Matthew Morgis

The Academy Is… on tour with Kiss this summer.

The Illinois pop-punk band is on the road supporting Kiss on “The Hottest Show on Earth” tour, which stops at the Toyota Pavilion at Montage Mountain Sunday. The group is made up of singer William Beckett, guitarists Mike Carden and Michael Chislett, drummer Andy Mrotek and bassist Adam Siska.

The Academy Is… has released three full-length albums and four EPs to date. It has toured with popular acts Motion City Soundtrack, Something Corporate, +44 and Fall Out Boy. It also has headlined the Vans Warped Tour Twice.

Recently, Siska checked in with the Weekender to answer a few questions about the band and its current tour with classic rockers Kiss.

MORGIS: What is The Academy? Is there any specific adjective that is supposed to come or is it just open for interpretation?

SISKA: It’s definitely open. If they like it, they can say any type of positive word about it. It’s supercalifragilisticexpialidocious or it’s tubular. If they don’t like it, they can say … Well, I don’t want to say anything too nasty, but leave it to your wildest imagination if you’re a hater on The Academy Is… But we have lots fun talking about what the band actually is.

MORGIS: What is The Academy to the band? Is there something the band likes to think it is?

SISKA: Not really, for us it’s constantly changing. Today, The Academy Is…very bored in Syracuse doing laundry, but last night The Academy was having a wild time in Brooklyn eating really good food and drinking lots of beer.

MORGIS: Tell me some background about the band. How did it get started?

SISKA: William and I had always wanted to start a band when we were like school kids, but we were never able to find the right people in the town we lived in. Most kids were more into sports or hanging out in their parents’ basement. Luckily there was another band a few towns over called Jodie. They had a guitar player called Mike Carden who was really great and was very charismatic. He was really good at guitar, so we all got in a room together, wrote a few songs, and it felt pretty good. So we kept doing that and people started coming to our shows. We played more shows and more people came. It’s kind of a natural progression of rock and roll.

WEEKENDER: So the band got where it is today because of hard work, no magic hand came down helped you guys?

SISKA: I’d like to think so; I don’t believe in the magic hand. Some people will say Pete Wentz discovered the band, and that’s how the press has told the story in the past — we were discovered by him and he helped us out and coached us along. Which is partly true, I wouldn’t say he discovered the band — we knew him long before the band even started. It’s not like he stumbled into a saloon in a bad part of town and found these kids playing music. We just worked really hard, and people who have helped us along the way have noticed that.

MORGIS: You guys were off for nine months, then all of a sudden end up on tour with Kiss. Has it been what you expected so far?

SISKA: It hasn’t been what I’ve expected so far. It’s actually been better than what I’ve expected. We’ve never toured with this type of classic act. They’ve been going since the mid-’70s.

To me, it’s been like any other big-scale tour we’ve done. We did the Honda Civic Tour with Fall Out Boy in 2007 with a lot of people there each night. Some really dug the band, and some didn’t really us. It was fun to win people over on that tour. On this tour, I’d say 99 percent of people have never heard our band name before. It’s fun, because we’re playing in front of new people, which is very hard to do this day in age. The other night in Boston we got a standing ovation halfway through our set, which isn’t what we expected. People told us, “You’ll be getting shit thrown at you. It’s classic rock, a bunch of boozers and rockers in the crowd.” But the tour has been very cool and fun

MORGIS: How did a young pop-punk band as yourselves end up on tour with Kiss?

SISKA: Gene (Simmons’) son and daughter who like the band were playing our music in the house one day. Gene liked what he heard and asked who it was and decided we’d be a good fit for the new tour. We weren’t even planning on going on tour, we were off for nine months, and then we get a call asking to go out with Kiss, and you can’t exactly turn that down.

MORGIS: What have you learned from being on the road with veterans like Kiss?

SISKA: Just stick with what you do best. Their songs have evolved since they’ve been a band for so long, and it just moves in phases. There were periods when they weren’t the hottest band in the world, and sure enough, five years later they are again. So basically perseverance and doing what you believe in and then working hard at it.

You can tell there is no place Gene and Paul (Stanley) would rather be then up on stage in front of their fans, even after all of these years. I hope that mentality stays with us.

MORGIS: After the tour with Kiss, what are the future plans for The Academy Is…?

SISKA: I’d say when this tour is over we’re going to go figure out everything with the new record. Make sure we get it in the right place and make sure we’re happy with it. Then we’ll pack our suitcases and do what we do best, which is sit around in parking lots and dream about the next move.

Source: timesleader.com