By Andrew Bansal
Houston TX-based instrumental progressive group Scale The Summit released a stellar new album called ‘The Migration’ earlier this year, and are now on a headline run to promote of the album, following support tours with the likes of Tesseract and Intronaut. They played at the Whisky-A-Go-Go in West Hollywood last Wednesday November 6th and put on an incredible show. A few hours before their set, I sat down with guitarist/principal songwriter Chris Letchford in the band’s sprinter van, to talk about Scale The Summit’s recent travels, future plans, the new album, songwriting, touring vehicles, and lots more. Enjoy the conversation below, along with two tunes from their amazing new album.
You guys are on this headline run, which started five days ago. How’s everything been going?
Really good! It started in Houston, in our hometown, so opening the tour with that was really fun, and now we’re out in LA. Phoenix is kind of a rough market for us so it was a rough day yesterday, but I’m glad to be in California because we always have great shows here in LA and in San Francisco.
You were just telling me that you had some really bad food today?
Correct! We had Mexican food with Margaritas, way too early in the day. It just knocked me out (laughs).
But you’re doing alright now and ready for the show?
Oh yeah, definitely ready for the show. I had some oats with some honey, chia seeds and olive milk to kind of push it all down. I should be good to rock now.
Awesome. I was just looking outside at the venue and there’s a big line of people, which means it’s not the usual thing where they have five local openers starting the show at 6 o’ clock. I guess it’s the three touring bands for this show?
Right, that was the thing with this tour. I mean, we’ve done a lot of the younger band tours, kind of like the ‘kid’ tours, and no offense to locals because every band is a local at one point. We’re still technically a local band in Houston. But our thing for this tour was, I wanted The Reign Of Kindo to have an hour set and Jolly are playing 40 minutes. So it’s just more of a prog night, letting the touring bands play longer. Plus the whole pay-to-play thing with the local bands too, we never did that when we lived in LA so I don’t really prefer the bands having to do that. I feel bad, and it’s not like something in our control. It’s more of a promoter thing, but I like having just the three touring bands play longer, which is better for the fans, specially for The Reign Of Kindo who never tour. They’ve got to have at least an hour’s set.
That makes sense, and I wish more bands were thinking like that, because at the Whisky it’s quite rare to have a show like this, you know?
Yeah it is! I mean, having local bands does help to promote the show and that’s kind of the point, to promote to the local area. But hey, it worked out this way too, but so far we’ve had locals on some of the shows. I think we have locals on the San Francisco show tomorrow. As long as they fit the package, we’re cool with it.
I see that you have a nice vehicle here, which is pretty important because lately so many bands have been suffering from vehicle problems on tour. Has this van been treating you well on this tour?
Yeah, so far! This is a rental. Our van was pretty much just done. We put over 220,000 miles on it, and when we got to LA for the last show of the Intronaut tour, the wheel bearings were starting to go off and our wheel nearly fell off by the time we drove it to the mechanic. He was like, ‘One more mile and you guys would have lost your wheel!’ So we decided to rent this one. It’s got bunks, fridge, microwave, TV, and it’s more comfortable. It’s not huge and it’s pretty cramped in here with six dudes, but we’re getting more sleep and we’re eating better. That’s more important, specially when we’re doing shows everyday. After this we have just one more day off and then 17 shows in a row.
One thing I wanted to ask you about that is, the fact that you have toured in a van before getting this one, what tips would you give to other bands to maintain the van, to not have it blow out in the middle of a tour? I don’t think you’ve suffered from any major van issues in the past.
Well, we have before, but those were things that were beyond our control. I think our radiator just blew up on us one day. It just cracked and everything came out. So that was done and there’s nothing we can do there. But we always do tune-ups before going on a tour every time. So we end up spending between $500 and $1000, whether it’s brakes, new tires, checking the hoses, the belts and everything. That’s really what it’s all about, and then just not dogging the engine when you’re driving it. When you’re going up the hill, just go slow. There’s no reason to rev it into third gear. So we just take our time, and this thing is awesome because it’s diesel so it tows our trailer even better than our old van, which matters a lot because our trailer is more full than ever on this tour.
Right, so the key is to go slow if you have time, right?
Oh yeah, and that’s the thing too because we used to be the band that was always super early. We got in early today but that’s just because we didn’t hit any traffic. But on a lot of occasions we end up wasting time by getting to the venue really early and the promoter’s not there for a couple of hours. But now we just get there close to when we’re supposed to. There’s no point in rushing. That’s usually when you hear bands getting in wrecks and stuff, when they’re rushing, specially through the bad weather. So we just take our time now and get there when we can.
Leading up to this tour you went out with Tesseract and Anciients, and before that was the big tour with Intronaut. Even looking at your past tours, you’ve gone out with Dream Theater, Cynic and all those bands. So you’ve been pretty fortunate with getting tours where you’re not the headliner but where people would actually enjoy your music and understand it.
Yeah, I guess the other bands dig our albums enough to invite us on the road (laughs). There’s not really any set way of how things work. I don’t want to say we just got lucky, but it’s been a result of knowing the right people. We’ve been friends with the guys in Cynic and BTBAM, Dream Theater from years ago, and all those connections lead to other connections I guess.
The last time I talked to you was here at the Whisky in January of 2012, and you were saying that one of your goals was to go to Europe. Now you have your first ever European tour coming up, supporting Intronaut. How does that feel?
Finally! Four albums and our first tour over there. It took us four records just to make it. I can’t wait. We’re hoping and in talks for Japan as well, which would be cool too. And we’re going to Mexico in February, so it’s cool to finally branch out. Europe was frustrating because we had two tours booked over the last two years that were canceled as financially it just wasn’t going to work. But this one hopefully will pan out. We got our flights booked this time. It didn’t even get that far last time. We’re working on visas for the UK, so we should be good to go!
Great, man. Recently you did the ‘Yestival’ and played alongside Yes. What was that experience like?
Oh, that was awesome. That’s a crowd we’d never played in front of. Dream Theater has fans in the 40s but also all the way down to teenagers. But Yes is like 40-plus and it’s really interesting. The crowd seemed to really like us. It wasn’t completely filled in and it was like an all-day affair, but it was really fun and hopefully we can do more stuff with them in the future. That would be really cool.
Don’t you have a show coming up with them on a cruise or something, next year?
Oh right, I forgot about that. The ‘Cruise To The Edge’ next year. So yeah, we are doing more stuff with them soon (laughs). We have so much coming up next year, it’s ridiculous. We just have the Christmas and a month off in January and then it’s Mexico, then another tour, the Yes cruise, and then supposed to be going back to Europe for festivals in the summer. It’s a lot to keep up with.
Talking of Yes, have they been any kind of an influence on your music at all, or are they just a band that you respect for their stature as prog legends?
I grew up listening to Yes. I remember watching videos of me as a kid 5 or 6 years old with Yes always playing in the background. My parents have been longtime prog fans, of bands like Yes and my dad used to listen to a lot of Stevie Ray Vaughan, Johnny Winter and stuff. Yes is one band that I listened to as a kid forcefully, at a very young age, through my teenage years and into my early twenties. I still enjoy it to this day. You get burned out on a lot of stuff and it just goes away, but Yes is a band that I actually still enjoy listening to.
Coming to your latest album ‘The Migration’, I was reading about some of the first-week sales figures and apparently you sold four times as many copies of this album in its first week than you did with the previous album ‘The Collective’. You’re heading in the right direction and it must be a good feeling.
It is! We’re actually only a couple of hundred records shy of out-selling The Collective within just six months. I don’t know what we did on this one, but everyone seems to dig it more. I think that the production is perfect but that’s going to be personal opinion of everybody. But this is what we’ve always wanted, a more natural sounding record, and Jamie King finally nailed that. So we got the perfect artwork, what we consider to be great songwriting, and then just perfect production with Jamie King. So I think all the pieces just happened to fall together perfectly in time.
You’ve had two pressings of the vinyl for ‘The Migration’ and the third one was in the pre-order stage last month. You’re carrying it on this tour, I believe?
Yeah, we actually have some of the third pressing, in white and green. I’m not sure how many they pressed for this one but we’ve got 80 total, 40 in green and 40 in white with us on the road.
One thing about the music I wanted to ask you is, with you being all-instrumental is it difficult to make a new album sound different from the old ones? Because there’s nothing to envelope the guitar parts or the instruments, there’s no vocals. I guess ‘regular’ bands can get away with doing the same kind of thing on their instruments because vocally it always sounds different.
Yeah, vocally it’s different but with singers I don’t think anything changes other than their lyrics. In our band, everything that changes is the melody which is pretty much the same thing. I guess with us it’s just a natural progression. It’s two years in between albums so there’s no way to write the same stuff you wrote two years ago. I know some bands do, but I guess luckily for us we branched off. We got a new bass player which I think helped push the record in a new direction. Even though I still handle pretty much all of the songwriting, what he added to it was definitely different from our old bass player, so it could change the overall dynamics of the songs.
On this album and with these tours, have you changed any of your gear setup at all?
We’re still using our fractals. We didn’t record a lot of stuff with fractal on the record though, and we ended up re-amping with a bunch of stuff. But we’re always tweaking our patches in the fractal. We used to play the Orange settings for distortion and leads inside of the fractal. Now we’re on the Spawn head. So we’re changing our sound. I think our ears are growing as we mature as musicians, always trying to perfect stuff. We’re the worst when it comes to the end of a show and we get in the van. We’d just have a show-bashing of mistakes. Even though no one in the crowd would know, we really get on each other for stuff like that. I’d have some shows which just ruin the night for me, even though people in the crowd would go, ‘Oh my gosh, you played flawlessly!’ And I’m like, ‘No I didn’t!’ I get upset about it because we practice so much and just the smallest mistake is a whole night’s ruin. Like last night, we played okay but I just wasn’t feeling it. But the day before that in Austin, I played what I felt was flawless for once, which I never feel like. At a show there’s distractions, there’s all kinds of stuff. It just depends on the day. So we’re always looking to improve in every way, songwriting, stage performance, and stage presence for which you kind of have to give a little of the technique to be able to rock out some. You can’t have flawless classical technique and head-bang. That doesn’t really work. So we do our best, and just practice.
Related – Gig Review: Scale The Summit Play Progtastic Set At The Whisky
Visit Scale The Summit on the web at:
ScaleTheSummit.com
facebook.com/ScaleTheSummit
twitter.com/ScaleTheSummit
Remaining North American tour dates:
11/09 Seattle, WA – Highline
11/11 Salt Lake City, UT – Shred Shed
11/12 Denver, CO – Marquis Theatre
11/13 Merriam, KS – Aftershock
11/14 Newport, KY – Southgate House
11/15 Cleveland, OH – Now That’s Class
11/16 Toronto, Canada – Wreck Room
11/17 Montreal, Canada – il Motore
11/18 Danbury, CT – Heirloom Arts Center
11/19 Boston, MA – Great Scott
11/20 New York, NY – Santos Party House
11/21 West Chester, PA – The Note
11/22 Norfolk, VA – The Iguana
11/23 Knoxville, TN – The Bowery
11/24 Nashville, TN – The End