Thursday promises to be a fun night with Stephen Kellogg and the Sixers making their way to D.C.’s 9:30 Club. NBCWashington.com caught up with the band’s drummer, Brian “Boots” Factor to hear more about his fellow band members Stephen Kellogg and Keith “Kit” Karlson.
NBCWashington.com: Stephen Kellogg and the Sixers are going to be in D.C soon. You guys excited?
Brian "Boots" Factor: Oh yea, excited to be back at the 9:30 Club
NBCWashington.com: You are playing with Erin McKeown and Clayton Senne. Could you tell us more about that?
BF: Clayton has been with us for most of the five-year anniversary tour, and Erin has been here since the beginning. We’ve had a lot of openers come out and she is definitely one of the best. I want to say ‘openers’, but I feel like I’m disrespecting her when I use the word ‘openers’. She’s an artist in her own right and we are honored to have her play with us. She’s really great.
NBCWashington.com: While in D.C., you three are doing an on air performance on DC101, have you done one of these before?
BF: We did one before, I think last spring. We went on tour with Hansen and we got in there, played some songs and talked a lot, but mostly about Hansen because it seems like everybody, when you say you’ve toured with them, all these questions come up and people want to know about Hansen.
NBCWashington.com: How’s the tour been going?
BF: We decided to make a tour to celebrate the five years our band has been together.
NBCWashington.com: Is there a new album in the works for 2009?
BF: Yea, we are gonna go to the studio this December and start strumming out some hits that you will undoubtedly hear on the radio everywhere you go for 2009.
NBCWashington.com: What will the album be titled?
BF: We were thinking about [American Standard] but lately we haven’t been really into it, so the title is still up in the air. I’m under the impression that the best way of naming an album is to record the music first, so I think after that we’ll have a better idea.
NBCWashington.com: For the tour, what have you’ve been performing? Hits?
BF: Well every song is a hit. So you make a set list and number it one through fourteen, fifteen songs. And you look through the list and you’re like: “One’s a hit; two’s a hit; three’s a hit…” and then you say to yourself, “Man, this band is a hit factory!” Our identity has become that of Madonna, or, I donno, Enrique Iglesias.
NBCWashington.com: What else do you have planned for the new year?
BF: Okay so 2009 is gonna be a great year. We are gonna finish recording around January/February and then in March we are gonna fly to Europe and play for the troops over there, which we’re very excited about. And that’s in the beginning of March. We are just going through Europe and the Middle East and we are playing for the guys over there, the men and women.
NBCWashington.com: Have you ever been to the Middle East before?
BF: None of us have. We went to Europe before in like college, bumming around with a backpack. But this is going to have a lot more meaning and we’re really excited. And you can say what you want about the war, but we just love the people that risk their lives for our country, so we’re excited about that. And I think we’ll probably do some sort of tour in the spring; we don’t really have that planned out yet.
NBCWashington.com: You guys seem to be touring a lot. Would you say that defines a lot about your band?
BF: Yea, I would say so. If you ask any of our friends and family, they would say we tour a lot [laughs]. You know that’s how we’ve grown our fan base, we don’t have radio hits, so this is our way of reaching people.
NBCWashington.com: How do you handle always being on the road?
BF: We’ve been doing it for five years, so we’ve figured out loopholes and ways to make life easier on the road. You know obviously, the number one priority is to surround yourself with people that you get along with. This band has always been about friends first, everything else later, so we’ve, you know, we know how to handle each other and what our intricacies are, it’s just been working really well. We are touring a little bit less than we have a couple years ago, but it works. We are gonna be doing this for a little while longer.
NBCWashington.com: Do you all still have more left in you?
BF: We do. And with the new album coming out, we’ve got a lot of energy and we’re really looking forward to it.
NBCWashington.com: How did you all come together five years ago?
BF: We all went to the same college and we were living in the area post-college and we were all working very lackluster jobs and we were all in bands, and Stephen was doing his solo thing. And we met through people and it made sense to start playing together and supporting Stephen and then it quickly turned into a band of brothers and a band thing and that was about five years ago. And that was pretty much how we met. You know we say we are from Massachusetts because that’s where we all went to school, but I lived in New York and Stephen lived in Connecticut.
NBCWashington.com: What’s the relationship between the three of you?
BF: I’d say it’s more of a brotherly thing. We all have different hats that we wear. Kit wears the dancing hat, so when he gets all the attention for dancing I never get jealous because I wear the drumming the hat. So when I have a drum solo, I don’t think Kit’s gonna get jealous. And then Stephen, he wears the heartthrob hot. And you can’t get jealous of the heartthrob, because that’s his job. We respect our hats.
NBCWashington.com: Anything else you’d like to say?
BF: We love D.C. We’ll be at the Capitol hanging out on the steps; playing some tunes, some old-time stuff.
NBCWashington.com: Sounds fun. I hope you do well on your tour and thanks for talking to NBCWashington.com.
BF: Thank you.
9:30 Club is located on 815 V St. NW. Doors open at 7 p.m.Get your $15 tickets on-line at purchase.tickets.com
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