I was unable to meet up with the band in person or phone due to their busy touring schedule. The band was kind enough to answer my questions via email. • If I could have you all introduce yourself by name and your role in the band? If you answer any of the questions below individually could you please put your name or initials before the answer? Dylan Nash - Vocals Sam De La Torre - Guitar Charlie Anastasis - Bass Maxx Morando - Drums Maxx Morando will be answering all the questions. • How long has the band been together? We’ve been together as a band for about 3 years. • From what I can gather, you are all very good friends and have a lot of fun together. Were you all friends first or did the band come together first? I met Dylan and Sam at a music school when we were young, and Charlie and I went to an all-boys catholic High school together. We first started playing together when Sam, Charlie, and I we’re in a Fleetwood Mac cover band. During the cover band rehearsals, before the singer arrived, we’d jam and sort of write songs. Eventually the jams before the rehearsals became our own rehearsals, Dylan joined the group and Liily had started. • You are all very young and very talented. Which one of you would you say is the most senior as far as having been around the music scene the longest? Or have you all been playing music for about the same amount of time? We’ve all been playing music since we were young. Charlie and I used to tour with other bands a few years back, but other than that we’ve all been in the music scene for about the same time. • There are several animal head mask references (in your videos and including a merch t-shirt – that I hope will be for sale at your show next week in Indy so I can buy one!) how did that all get started? The animal head drawing had been around since the beginning of the band. We wrote the songs on the EP when we were 15, so when we released it, we thought it encompassed everything we we’re doing at that time. • I am also curious about the mannequin prop on stage and in the videos. Did you take that from a store and keep it around for fun, or is there a bit of a story there? We initially made a music video for SOLD, which turned into something we thought didn’t represent us correctly. At the time of making that video, we had really gotten into the physical aspect mannequins possessed. The video featured that idea about the mannequins we enjoyed but didn’t turn out how we hoped. We had to make an entirely different video for the song and used some of the footage from the initial video. But since then we started honing in better on the mannequin idea and the imagery they bring. • You have over 15k followers on Instagram. Your feed is full of really great content. Do you each help contribute or is there just one person in charge of what goes up? We all contribute to the feed. Sometimes it’s Sam’s art or a photo/video one of us took. We like to keep the feed as artistic as possible and not be filled with bs. • I am beyond impressed with how you started your own festival. Not a lot of bands would have done that. Especially bands that are still up and coming. Do you think you will continue the festival in in the years ahead, and do you hope to expand it to be bigger in the future or is the idea to keep it a bit contained in size? Thank you. Yes, we hope to expand Brekfest, but with the same mentality as we did the first one. A lot of festivals jam pack a line up in which you almost never get to see all the bands you wanna see, and not giving the artist a proper show. We want the artist to be first and have everyone playing a chance to be seen. • I watched the documentary CITY/VALLEY: A Concert Film of the Brekfest Festival. It was very well done and full of amazing content. Have you ever thought of playing it for the crowd before one of your shows or have you already done that? Thank you. We haven’t done that before. What kind of feedback and reactions did you get from your fans, friends, and family when the documentary first came out? We got a lot of good feedback on the doc. We also learned from it as it was our very first one. • In the video for Toro, I’m curious… how much did you pay the extras, or did they happily volunteer to toss tomatoes at you and the other person run around like what I assume is a bull mask? A lot of the people throwing stuff we’re people working on set, and some of our friends. The man behind the bull mask is our dear friend Cameron Booth. • I have to say, all of your videos with that home movie style… they make me want to hang out with you all for an entire day or a week! Do you have someone following you around with a camera a lot or are one of you really into filming everything? A while ago Charlie found his family’s old sony handycam, and just stated to film stuff with it. We ended up really liking the way it looked and continued to use it. Charlie films almost everything with that camera, but we’ll pass it around sometimes. Also, our friend Ricky recently started coming out on tour with us taking pictures and videos. He uses the camera a lot as well. • Other than your own festival, what has been your favorite festival to perform at and are there any that you hope to do again or still want to be a part of? We recently played at Lollapalooza, and it blew our expectations away. We played 2 shows, one of which we were first to play on that stage, another a smaller stage shortly after the first. The amount of people at the first show was insane, and unexpected. Hopefully we can play Lolla again. We’d love to be apart of the Glastonbury festival and/or Reading and Leeds. • Mosh pits are pretty much a staple of a good alt/rock show. Do you ever look down from the stage and see everyone thrashing about and want to join in? Have you ever joined in? Our favorite kind of shows is when we’re playing at the same level as the audience. Where the crowd and us playing become one singular thing, and there’s no stage or barrier separation. https://www.liilytheband.com/