Devour the Day is Devouring Rock’n’Roll
Rising from the ashes of Egypt Central – Devour the Day is making music for themselves. Instead of feeling the weight of expectations Joey Walser and Blake Allison took to music to express their experience and create something they could be proud of.
Blake talked to us about all things Devour the Day in preparation for their October 17th stop at Club LA in Destin.
“I didn’t really want to walk into this expectations,” explains Blake. “Joey and I didn’t feel sure about being a success – we didn’t write these songs with that in mind. We wrote these songs to be the best art that we’ve created yet. The idea was to make meaningful music – not popular music.”
But they managed to do both. ‘Good Man’, the lead single off Devour the Day’s debut album Time & Pressure currently is sitting at number 12 on Billboard’s rock charts.
“I would say as far as writing the record, Joey and I were in a dark place because our previous project had fallen through. And we didn’t know what we were going to do, and some tragedies happened in our personal lives as well. Joey being the primary on the lyric writing thought it would be a great idea to just put it all out there on the record.”
“We have a history of writing songs about things that we are going through, but in that other band we also made songs that didn’t really have anything to do with us and we thought that was a mistake.”
“We decided that this record – it was either going to be personal to us or it wasn’t going to go on the record. Fortunately we had a lot of stuff to talk about.”
The artwork for the debut Devour the Day album and ‘Good Man’ single is hard to miss. And it is something that Blake and Joey hand picked to be representations of their songs.
“Joey and I, were on a website called Deviantart – we searched for hours and hours trying to find some artwork that would help inspire the album artwork. What we found was this guy named Dmitry Ligay, who does incredible artwork. We thought it would be a good idea to just contact the guy and see if he would be interested in creating some pieces for us. He lives in Uzbekistan, so there was a little bit of a language barrier, but we got some great artwork out of it.”
Currently Devour the Day only has two full members, Blake and Joey, with touring members to flush out the band’s stage presence. This isn’t an arrangement that Blake plans on altering anytime soon.
“Joey and I like the dynamic that we have between each other, and I don’t think we are looking to add anymore chefs to the kitchen.”
But that doesn’t mean that Blake things the live show is lacking.
“We’ve been working on the live show and we have some great performers in our band. Our live show doesn’t hold back – we put it all out there.”
Devour the Day is already in the beginning stages of working on new material – hoping for a minimal wait period between album releases.
“We’ve already started to create a template for the kind of record that we are putting together next. We have a good idea of where we want to go musically. We have ideas that we haven’t explored yet – and we are really looking forward to exploring them on the next record. It is really exciting, because we have an idea of what it is going to sound to like, but obviously we haven’t heard anything yet, because we haven’t recorded or performed it yet.”
“We are confident in our direction. And that is a big weight off our shoulders.”
This isn’t Blake’s first time to our area. His previous band, Egypt Central traveled through the Gulf Coast on multiple occasions.
“Floyds Music Store (Tallahassee) was a place that we highly enjoyed playing. We’d been playing there since 2004 or 2005. The whole Florida region – the gulf region – has been our vacation. I mean we are still working and still playing shows, but we love the beach. We love to go into the area – the whole climate and vibe down there is something that we’ve fed off of.”
“It really helps with stops like that during the tour because everybody gets to relax and have a day off at the beach and everybody enjoys that.”
It is easy to hear Blake’s passion for the project as he talks about it and the future of it. Being a brand new band, with a charting radio single, and a headlining tour is something to be proud of.
This is only the first chapter in Devour the Day’s story, and as Blake puts it, “We have exciting things coming from Devour the Day in the future.”
850 Music & Entertainment 
Great piece Nikki.
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