Brandon Coleman

Like, we would have our...

our mains set up behind us and so the microphones would be feeding back into the mains.

We didn't know what we were doing.

We just knew we wanted to play music.

So we'd show up to these bars and most of the time run people out and clear the room out because we didn't know how to play music that well either.

Guitar amps turned up, and we would show up and just ruin people's evening and clear out a bar.

They're trying to watch a football game, and we show up playing Allman Brothers, and just our guitar players just always crank their amps.

We did have an old man drummer, though.

That was the only thing about that band before Red Clay Strays.

So you didn't have to worry about the drums being too loud, I guess, because he was just doing his thing.

He ended up quitting...

um when we started traveling more and uh that's when we started holding auditions and we were going to audition this one guy and he flaked he couldn't make the audition we rescheduled him and he couldn't make the audition again and then we were like how did we get in touch with john what when did we audition him

yeah we had like this is gonna work we had the auditions in uh citronelle alabama which is like up in the sticks and he didn't have a phone um so he's like meet me at the hardy's at like you know 6 30 or whatever time it was because he did we couldn't call him once he left his house and uh so andrew left you were driving the firebird at the time you left in the firebird and met him and brought him back and we auditioned him then

And the audition went great.

He showed up with his brother, who played piano.

And his brother wasn't trying to join the band, but his brother just played with us.

And just the first song we played, we tried them out with an original that we were working on, which was a terrible song also.

Andrew and John locked in immediately and just they hit all the pauses together and I just remember still being blown away by that just how quickly y'all locked in and it still shows today on stage their chemistry they've got some kind of telekinetic thing going on I think I think the big thing was coming from that old man drummer and then that's the first time I've ever played with a real drummer besides my own dad his name was Ray

Is that when it's supposed to come out?

We're shooting for summer of next year.