Dear listeners and readers of Soundville,

Today I would like to introduce you to the band The Eastern Kings in which different cultural roots, musical genres and the personal stories of its members come together. In their sound you can easily hear the energy of live rock, the depth of country and folk, as well as bold instrumental experiments. But most important is the sincerity and integrity with which the musicians create and record their music.

Being first and foremost a live band, The Eastern Kings always find a way to connect with their audience, whether it’s an intimate pub show or a large stage under the spotlights. Their music is recognizable for the depth of emotion at its core and for its clarity of sound, free from excessive effects. Behind every note of The Eastern Kings lies raw energy, experience, and a genuine attention to detail from the musicians.

In this interview The Eastern Kings talk about working together, the process of shaping their sound, the ideas that unite them and how to keep a balance between personal stories and a shared artistic vision. Get ready, the brightest moments are still ahead!

You’re mid-freefall before you realize you even left the ledge. That intro barely gives you time to blink, guitars are screaming, drums are swinging sledgehammers, and the vocals hit like a warning flare in your chest. This is how “The Fall” kicks in, just instant emotional detonation. Was there a moment in your own life where that drop felt real? A time where you knew love was coming for you, and you stepped in anyway — full speed, no brakes?

MAX MAYER (GUITAR): Yes. [Laughs] Me personally, I often make spontaneous decisions and I tend to fall for people that won’t stick around for long, there’s just something thrilling about knowing you don’t have much time left, and all you have is the passion and the moment. Then there’s truly no time to waste and though it’s always heartbreaking in the end, it is worth the pain. But everyone’s fallen in love at least once, right? And maybe at least once with the totally wrong person… so I think there’s probably a bit of everyone in this concept.

ANDY JAMES (DRUMS): That makes it sound suspiciously like Max is the ‘wrong person’ to fall in love with [laughs]. Personally, I’m happily married so contractually I can only talk about the one incident of falling in love… and yeah, I mean, it hits you like a freight train, doesn’t it? That’s what makes it real, and scary.

The way the track builds is nuts — soft intro, then it just erupts. When you’re stacking a song like this, do you sketch the whole thing out first, or do you throw stuff in the fire and see what survives?

THEO BOON (BASS): For this track at least, we got a demo sent from John which is famously usually him having just woken up and sounding terrible, trying to get a song idea out before he forgets it. So we’d learnt it over the weekend for when he brought it into the session. Next thing we knew we were playing it at shows to an amazing response, people actually came up to us to single out this particular track. And then by the time we got around to recording it was a well rounded song in terms of its parts. So in the session we added more things to fill out the track by constantly recording, listening, and tweaking over and over, till we finally got the mix that made everything work. There are maybe, what, eight different masters of this song?

MIKE STING (VIOLIN/GUITAR/ENGINEER): Eight or more is pretty normal for this band [laughs]. When John arrives at the mix with a composition, everything – the whole production – is in his head. He has already the idea of how each instrument should sound, which reverb, how strong and the dynamics of it. It is amazing how his brain works. Of course then, he’s able to come the next day and shift the entire song upside down, which as the engineer, is something I have to deal with, what can I do. [laughs]. We play with it on the software and try out how it sounds. And keep adjusting every part until the puzzle makes sense. It’s a process…

How do you keep a track this explosive from boiling over? Do you lean more on instinct or on studio tricks to land that balance?

JOHN ARTER (VOCALS): Oh, I don’t know – I think boiling over was the point, on this one. But we do all our recording now with in-house engineer, the very talented Mike, who you may recognise as the guy playing three different instruments on stage at our shows…

MS: I believe it’s a combination of both. We learn to put the basic structure on a rehearsal so everyone does a part and then we really go as far as we can with it on stage and in the studio, where there is no limit to what we can add and how we can twist the sound. But it’s always natural sounds, which is cool.

JA: It’s funny, we started out with like these full pedalboards you see so many musicians with, these effects, all these different things we were trying to do. But we play a huge variety of genres within our sets, so actually we’ve ended up with not a lot of bells and whistles in terms of technology, so that the sound is consistent even if the music style isn’t. It’s all natural tone now and at most one pedal for the guitars. Acoustic goes straight into the desk, now. What you hear on the recordings and on stage is the real instruments, and it’s us playing them – I’m really proud of that. And there’s some amazing live room stuff on the album that I can’t wait for people to hear, it really shows the band chemistry and you can hear the fun we’re having with it.

John, you’ve got that kind of voice where you don’t need to scream to sound huge. There’s gravel and heat in it, like it’s been through something. And on “The Fall”, you let that thing rip. What kind of headspace do you go into when tracking vocals like that?

JA: Thanks so much – I’m a little too loud at times. If you’re playing Wembley, great, but in the local pub I can be a bit ear-shattering. The Fall is a great one to be talking about for this, though, because I do open it up at last – I’m normally a little more conservative in my singing. Something about this one demands a full throttle approach. So finding out in the rehearsal room where I could take it, and how much we could do with it, was really exciting. I never really consider myself a ‘singer’ instead of foremost a songwriter, and I guess part of how I perform them should make that obvious – I write what I feel, and I try to feel it again when I sing the song. Hope, fear, love, hate – it’s all there if I’m doing it right, whether live or in the booth. It’s exhausting, actually. [laughs]

Since this is the last single before the album lands, it kind of feels like a final preview — like you’re giving us the storm right before the flood. What made “The Fall” the right track to lead into the full record? Was it always meant to be the closer, or did it demand that spot the second it was finished?

JIMMY HULME (LAPSTEEL,GUITAR,BASS): When John brought the song to a rehearsal, we all had a special feeling about it right from the first time he played the opening chord progression. It felt like a waltz except it was taking place in the swamps of Louisiana, a really cool sound. Add Mike’s strings to add to that dramatic sound and we had something really cool and something a little different to add to our set, while still maintaining our sonic identity as a band. It was fun for Andy and co to come up with the right rhythm section part.

AJ: Yeah we had audiences really excited by it. It’s very different to a lot of what you hear. Gruff and gravelly (but still emotional) songs are rare enough, but there’s definitely something that people get out of this one which is really gratifying. It’s also a really performative song, the dynamics and percussion are so precise, and it has room-filling epic bits but also after the bridge when it’s just vocals and strings… you could hear a pin drop in the room, every time. It’s really special. And it beats just hammering out the same 4:4 for forty minutes!

JH: We played it for the first time live at a headline show at the World’s End, an earlier version of it. After that show, a number of people came up to us individually to comment on how much they liked “The Fall”. It seemed like the perfect final single before our full album release. Another ‘water’ song, there are a few in John’s repertoire, they’re always special – where ebb and flow is really important.

Your album’s called Not Just A Story, which is kind of hilarious, because these tracks bleed real life. It’s like a scrapbook someone dropped in a thunderstorm — messy, personal, unfiltered. When you write stuff this raw, do you come out of it lighter? Or does it hang around with you, even after the song’s done?

JA: Oh man I’m so glad you asked that – yeah writing what I’m feeling is definitely cheaper than therapy, but mainly I mean the bit about the album name. It’s a line from Mariner’s Song, from the album, a song I wrote twenty years ago. And the only track from a very different era to survive into the modern day of me as an artist. “‘Life is not just a story,’ the protagonist lies” – there’s a huge irony to that, I’m glad someone has caught it! It’s always going to feel like other people are in your story, like there can’t be storybook endings, like there’s something pre-written or fated about certain moments. I love the line, and fortunately one of the guys suggested it as the album title, and it really feels like a way to include an authentic piece of who I used to be and where I’ve come from. It’s such a personal but true piece of me as an artist. And the album title, that line – it’s older than Theo! [laughs]

TB: Oh my god!

There’s a pattern across your singles — this undercurrent of yearning. The deep-in-your-ribs kind. “Last Ride”, “Shutaway”, now “The Fall” — they all pull at something. Where does that come from? Are you just wired to chase those bittersweet emotions, or do they find you no matter what kind of song you’re writing?

MM: I guess it’s just in us as a band! Of course many of the songs are John’s personal experience in terms of lyrics and vocal expression but we all had our share of those “bittersweet moments”. And so no matter if we’re directly telling so or not, I’m sure it’s present in our music in some way. I guess it’s one of those things we don’t think about when writing or performing but we project that anyway. We definitely bring a bit of ourselves to every part and arrangement, though, and we all work in a ‘song-first’ way, where it’s less about personal triumph and hero moments, and more about making sure the track and sound is as amazing as it can be.

TB: Yeah as someone who isn’t really in the front in the band it’s more about making sure the song sounds good before we move onto any greater emotion. It’s fun to watch people in the crowd start to have an emotional response to the country band playing in the corner… they’re always surprised. And during shows John always says as long as we’re having fun we’ve done alright, so.

JA: [laughs]

You’ve got a band name that sounds like a gang of outlaws from a forgotten Western, or maybe a lost gospel group with switchblades in their boots. Where did ‘The Eastern Kings’ come from, and how does that name shape the way you all approach your sound and identity?

JH: Nothing ‘forgotten’ about this western! [laughs] Mike & John really liked the name, I think they had it in mind very soon after I joined the band. I think it’s perfect for our branding, sound and identity. Things like our logo, social presence benefit from it. Also, the UK is technically east from the American west – and so is my hometown, I’m originally from Connecticut. So perhaps it ties into our multinational roots! Someone said after a show, “you know eastern kings are just called sultans,” but Sultans of Swing was already taken.

MS: Yeah, it does suit our vision and sound very well. To be honest me and John came up with it after a brainstorm where we explored many options. The Eastern Kings was the one that had great presence, western sound and also didn’t sound like a joke, which some of the possible names were [laughs]. We were nearly the ‘Merry Martyrs’, ‘the Spitfires’ or even or ‘the M4 Troubadours,’ that last one was Jimmy’s and obviously we don’t like to talk about it.

You seem like a band that enjoys the push and pull of making music — tension, release, mood swings included. What’s something weird or funny that always happens in the studio with you all? Any rituals, arguments, or inside jokes that somehow make it into the final recording without anyone realizing it?

AJ: Actually yeah, for producing such serious music, we have a lot of fun when we’re in the room together. The guys are all pros so there’s not so much pressure on learning parts, it all comes together really naturally, and gives us a lot of time to take the piss out of each other. John and Mike, though they’ll kill me for saying it, you definitely see two serious artists having to make way for each others’ ideas and they wind each other up a lot. Empty Rooms is the funniest song to rehearse, now, because it’s this very heartfelt love letter from John to the audience, but the first two minutes are him solo, so Mike really enjoys ‘filling’ the empty spaces for him with some encouraging shouts… nobody’s been fired from the band yet but it’s gotten close [laughs].

Your sound could fill a dive bar or a cathedral. That’s a weird superpower. You’ve got the kind of voice and band chemistry that works in sweat. What’s the live show like for you right now — and how do you want it to evolve once the album drops?

MM: Wow thanks, I love the way you said it, it’s so true! I was a fan of the band’s sound first and then had the opportunity to join as a guitarist (I’m also a solo artist myself!), it’s still kinda recent! And our live shows are definitely full of raw energy and sweat – it’s all about giving it all to the audience, but also having fun on stage! The guys are really experienced musicians and so we can afford to give something extra to our shows. I also think each of us are adding a “spice” of our own, as individuals, we have a distinct sound and bring our characters to those records and performances. As I said, I’ve been with the best for a short time, but had a blast so far! We can’t wait to see what’s ahead of us!

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