When I asked Kalel about the Midwestern grittiness of Pillar's music, he knew exactly where I was going. “A lot of music comes from the bigger cities on the coasts. But you know we started out in Kansas, where we were one of the very few bands around. Now we’re in Tulsa, and there’s more of a music scene, but we’re still not heavily influenced by the scene music. It was just never around us, so we learned to come up with our own sound.”
Kalel’s reply leads me to ask who they listen to, and he laughs as he answers, “Our band is so diverse. We’re all into different sounds. Our drummer (Lester Estelle) is an amazing drummer, and he listens to other monster drummers. Most of them play in pop bands, like with Justin Timberlake or Michael Jackson, whereas Noah (Henson, guitarist) listens to metal. And the rest of us listen to everything in between. I’d say that our whole band collectively just listens to a wide variety of music,” he finishes.
It shows up in Pillar’s rich sound, and I asked Kalel about their writing process. “We all contribute,” he answered. “The musicians get together and jam. For “The Reckoning,” our new record, we jammed for about a year and a half before they turned into songs ready to be recorded. Then we give them to Rob (Beckley, vocalist) and he writes the lyrics for them.”
I comment on the band’s growth and wonder how satisfied they are with themselves musically. “We’ve grown a lot in between every album, but since our last one and this, there’s been a ton of growth. Especially in Rob, whose voice has become more powerful and he’s become a better writer also. We found more freedom in our writing this time. We were able to go to some new places musically, experiment a bit more, because there was no time pressure this time around. We ended up trying a lot of new stuff we hadn’t tried before.”
You’ll love the story of the album’s title, “The Reckoning.” Kalel is laughing again as he shares, “We were watching one of our favorite movies, “Tombstone.” Val Kilmer, playing Wyatt Earp, says to someone ‘It’s the day of reckoning.’ And we thought it sounded very tough,” he laughs. “But it’s about coming to terms, settling accounts, and we thought it was a great name for the new project and adopted it.”
We close with a moment of fantasy when I ask Kalel what band he’d like to play with for one day. At first he’s stumped, but in a moment he replies, “It’d be pretty cool to play with U2 and play a huge sold-out 100,000 seat stadium for one day and see what that’s like.”
Doesn’t seem out of the realm of possibility to me for this great band. For more information on Pillar, “The Reckoning,” or tour dates, check the Pillar website.
