PropertyOfZack had the chance to catch up with Kirk Huffman from Kay Kay And His Weathered Underground a few weeks ago for a great interview. Kirk and I discussed the band’s recent tour with The Dear Hunter, reception to Introduction, the timeframe for their next album, and more. Check it out and enjoy!

For the record, could you state your name and role in the band?
My name is Kirk, and I sing in the band.

Kay Kay played through the first leg of The Dear Hunter tour. How was it out there on the west coast and the mid-west?
We actually went all the way through the tour. It was amazing. We’re really, really fortunate. Originally we planned on just doing the first leg, but we were able to hop on the last three weeks as well when the other band couldn’t do those dates. It’s the third time those guys have taken us out, which is really cool because they’re a great band. They have really, really amazing fans too. It wasn’t a scene tour or anything, we got to hit all the major cities and it was a very promising tour. It was amazing.

Were fans of The Dear Hunter pretty open to you?
The package for the tour was O’Brother from Atlanta, us, and The Dear Hunter. The three of us musically really don’t have anything in common, but the fact that it was such an awesome tour was definitely because of The Dear Hunter’s fans. All the bands were able to bring out their own set of people too. We were there every night seeing people purchase everyone’s merch and records. That was really cool to see. The fans were really amazing.

Introducing Kay Kay has been out in one form or another for quite some time now. Has the band been happy with the reception to the release?
We really, really have been. We saw that sort of manifest on tour. A lot of those kids came out again to see us a third time. We went down south, where we’ve never been before, and so many of those kids have been waiting for us since back in the day. Some kids have been waiting four or five years to see us, and it was amazing. We’ve just been stoked on the way that everybody reacted both to the record and our live shows. We feel like we’re in a really good position going forward because we’re getting all the demos for record three together.

It’s been rumored that Kay Kay will be releasing a new album titled III in the fall, but that’s obviously not happening. Can you update us?
We’re about fifteen songs in. It’s kind of a new direction for us. All that stuff from Introducing was written just a year and a half after our first record. We were in the finalizing process of mixing and mastering it, but it obviously got delayed. All that stuff from Introducing is old to us. It’s sort of similar to The Beatles how Rubber Soul and Revolver had the same palette and were part one and part two of the mindset The Beatles were in at that time. Those records were recorded close to each other too time wise. Introducing was like us refining record one and putting it into pop structures. That was us years ago, and now everyone knows the band, but there is this whole other aspect of Kay Kay that nobody really knows about, which is really cool on record three. We’re really excited about it. We’re so stoked to finally get these songs out.

When are you guys looking to record?
We’re hoping to record in January or February. We’re talking to producers right now. The record should be out by the spring or early summer.

Will you be self-releasing or putting it out on a label?
We don’t know about that either. That’ll all be up in the air. We probably won’t know more till the future. We’re fronting all the money for the recording right now, even if we get the opportunity to record with the guy we really want and it costs x much money. We’re fronting the bill on this record.

Has it been tough as of late to manage all of your projects as of late?
We’ve always been really good at balancing everything out. Everyone appreciates and understands how much music we all want to make. It’s very cool and we always balance it out. We’re putting most of our energy into this new Kay Kay record and Kay Kay going forward versus all the other stuff. People ask us that all the time. If we dumped all the time into the one project instead of the other ten then we’d probably be bigger, but we’re balancing things out. We realized from our previous bands that too much of everything is too much. We wouldn’t get all the other opportunities we get if this was our only focus. The ball is really rolling moving into next year though.

The plan is to record the album and then tour with its release?
We’d like to do some stuff in the spring to get out there. We’re definitely getting Kay Kay out on the road. We want to put out the best live show that we can.