LOCAL Houston | The City Guide May 2016 | Page 73

FOOD | ARTS | COMMUNITY | STYLE+LEISURE THE SUFFERS continued. Are all of you finding a good balance between being able to hold everything down at home and being out on the road? Have you made the jump where you’re doing it full time? We started doing it full time in January 2015. We quit our jobs the same month, and we’ve been doing it full time ever since. But as far as maintaining the home/work balance, that’s something we’ve actually been striving for this year. We didn’t do it last year, and we learned that if you don’t maintain that time at home, it not only fucks things up at home, but it starts to mess with you personally as well, and so we’ve kind of come to an agreement where we’ll tour this amount but then we have to be home this amount. We have to be home for these holidays, or these dates, so and so’s getting married, that means everybody has to be home. Last year we were on the road for two and a half months during the summer, and when we came home, it was like we were different people when we came back. No one really knew how to adjust right away because we’d been in a van for so long and hadn’t seen our things in so long that it was like, “Wait, we just missed an entire season.” Like we weren’t home for a Houston summer, which is kind of great because of the heat and whatnot, but we came back and it was like, “Whoa.” I feel a little bit more of a balance as far as this last tour has gone. It was probably one of the most intense tours that we’ve done because we weren’t in a tour bus and we didn’t have all of the extra help on the road with us, but because it was planned so well and was really on point as far as the organization was concerned, it put us in a place where we had an understanding that there are smart ways to tour, and there are stupid ways to tour – how can we grow and continue to get better? That’s the goal right now, to not repeat our past mistakes. Not be on tour too long. I think it’s only going to get better as we are able to educate ourselves more. It only makes you stronger when you do go out, right? Exactly. It feels good to come home. I feel like at the end of every tour, when we walk into the bars in Houston and people recognize us and are happy to see us, it’s kind of like, “We did it again – another tour that people thought we couldn’t do, and now we’ll sleep.” It feels good to be out representing a city that everybody loves to underestimate when it comes to its music. The city is very proud of you. Well, we’re proud of Houston. For full interview visit www.localhoustonmagazine.com BILLY PERKINS continued. If so, have there ever been any really wild changes/edits/new directions you’ve taken with a particular poster because of suggestions by the artist? I did get asked to remove a chunk of fat from under an unnamed guitarist’s chin. On another job, Ted Nugent’s management didn’t like the image I did of the cowardly lion from the Wizard of Oz, who had several arrows sticking out of his body. They requested a more straightforward design with no hunting or political tones. Well...at least I tried. No major direction changes come to mind, it was more like “let’s design this together.” So it just made the process slower and more painstaking. As with songwriting, there are very few people that I can collaborate with. I need to enjoy the process in order to give my best, and I need to feel creatively stimulated by the other person (and vice versa) for it to work well. Otherwise we’re struggling against each other. If the ideas don’t flow in a compatible manner, it’s going to be harder getting to the finished piece. Even then we both have to like it, so there will almost certainly be some compromises. And again, if the end result is something that I can’t really claim as my design, I’m detached from it. For full interview visit www.localhoustonmagazine.com may 16 | L O C A L 73