Since the release of their highly-praised 2015 debut album Never Happy, Ever After, Brighton, UK’s As It Is has garnered an ever-growing, devout fan following with their sincere and relatable lyrics, charged with energized pop-rock melodies. With the release of their sophomore album ‘Okay’, the members of the transatlantic quintet push themselves both musically and lyrically to craft their most personal and honest record to date. Melisa speaks to vocalist Patty Walters about the new record and their plans to tour the world.
Melisa: Hi Patty how are you?
Patty: I’m wonderful, how are you doing?
Melisa: I’m great! Thanks for talking to The Rockpit today.
Patty: Yeah my pleasure!
Melisa: The new album is out on the 20th of January next year. It’s called “OK”, congratulations! I got to listen to a little bit of it yesterday, it really is an awesome piece of work. How are you feeling about it?
Patty: I’m feeling really excited! Thank you so much, glad you enjoyed it. It’s been a really amazing, slightly overwhelming reaction that everybody has kind of shown for the songs thus far. It’s making me really excited and really optimistic to share the rest of the record with everybody because these are the most personal songs that we’ve ever written but it’s also the most liberated we’ve been musically and lyrically. These are songs that I don’t think we would of been brave enough to write on our first record. To see so many people be so warm and accepting of writing songs that are different, you see so many bands be criticized for changing their sound and not being different enough and I think we’re still very fortunate for the fans we have supporting the fact that we can seemingly be whoever we want to be as long as we stay true to ourselves and just write about things that mean something, things that are personal to us. It’s been awesome, I’m excited for everybody to hear it.
Melisa: Excellent! So you have gone deeper on this album and what was the driving force behind that?
Patty: Yeah I mean that was a conscious decision that we made early on in the writing process to really push ourselves and write more personally and vulnerably than we had in the past. We listen back on our first record and as much that we are proud of a lot of things we achieved and wrote on that record, we know that we could of been more honest and more vulnerable and this time we made a conscious effort to really push ourselves out of our comfort zones and to be afraid to show some of the things that we did. It was frightening enough sharing these experiences and these emotions with each other let alone to the world and putting these lyrics into these songs so I think that’s how we knew we were moving in the right direction was when we were second guessing ourselves and doubting ourselves, I’m not really sure how it is so many people knowing about these experiences I’ve had and these things I’ve been feeling but at the same time it better shaped the songs and it’s left me feeling much more proud of these songs and relating to them more so.
Melisa: Absolutely so I’m guessing that writing process and that recording process probably brought you together more as a band, bonded more as well over the album.
Patty: It definitely did and everybody was slightly more involved in the lyric writing process and that we were writing about our collective experiences and experiences that were unique to the five of us. It brought us much closer together and we had to open up to each other like we never had before and like I said, that made us feel more vulnerable and really afraid but at the same time it gave us results that we couldn’t of achieved otherwise.
Melisa: Excellent, sounds like you guys had a really great recording the album. So will you be touring the album after it comes out in January?
Patty: Yes so our first stop is Japan, our second stop is Australia. It’s going to be really exciting, we’re going to be playing quite a few of these songs for the first time on those tours so hugely excited for that. I remember last time we were in Australia last year, the crowds were phenomenal and the energy was fantastic and I’m so excited for that energy to be kind of be put in front of these songs for the first time. That’s going to be really exciting.
Melisa: Oh absolutely, we’re crazy over here [laughs].
Patty: Absolutely nuts, it’s amazing!
Melisa: What are the bands influences? Where do you draw your energy from?
Patty: Well it’s very interesting with this record because early on in the writing process the band was afraid, ‘Oh that doesn’t sound like As It Is’. We made this conscious decision to really embrace writing differently and we as five people didn’t or barely knew each other before we started this band, it was just our common interest in starting a band. And we have five very different backgrounds and interests in music and that’s much more as it is on this record than on our music prior and we still had a lot of common influences, bands like Greenday, Blink 182, New Found Glory, Motion City Soundtrack, The Starting Line. Jimmy Eat World is a huge one actually but equally the artists that are a little more eclectic and a little less representative of our sound still manage to inspire us on this record just in the sense that if it was darker or if it was poppier or of it was another genre entirely, it still managed to inspire a certain thing with this record. And that’s super exciting and I think that shows just how much more experimental the songs are.
Melisa: Yeah absolutely. So what will we see in the future from As It Is? We know you’re going to be touring next year, are there any plans after that?
Patty: Yeah we’re just figuring out our touring schedule for the remainder of the year, we come to Japan and Australia then we tour in the UK and Europe, I believe it’s March with the State Champs. And then after that it’s all still kind of up in the air figuring out where we go and what we do but we’re going to play as many shows as humanly possible, that’s generally the work ethic of the band is play as many shows without dying as we can. We’ve all started writing album 3 in our own ways just with riffs and lyrics and with ideas, that’s super exciting in itself so we’ll just kind of play a bunch of shows, meet a bunch of people, have a good time and then get writing again.
Melisa: And you can draw on the experience of doing a major tour as well.
Patty: Yeah certainly! I mean it’s a super unique and special experience being on the road that much and being in new cities and making new memories there in foreign places and I think that usually inspires us in what we do and what we write.
Melisa: So you guys are from Brighton in the UK, what’s the scene like over there?
Patty: It’s cool, it’s a really tightly knit scene and it always has been. Because it’s such a small city we’re not kind of over saturated with venues and with that you typically know the majority of the bands and musicians in our city and it becomes so much more of this kind of DIY, communal…you just have this community of bands and people helping each other out and supporting each other like when we first started. Our first show was in somebody’s living room [laughs] and I got to see for myself instead of playing in a club or a venue or something, it was just people putting on shows because it was what we were passionate about doing and taking any show that we could get and it’s very much still that way.
Melisa: Oh excellent. It’s the same in Perth, it’s a little family community really [laughs].
Patty: Oh certainly.
Melisa: Well thank you very much for your time today Patty and I hope everything goes well with the album and hopefully we will see you soon in Perth.
Patty: Yeah thank you so much!
