

Michael Martinez: Yeah, cause I think that along the whole way of being signed and not signed we were happy that we had the fan base that we had. That’s what we wanted, that was the ultimate goal, to get our fans to be bigger. A lot of bans on labels try to do other things, but we wanted to focus on getting the fans so that whether or not we had a label or we did this or that, we’d still have are fans. So it’s cool.


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