Brighton MA shared the road on Red Bull’s Rock the Route with Young Jesus. The Chicago-based band enjoyed a week of having a camera crew in their face capturing every minute of their experience. From taking shots out of a stiletto shoe to homemade Halloween costumes and feedback from guest celebrity judges, the guys consider it to be one of the best weeks of their lives.

I caught up with Brighton MA as they were cashing in their awarded studio time at Red Bull Studios. While sitting on the couch chatting over lunch, the fire alarm went off, causing everyone to scamper outside in the name of preserving their hearing. That was definitely a first but it didn’t stop the band from regrouping and sharing stories from Red Bull’s Rock the Route with ChinaShop:

What are you guys recording here today?
Matt: We are recording 2 new songs of ours, which are going to be the final songs for our new album.

When is that album coming out?
Matt: We don’t know. We’re gonna be finishing it up after this weekend. We’ll be wrapping up and doing the final mixes and all that so hopefully it will be completed in the next month or so and we’re looking for someone to put it out so we don’t know when it will be out.

So these are the last 2 songs? That’s exciting.
Sam: Brand new last two songs.

Jon: We have 14 tracks right now. We’re gonna cut a few just to get down to vinyl length – 42 minutes or so. There’s gonna be a couple that are gonna get cut and probably released on the 7 inch separately.

Tell me about the Red Bull Rock The Route experience.
Matt: It was a really incredible trip. It was kind of surreal and we had a lot of fun. It was a blast. It’s kind of a blur looking back on it now.

Jon: Both in advance and in retrospect it seems almost unreal all the stuff that we did and how much of a whirlwind trip it was. While we were at it, it was a fantastic time. By the end of the week, we were still competing with Young Jesus but we were more so friends with them and everybody else on the thing. We were all talking about how it was like one of the best weeks of our lives basically.

Matt: It was kind at like a week at sleepover summer camp.

Sam: It was kind of beautiful too because usually we go on the road and we’re responsible for getting places on time and taking care of things. All we had to do was show up in the hotel lobby in the morning…

Jon: And remember how to play songs

Sam: It was great. We were able to totally focus on our thing and not worry about anything and have fun.

How were your experiences with the guest judges you encountered along the way on the tour?
Jon: We had guest judges at every show that were going to judge us on performance, rock star factor, and musicality I believe. They didn’t give us a delineated report card or anything like that but they were like, ‘I really like this about you guys; you should think more about this.’ It was interesting because there were a lot of musicians that I hadn’t expected to talk to. They all had very interesting points. They were all well-established musicians so it was nice to hear it from someone who has gone over that hump of doing the overnight drives in the van — somebody who used to do that saying ‘this is what I recommend to you if you want to get over that.’

Sam: I thought it was really funny being judged from such a wide variety of bands. The Plain White Tees and Gilby Clarke are very different people and so all their advice and opinions were very different and you could really tell what they do as musicians.

Matt: And what they value

Sam: Yeah from what they were saying we should do and how we could improve ourselves. It was very interesting to hear that. I don’t know if that’s what we would do. A little bit of that could be helpful though.

Matt: They threw in a rock critic out of St. Louis also and it was cool. One good thing about the trip is we heard very similar things – positive things about what we’ve been doing and kind of the attitude that we got towards us was kind of like ‘you guys got them going kind of keep doing what you’re doing’ which was really nice to hear and reaffirming.

Sam: I especially liked getting advice from Gilby Clarke because as much as Plain White Tees and Shiny Toy Guns are really well established musicians, Gilby, as a former Guns ‘n Roses member, was on a completely different level like ‘we fly to all of our shows.’ He’s kind of an old-fashioned guy who was all about, ‘you have to get yourself out there’ and it was really cool to get that perspective from somebody who made it big.

Was it weird having the cameras on your all the time?
Matt: No. The crew was all really great guys. We got along with them so well that it wasn’t weird at all.

Jon: I will say that I was a little camera nervous for about two days or so.

Matt: When we first start going into it I was like ‘ahh are we gonna get too drunk and make a fool of ourselves one day?’ But it turns out we’re grownups.

Sam: Kinda

Matt: We’re grown ups till filming ends.

Was there anything that was filmed that you wouldn’t want your parents to see?
Sam: I stuck my butt out of a moving bus.

John: But that wouldn’t surprise Sam’s parents.

Sam: They’ve seen my butt before.

John: The night of the Tulsa show there was a party on the party bus. Everyone was taking shots out of a shoe and a whole bunch of grind dancing going on.

Matt: There was a stiletto that had been left on the bus and everyone was doing shots out of it and chanting shoe shot. So there were some moments like that.

I heard about the steak challenge from the Young Jesus point of view. Let’s hear about what happened on your end Sam.
Matt: He’s still having bowel issues!

Sam: Cody beat me by 5 ounces. I ate 49 of the 72 ounces and it was a bad decision. It’s not something that I’d like to redo.

John: But the thing is Sam said the steak was like tough and kinda thick. It’s hard to cook 5 ½ pounds of steak.

Sam: Someone kind of fucked me because I didn’t get to order the steak and they ordered it cooked medium. I would have ordered it rare. It would have been juicer and more tender.  The best part about that whole competition was right before we went on. I wasn’t quite feeling so I took a moment by myself and I kind of looked in the mirror and pumped myself up. I buttoned up my shirt and got on my cowboy belt and got my cowboy hat on and got myself in the role. For me, that was what made that challenge.

Matt: That’s what made it for me too.

What did you all wear for your Halloween set?
Sam: My wife makes me Halloween costumes every year so I was a bird – like a big black bird. It was like with a hoodie with a big beak on it and it had wings. One of my other costumes was a big bad wolf.

Jon: Also made from a hoodie that I was wearing…

Matt: There was one point — didn’t you get up on the drum set and flap for a second?

Sam: Oh I did that. [Laughs]

John: I guess the wolf thing worked really well with my beard.

Matt: I was some sort of nerd I guess. I had high-water pants and suspenders.

John: Joe and Jim had bruise make up on and looked very zombieish.

What’s the plan after this? Are you guys heading back to Chicago?
Matt: We’re doing one or two more shows the next couple weeks. One is up in Minneapolis. We’re also doing one outside Chicago – a little profile show with some friends.

John: We try to keep up a route within 5 hours outside of Chicago and play there every weekend.

Matt: We’ve been kind of growing as a regional band in the US and this LA trip – second time we’ve been out here at the Viper room – Red Bull has helped us kind of make the circle bigger.

Back to the cold Chicago weather?
Sam: It’s brutally cold. We’re loving it out here.

[An extremely loud and obnoxious fire alarm went off..mass chaos….the band and I ran outside while we waited for the all clear to get back into the building]

Fire alarm in the middle of an interview… that’s a first! Let’s wrap this up and let you guys get back to recording. I heard you just had 2 songs on the show Community. How did that come about?
Matt: We are on the roster for an LA based company that places songs on TV and film and we’ve been on that for a couple years now. Almost every tune on our first EP and the main single off our one album were placed on television so this is just a continuation of that.

What other shows have you guys had songs on?
Matt: Gossip Girl, Ghost Whisperer, One Tree Hill, Castle.

Jon: There is somebody in the band who I’ll do the decency of not naming who is a big Gossip Girl fan and around the time that we had a song licensed for it, he was telling us how it became a reoccurring love theme between to major characters. He’d be like ‘they used that again for the season finale.’  We’re like ‘oh cool.’

Sam: That was the long running most popular Brighton MA video on YouTube. Also right when those episodes aired, those months we sold like 5 times as many iTunes songs than we had sold.

What was the greatest feedback that you received on the tour?
Matt: We kind of just came together and learned performance wise how to be direct and get a more simple way across to the audience no matter who they are – people that just came off the street or people that know us. Just kind of how to hold our own and kind of like project indirectly and get our thing across.

Sam: Usually when we play in Chicago and towns where we play more regularly people who come to see us are familiar with us. When you’re playing to strangers and people that have never heard your music before, you need to have an immediate connection with them. They don’t have the benefit of knowing your songs ahead of time.

Jon: That’s the thing I think we learned the most was how to deal with an actual high-pressure situation.

Matt: It was great training on that aspect in terms of moving on from where we are. There are way more variables when you don’t have a production manager running the show.

Almost like boot camp for bands.

Matt: That’s kind of like what it is!

Words by Nicole Pajer. Lead photo by Dustin Downing with additional photos courtesy of Brighton MA