PipemanRadio Interviews Lord of the Lost About Riotfest 2024

0:00 Hy you have unto censure. Wow, pray young. Whycome America, It's time for the Adventures of Pipe Man on W four C why dot Com West pomp Beach is number one Internet radio station. Here's your host, the HiPE Man.

0:46 It's not today, it stays the same, It's not the shame. This is the pipe Man here on the Adventures pipe Man W four C Y Radio. I'm pretty excited about our next guest, who is a US tour just perform that riot Fest one of my favorite festivals, and I was just at it. Was only able to make it Sunday due to death in the family, so I was bummed out that I missed their set. But we're here. Now and I did see some I did find some clips a set and man may killed. It at riot Fest. So welcome to the show. Lord of the Lost, how are you?

1:30 Yeah, thank you? And I'm Chris. I'm not the Lord of the Lost. Lord of Loss is a band name, so I'm just Chris the singer. I'm fine. We're having a day off here at the moment, traveling from Denver to Phoenix, so our bus drive and needs some sleep and we need a shower and stuff. So I'm sitting right here in an hotel room in Albuquerque, and yeah, waiting for the bus to leave tonight and playing Phoenix tomorrow. And yeah, we're good. We have three shows, three more shows to go. It's been an amazing tour so far, and nothing to complain. We're really excited and really like surprised by what's happening. So many people showing up at each show. It's sold out venues sometimes here and there. It's amazing.

2:15 I love it. And so tell us a little bit about the experience at riot Fest. And you know, Europe is always known for their festivals, especially Waking in Germany and the Granddaddy out there. How did you like playing at Riotfest? What was your impression? I mean, you know, the thing is when I say like it was just another festival, I don't mean it in a bad way, because it was. It was one of these festivals. And so when you're an artist and you play and you see the dressing rooms and the catering at the back of the stage in the end, when it's a well organized festival, when I say was just another of these festivals, then it's a compliment because it's a festival where nothing like, you know, shit didn't hit the fan, which sometimes happens at some weird festivals, which you remember for that. But of course I realized that it was something special and something new when I went out after the show and I went through all these you know, these stores on the festival ground and seeing the people, because you know, all these shops in Europe, especially in Germany, they're all the same. After a while you've seen them all, and now here, of course everything's different, so so many different like fashion brands and tattoo artists and everything was like very much punk rock based at ride Fest, and

3:46 that was different. That made it special. So there was from that point on suddenly was like, oh yeah, that's that's a new festival. Because before the bus arrived, you know, backstage, all this stuff, it's it's the same. It just cables and stages and hazers and lights and speakers, you know what I'm saying. Yeah, like groundhog Day, right, yeah, yeah. Yeah a little like that. So and I really liked that and what was new to me. Of course some people recognized me, but it was just like maybe every ten to fifteen minutes someone was like, hey, aren't you the singer of lorda Loss. It was like, yeah, we can take a picture whatever, you know, do the usual at a europeak festival, especially like Middle Europe, Germany and stuff that doesn't work. I can't walk like three feet without being recognized. So there was actually there was nice.

4:42 There was like, yeah, cool, I can know that I could just be at a festival, So it was nic. Yeah, because like in my town where my studio is, I do a lot of events and like I can't go anywhere undercover, but then when I go someplace else it's nice to be incognito sometimes. And yeah, well, and. I gotta say too, like I love that I'm hearing this because you know. It says a lot about festivals over. Here that you had a good experience, because we we over here always talk about the European festivals and how amazing they are. And to your point of what you said, it is true. When it's something that you're used to all the time, you know that the excitement isn't as much there. It's kind of like my youngest daughter, every time I go to a festival, because I do all of them, she's like, are you excited about going as festival?

5:39 I'm like, I don't know if excited is the word I would use. You know, do I love doing it? Yeah? Is it fun? Yes, But like you said, when you're seeing all the same venues and the same things going on, I don't think excitement is necessarily the word. But the thing is, you know, yes, sorry, I didn't want to. No, I was gonna say, but riot Fast was exciting this year too, which you probably didn't know. They did like a makeover and added riot Land and all these different attractions. So it was kind of exciting for me this year after doing it every year that oh now it's new. Yeah. You know.

6:19 The thing is, I think not being too excited about these things means you're a professional what you do. Because I don't go to a festival for fun for my personal fund. I go there because I'm an entertainer. I'm there for the fun of other people. That doesn't mean that I'm not having fun on stage. But it's not like I'm going there like getting crazy, just doing what I want, you know, and maybe, like occasionally i play a concert, I think it comes. But this is my job. So I go there and before I get excited about things, first I need to make sure that I'm doing a good job to make the people like this is so.

7:01 Much more important about that. So so in a way, of course, it's exciting to go somewhere, to travel and all this stuff, But when this is your job, I think you should do a good job. When musicians just go on tour for their own excitement, like to have a great party and to you know, like the usual rock and roll shit like having a girl in each town and all these things, if this is what you're striving for, like being a musician, then maybe it's yeah. Then I mean get a hobby then, you know. So for me, it's like I want to go there. I want to want to make a good job, and then I can like, Okay, then I'm starting to relax, like, Okay, I've done a good job.

7:43 It was great. I had a lot of fun with the people, and I can go and maybe check out some shops and see if something's exciting there for me at ride Fest or some other festival. I love that you said all that because it just shows to me that you were true artist, because you're doing it for the art and for the music and for the creativity opposed to hey. Look at me, I'm a rock star. Yeah, you know. The thing is what many colleagues I see that all the time, and it doesn't matter how old they are. Our experience are not many of them, some newcomers, some people doing that for fifty years. Some of them they don't.

8:30 They cannot differ anymore between the stage and real life. Yeah, and for me, it's like, I allow myself to be the rock star on stage for these thirty minutes, forty five, sixty ninety one and twenty whatever, and everything else is just like normal life. And I want to be a good human being. I want to make a good job. I'm there to be part of the team. And this is something what we learned when we actually we didn't have to learn. It was our paradigm already, but we were reassured that it's a good thing. We went on tour through Europe with Iron Maiden two summers long, and these guys are doing that for like nearly half a century, and they're the nicest, most down to earth people. And we always said, like, hey, guys, we're playing forty minutes.

9:20 Support said for Iron Maiden. In this forty minutes, we are rock stars. For the rest of the day. We hold the door open for other people. We are saying thank you and you're welcome, and making sure that everybody's having a good time and everybody's being respectful, and we are not there to be the rock stars. And then we met these guys, you know, Iron Maiden. They're all so great, they're so like they are team workers still, and you wouldn't when you see them come in a room, you wouldn't see that they're like big rockstars, like rich, big rockstars doing that for half a century. They're just nice, respectful people and also being rock stars within their one hundred and twenty minutes on stage. For the rest of the day, they're just part of the bigger picture.

10:13 You know. It's not just about you, and. You're like the singer of this great rock and roll and that's for me, that's bullshit. For me, that's not rock and roll. Rock and roll is mostly used as an excuse for fucking it up. Well, I love what you said too, because I have found myself personally as somebody that does interviews does press that the band like Iron Man icon't They have no clue to their icon's and that's why their icon't. Yeah, they're just there to entertain and they have no idea that they're Iron Maid and you know, you know what I mean. Yeah, but I can.

10:54 I can totally relate with that. When people come to me and you know, like write all these compliments about, you know, our show and our looks or whatever, I always have to smirk a little like. Do they mean us? Do they mean me? It's like I'm like, it's nice to hear, but but but I don't. I don't see myself that way, you know. I don't see myself as someone who some girl or boy whatever put on their wall as a poster. Is like, yeah, okay, that's that's part of the job. But I'm here for the art, so so I embrace it that people love that. But at the same time, I don't take the stage persona of mine too seriously. It's it's always a little funny to be like, oh, yeah, okay, that's my stage persona that why not you know.

11:41 Oh, I don't feel it totally. And you know, it's funny because I have somebody that I'm really close friends with over in Germany and I'm actually going there for at least a month in December, and I showed her the lineup for riot Fest without even me looking at it. It was like, I just here, there is the festival. I'm going to, and she immediately noticed you guys on the list. All right cool, immediately sent me, I don't even remember where the show is yet, but a show in December that you guys are playing in Germany, like we have to go to this, and I'm like, OK.

12:23 Yeah, we're actually playing only one show in Germany in December, or one show in total. It's our own festival. It's called lord Fest. So we're having this own festival of ours with like always four bands this year. It's in a seven thousand capacity hall, so it's an indoor festival because it's like, you know, it's called in Germany December. Yeah, so this must be our own festival then lord Fest. Yeah, that's that's very cool. I love it. And I also know something that I thought was really cool and at TV of the Lost tell us a little bit about that. Yeah, you know, that's our online TV show which is mostly like a documentary of the things we're doing. We started that with episode one, mostly on tour. We started it in twenty eleven, and meanwhile we have already reached episode six hundred, which is kind of insane.

13:21 I know, that's exactly what I was thinking my head, but I saw I was looking, I think at your latest episode. I'm like, holy crap, that's a lot of episode. Yeah. Yeah. We started like filming and editing everything ourselves for I think the first three hundred episodes or something. But after some years you get really tired of like running around with the camera all the time, and you know, your job touring, you get more responsibility. The shows are getting bigger, so from. Time to time we took more and more people in the team taking care of that and now social media and you know, so always having a team around us filming stuff and doing these things. So yeah, so it's a little more professional now.

14:03 And I know some fans of the the first hour, they really missed the self made DIY very you know, rock and roll kind of TV of the lost. But meanwhile, we can't do it anymore that way. So now it's like this, this is really our job now, not a hobby anymore. And it's nice to have someone professional around with a good camera and you know, taking good pictures of you. And yeah, that's a lot of fun. So we'll see, maybe we make it up to one thousand episodes in a couple of years. I think you will. And you know, I totally get what you're saying, and I'm glad you said it, because I think a lot of people don't realize. You know, we're all like that.

14:43 You know, I have my bands that I saw when they were first starting, and then it's like, you know, they they get more professional, better at their craft, but you still want them to be the garage band. You know, yeah, yeah, you want them to be like the biggest drug store, but it's you don't want them to. Grow because they are yours. I kind of get that, but it doesn't work that way now. And for the artists I always look at it as well. The artists wouldn't want to stay that way. You want to evolve and grow as an artist and expand your abilities and explore everything and make it more professional and more polished. And you guys, as. A band, any band probably looks back on those garage days and goes, wow, we were really not that great yet, you know in reason.

15:32 You know, you know, the thing is that what some people that say, like, hey, I'm missing these old days, and they don't realize what these old days meant to us, like, you know, touring supporting another band. They were going with a nightliner tour bus. You were in a vent or just like a regular car, sleeping in the car, sleeping on the floor, in the houses of fans, freezing, having no money for food, for nothing, really nothing, working like a second and third job so you could actually afford like going to the studio and doing your stuff. You know, fans might miss these old days because it feels surreal to them. But if you have gone through these years, if you have soldiered your way through that, and now this is actually your job and you can actually make money with the music to actually be better in the art you do without like starving and freezing, and you have a family at home, you have kids you want to feed, then really, I don't really don't want to go back to these old days, although I get a certain kind of you know, being sentimental about it. But fans didn't go through that. They watched it from the outset, were like, yeah, they are so true. They slept in the car and stuff, But hey, do that for ten years, do try to do art and not getting money, And it's so easy for you to say that you work in this story all your life and you're like, yeah, I want my band to suffer it to make like real art and stuff. That's not fair, you know. So when this becomes your job, which is hard enough for

17:04 a musician, then every everybody should be happy about their artists too, that they actually get money for what they do. It makes them better artists. Yeah. Absolutely, So let's tell everybody how they can reach out to you on the web, socials and most importantly your merch. And you have some cool merch in your merch store. I especially love the shirt. They'll love shirts and that, you know, the love of the loss. Yes, yes, yeah, we have like two hundred and fifty plus items in our store. Our fans are merch crazy because we got like especially very creative with merch during COVID because we had to find a way to you know, also first make fans happy, second to you know, earn some money.

17:51 So we have like shitloads of crazy stuff. It's actually very easy. I mean, you can google us, you will find us right right away. But if you go like a lot of loss dot de for deutsch Land, which is Germany, there's actually like a link tree with all this stuff for merch and like all the socials, everything you need. Just really make sure on the socials, like look for the blue check marks, because we have so many fakes, like especially of me trying to scam people, especially young girls into like sending nude pigs or sending money and all these things. It's like, it's so criminal, it's so devastating what sometimes people believe it's me and it's not. Please please really check for the blue check mark that is us.

18:37 Everything else it's not. So Yeah, I even talk about stuff like that we're having to do with merchet shows. It's like, don't buy shirts outside the show. The bank not benefit and it's crap anyway. Yeah, yeah, it's bootlegs. It's illegal, you know, buy inside. You know. We had this one thing somewhere in Latin America on tour. We had like seven eight, nine, ten illegal merch stores in front of the concert hall. We walked there and we were like, okay, this looks actually pretty nice. We could do that. So some of these things were actually inspiring. And then I asked them like, hey, can I have one of these shirts because actually they are mine? Anyway you're selling them I'm not getting and they were like no, no, who are you. I'm like, I'm the guy who's merch you're ripping.

19:26 Off the Oh my god, It's like yeah. And so it was really funny. And in one of the cities, I won't tell where because I don't want to fuck any promoter over or something, but in one of these cities, one of these illegal merch stores in front of the concert hall was actually run by the family of the local promoters, so they actually know their way to make some extra money. We found that out way later. It was like, hilarious, bro, you wouldn't believe what. Yeah, you know, but it's like that. It's the same in some Eastern European countries, Russia and stuff. So we we had like. Lots of very inspiring bootleg merch stores with like articles, items we've never ever seen before, but we actually ripped off some of these items for like, that's a good idea, let's do.

20:18 It of it. That is the most brilliant thing ever. I love that when you were saying you were walking out there, I mean, I think that's just that's something I would do. So that was classic. I love it. Yeah, but that's that's one of these moments where you realize, Okay, you know, we kind of made it. If you have like ten merch stars copying your shit, that makes you realize, okay, you actually you actually achieved something. I know, right, Oh man, that's cool. And so you guys also are on one of my favorite labels and a Palm Records, So that's cool. And is there anything else we want to tell the audience that we haven't covered, Larrey that you want them to know about you guys on anything coming up?

21:10 You know? Actually, I mean like if some fans are listening that already knows, they might be really interested in knowing that we are writing a new record. I'm just here, just until one minute before our talk, I was sitting here on the bed working on news stuff. We're having thirty to forty songs in the writing at the moment, and we're going to hit the studio at the end of the year and in January February, and there's going to be a new record next summer. Nice. Yeah, very exciting. I'm excited about that. And I'm always in awe of artists like yourself. They've been doing it so long and still can come up with new material like it kind of blows my mind. I don't know where it's coming from. If I'd be you know, I have this constant radio in my head, and if i'd be a believer, I would say, like it's God.

21:59 Or whatever, you know. So I'm an agnostic, so I say, I don't know where it's coming from. It's a universe, it's something. It's like r but it's like it's it's like rain drops off like melodies and songs like in my brain like all day. I can shut it off. Sometimes it's really annoying because it's not always good. Some of these songs are really are real crap, so I need to filter out the good ones, you know. So that's a funny thing too, Like I always know it's where artists it's like they have to write a crap load of songs to get the ones that they actually like. And you know, you're your own worst critic. Right yeah, But you know the thing is, these days are I'm my worst critic, of course, but these days of like writing so much stuff are kind of over because twenty years ago, ten years ago, I was trying to make a demo of every little idea. Meanwhile, I'm like, okay that I hear something in my head and it's like actually listening to radio and I can rewind it, fast forward and restarted again, and if I don't remember it after three days, then it maybe the idea wasn't that good.

23:08 So wow, So. What I do, which is really hard because sometimes like I kind of like it, then you forget it. But really, if you don't remind it after three days, it wasn't that good. So that's my natural filter, and that saves me a lot of time on like doing demos, Like for our last record, we didn't have one single song too much. We just like we filtered everything out before we started doing demos, just by time. Time can solve so many things. Wow, that that is such a great way to go about because I know if it were me and I forgot, I'd be like so upset at myself, like, oh, that.

23:51 Was so good, I can't believe I forgot it. But then when you just said that, it's like, wow, that makes a lot of sense, Like if it really is that good, it'd be stuck in your head. Yeah yeah, I mean, like I have written so many songs or co written so many songs also for other artists since like I'm nineteen eighteen, so that would be. I'm forty four now, so that's twenty five years. So I have like, I think eighteen hundred songs registered or something. And so after so many songs, you need to find a way to. Not work on every idea. And yeah, so that's my filter time.

24:31 You're right, it'll drive you nuts. It'll drive you nuts if you work on every idea. Well, you guys, man, you're a greble. I can't. I'm so bummed. I missed you. At riot Fest, but you know, next to life happened. But I'm definitely gonna make it happen in Germany because I've watched some performances from Riotfest and man, I was like really bummed out. So now I have a second chance, but I'll have to go over to the pond. To do it. Yeah, see you in Germany, then. There you go. Well, thanks a lot, and thanks for being on the Adventures of pipe Man. Thank you for having me, thank you for inviting me.

25:15 Thank you for listening to the Adventures of Pipe Man on w for c u I Radio.