Fueled by the similar staples within their collective musical taste, the members of Knox Hamilton blend laid back guitar riffs and catchy bass lines with rhythmic drum beats and soaring vocals to produce a sound that’s as likely to make you want to visit the beach as it is to move your feet.
In this interview spotlight, we chat with Knox Hamilton about influences, their newest release and more.
Full Q&A, links and streams can be found below.
Where are you from and what style of music do you create? (In your own words, not necessarily in marketing terms or by popular genre classifications.)
Knox Hamilton was founded and now based in Little Rock, Arkansas. We create pop that you can “rock out” to while also feeling all the hipster feels. Not too rock, not too bubble gum, but just enough of both.
What led you down this path of music and what motivates you to stay the course?
I (Boots) started playing drums in church at age 5. I was very good. A prodigy if you will, but you shouldn’t. My dad was a pastor of a small church in Sherman, TX for the first 16 years of my life, so I’ve been immersed in the Pentecostal mellow gospel rock music scene from the get go.
Who or what are your biggest influences when it comes to your creativity?
Musically I’m influenced by multiple writers from Paul McCartney, Michael Jackson, Bread, Jim Croce to Brandon Flowers, Kanye West, Frank Ocean, Father John Misty and many more artists we sound nothing like.
Knox Hamilton is positive escape music, so my wife/high school sweetheart is my muse, she’s who I prefer sharing life’s experiences with, but I also like to think of writing songs as short stories, some based on real life experiences, and maybe some not so much, the music usually determines the theme. I can’t screen write so this is probably as close as I’ll get to that.
How is your new release different than previous ones? Did you set out to accomplish anything specific?
We’ve actually toured for quite a while without a full length album to support so we wanted to record songs that were fun and entertaining for the live show. I think you try to accomplish many things in the studio, but mainly we want the Knox Hamilton experience, whether it be in a car or at the live show, to be a positive portion of your day. We’re just trying to compose your euphoria, that’s all.
Do you face any challenges as an indie musician in a digital age? On the flip side, how has technology helped you (if it has)?
Even though it’s probably not the healthiest thing for music to be about competition, it’s always going to be a challenge to get your songs heard and liked by enough people to sustain your “career” for lack of a better word/sentence. But on the other hand, we would never have gotten off the ground without our manager hearing us on Spotify, digital has been huge for us.
How do you feel about streaming services? Any romantic attachments to the physical formats: vinyl, 8-track, cassettes, CDs?
Plenty of romance involved with CD’s for me. The smell of a freshly unwrapped CD is one of the best fragrances in the world. For all you out there too young to know and appreciate this feeling, I can’t.
With that being said, I only stream.
Where can we follow you online and hear more music?
- knoxhamilton.com should have all of our social media links, if not…
- Twitter: @knoxhamilton
- Instagram: @knoxhamilton
- Facebook: knoxhamiltonmusic
- Spotify: Knox Hamilton
Anything else before we sign off?
Yes, we’re very excited to share our first full length album with you in October 2016!! And thank you for reading, for real.
