PropertyOfZack had the pleasure of interviewing The Bigger Lights during their time on the Reach For The Sun Tour with The Dangerous Summer. Topher, Chris, and JK were absolutely hysterical and great guys. Read up for info on the band’s touring life, how they feel about their sound, and their next record. Enjoy!

For the record, could you state your name and roll in The Bigger Lights?
Topher: I’m Topher and I sing the voice.
JK: I’m JK and I’m just super attractive.
Chris: That’s very true. I’m Chris and I’m slightly less attractive.

The Bigger Lights have played just a few shows on the Reach For The Sun Tour, but how has your time out been so far?
Topher: Our time on this tour? It’s been pretty rad. It’s cool for us because one of our first actual US tour that we did was The Secret Handshake then The Morning Of and The Dangerous Summer too, so it’s kind of like a little reunion for us without Louis, It’s been cool. We’ve been playing on the east coast in the markets that we’re used to playing, so it’s been really rad. I think we’ve only played five shows on the tour, but it’s good.

Is it definitely nice not to have any of that awkwardness between bands when you first hop on a tour?
Topher: Yeah, totally. There’s this band City Lights that we’re just getting to know, but they’re cool guys for sure. It’s definitely easy to walk into that situation especially when you walk in mid-tour.

Tomorrow you guys will be beginning the band’s first ever headline tour with The Graduate, You, Me, And Everyone We Know, as well as Weatherstar. How stoked are you to finally be able to do this?
Topher: It’s definitely gonna be a ride for sure. We’ll see how it goes, but we’re definitely excited to play with The Graduate.
Chris: Definitely stoked to watch all the bands every night for sure.
Topher: We know the You, Me guys fairly well and we know Weatherstar too. It should be a pretty cool little rock tour. We wanted to make sure that we put rock bands on the tour for our first headliner, so we’re stoked for it.

Is it going to be interesting to be able to play directly to your fans rather than other band’s fans and having a longer set?
Topher: Totally. I think all the big touring that we’ve done in the last year or so we’ve played one or two on the package, so we get twenty to thirty minutes a night. Now we call the shots, so fuck it.
JK: We’re playing for three hours.
Topher: It’ll be cool.
Chris: No, two and a half.

The band released it’s self-titled debut album was released this past March. Now that the albums had quite some time to sit in how was the reaction been?
Topher: The reaction’s been good. I think people that like the EP definitely like the new stuff and we’ve also gotten a bunch of new kids off this record too. It’s more mainstream, I think. We’re already thinking about what we’re gonna do next. We’re a band that never really stops. We’ve been touring for pretty much the last six months of this year and we’re already itching to write some more songs. The response has been good, but I think especially now that we’ve really solidified who we are as a band we’re ready to write with everyone now. That record was kind of a little bit written before all the people that are in the band today were in it. So we’re stoked for it and stoked for the future, for sure.

Was it fun being in the studio to be able to record a whole record versus an EP?
Topher: Hell yeah. You wanna talk about Mr. Paul Barber?
JK: Paul’s awesome.
Topher & Chris: He is awesome.
Topher: We loved it. We did six weeks with him. It was really, really fun. He kind of wore us out and we definitely wore him out for sure. There were nights where we kept him up and we’re like, “We’ve got to do this and we’ve got to do this,” but it was definitely cool because he was more like a friend and more like the sixth member of the band then sort of someone who just told us what to do. So we had a lot of say in it and he helped guide the ship.
Chris: And his studio was in an Asian massage parlor, so that was really a plus.
Everyone: [Laughs]

Will you guys be playing a lot more new stuff on the headline tour?
Topher: Yeah, I think we’ll have about eleven or twelve songs on that tour, most of which will be from the new record.
JK: A couple old ones for vintage fans.
Topher: For the throwback kids from 2008. I think we’re playing most of the new record.

To bring it back to the spring, The Bigger Lights had the chance to tour with Cute Is What We Aim For. How was it being a part of that?
Topher: That was a different one for us. I think the big shocker on that tour was Down With Webster who played first. We were like, “Who’s this band with the hype man and like eighty people in the band.” Then within the first thirty seconds of their first song we were like, “Holy shit, these guys are awesome.”
Chris: We had to follow them every night.
Topher: We became really good friends with those guys. But it was really cool because that was the first time we had done like a lot of national touring in the year prior to it and it was one of the first times where we really felt like we were bringing a lot of the kids to the shows. It was cool to see some faces that we had won over on the Hey Monday tour or the This Providence tour. That was kind of a cool experience too.
Chris: All the Cute guys were really cool to us and The Friday Night Boys we’ve toured with countless times.
Topher: All of last year.
JK: Everything since January.

Are headlining tours something that the band will be looking into doing a lot more of in the future?
Topher: I wouldn’t think we would do another headline tour until…
JK: Who knows.
Topher: Yeah, who knows man.
JK: Touring is so much based on timing and what kind of opportunities go your way. We kind of decided there wasn’t really anything happening in August and it was either going to be downtime or we could try headlining and we just felt like even if the headlining shows were small and even if it was forty or sixty kids a night or something like that, that we’ve played a lot of these cities and we’ve built some groups of following. A lot of times they always ask for songs and we don’t have time to play them, so we just thought it would be cool to give it a shot.
Topher: I expect two thousand kids a night.
JK: Next time it should be four thousand.
Topher: Highline Ballroom [Laughs].
Chris: We just want to keep it modest.

You guys said that you’re excited to get back to writing, so would you like to get working on tour next record any time soon?
Topher: We’ll see.
Chris: I just moved to New Orleans, so we’re looking for plane tickets for everyone to come down and hang in New Orleans and maybe get a little culture.
JK: We just want to write there and see what happens. We’re not over this record or anything, but just with the way the business has changed in the last five to ten years, the turnaround time from record to record has greatly, greatly collapsed itself a little bit. Bands used to spend two years touring on one record and nowadays you put a record out, tour on it for six months, then you go back and make another one to keep people interested. I think the reason we’re excited to put a new record out is because we wrote the record before we had two of the members of the final band and it was just the three of us. I think from all the touring we’ve done in the past year as the five of us we’ve discovered who we are and who we want to be. The number one thing we get about this record is that people feel like the live show is a lot more rock then the record is and we didn’t know that when we were doing it, so we definitely love it, but we’re excited to try to capture what the band has organically become.
Topher: You can expect TBL’s version of “Bohemian Rhapsody” next summer for sure.
Chris: On this record we had the core of the song written before we went to the studio but it kind of came together in the studio. We kind of made the songs there and had to figure out how to play them life, but this time we want to write songs and figure out what will come out on stage and capture it on a recording.
Topher: We’re a pop band on record, but we will fuck you on stage.
Chris: That you can print.
Topher: We’re a pop-rock band, but the pop is on the record and the rock is in the live show. It’ll be a little more in your face.

Will you guys be announcing any more tour dates?
Topher: For sure. We’ll be announcing what’s going on in the fall pretty soon, once we know, but who knows after then. You get five emails a day saying we’re doing this or that and then we’re not doing this, but that is happening. It’s like, what the fuck is going on? So as soon as we know everyone else will know.
JK: For everything we do announce there’s like fifty things we didn’t announce. Hopefully we’ll get that one thing we announce pretty soon.

Within the next year could Europe be a possibility at all?
Topher: Europe not as much as Japan.
JK: I don’t know if our record is out in Europe. I know it’s out in Japan.
Topher: There was a guy who came up to us at Warped Tour, and he goes, “Bigger Lights, people like you in Japan.” And I was like, “Fuck yeah dude, let’s go!” I think we do really well. Our record is bigger there than here. It’s in like Tower Records and we’re like, “What the fuck?”
JK: They don’t even have our record here in Best Buy.
Topher: That’s definitely more of a possibility than Europe. We would love to do both and Australia for Soundwave. I’d love to play Maine, or Jersey.

Thanks so much for your time, is there anything else you’d like to add?
Topher: You don’t really need school, kids. Just kidding. Thank you to everyone who supports us, for sure. I think we have some of the craziest, but coolest fans ever. There’s a girl from Venezuela today who came to see us. That’s fucking weird to me, but it’s awesome.