The Contortionist Vocalist Michael Lessard Speaks About His Love of Fan Meet & Greets
Speaking as a fan, I would love nothing more than to shower bands willing to do meet and greets with 1,000 tiny gifts on every date of their tours. However, I know the reality of meet and greets is often grinding, non-stop work that can’t feasibly be done all the time.
In this week’s episode of The MetalSucks Podcast, we sit down with The Contortionist vocalist Michael Lessard to discuss how the band has embraced meet and greets. When asked if the experience of offering a package to fans on every tour date has been difficult, as well as how direct input from fans has affected their songwriting, here’s what Michael had to say:
“Oh, it’s been amazing. You get that direct input, just straight from the fans. We like to do a thing whenever we do it too. We do the Q&A where essentially everybody stands there and we try to take a half-hour to try and answer as many questions as possible. Whether it be who we’re listening to or what our ideas are for the next album, or whatever the question may be, we try to answer those.
“For the most part, it hasn’t been that difficult. When we go out on tour this is what we’re doing. We’re locked in for the day. We get there, we do our soundcheck, we get set up, we do our meet and greets, we get ready for the show. We’re so used to this grind that an hour and a half out of the day designated for meet and greets really doesn’t affect us too much.”
In any way do the fans have an effect on how you want to present your music in the future or anything like that?
“I don’t know if it directly affects it — maybe on a subconscious level because you do hear people that’ll be like ‘this song, and this song’ or ‘I love it when you guys do this.’ “Early Grave” was directly influenced by talking to the fans so in some ways it does. But in terms of where we’ll go stylistically, that’s always just kind of something we’ve chosen the path of. We have a good track record of not really listening to anybody when it comes to what we want to do.”
Elsewhere in the podcast, Michael also discusses a myriad of topics such as the band’s new EP, Our Bones, how the creative seeds for the record came out of soundchecks while on tour, their cover of the Smashing Pumpkins’ “1979,” and how James Taylor has influenced his singing style. So get your ass to it and stream the episode below:
