Touring With Teen Heroes & Being Empowered By Fans

When your band plays a style of music that is a long way removed from the mainstream - especially in the heavily depressed musical climate we find ourselves in today - watching it grow slowly but steadily over the course of ten years or more is a truly rewarding process. And that's exactly what has happened for Cam Maynard, guitar player for American avant-garde, progressive-metal act The Contortionist since his band's inception back in 2007. 

"It makes me feel really good actually," he says humbly, from Baltimore during the band's tour. "It's a lot of work. The idea of starting out and creating a following - it just takes a long, long time and it feels good to know that nothing's behind us and we've come a long way. It feels good to know that we've already clocked that many hours making this thing grow and finally getting it to a point where it's sustainable.

"It's been cool to see that happen from the beginning, building it from nothing to what it is now."

And just as gratifying for a band like The Contortionist is seeing that process happen multiple times in different locations around the world, including our own country, where the band is set to tour again very shortly. "We love coming to Australia because we've seen that market grow in that same way," Maynard says. "We've been going to Australia since 2010 and the first time we went we had, like, 30 to 50 people showing up and now it's much bigger than that. Every time we go back it's better, and that's the same way we grew our market in the States. It's cool to see how you do that internationally.

"It's so cool to see the band grow from scratch all over again, and you see it on foreign soil."

Maynard tells us that the other major rewarding factor that inspires them to keep going, and to look to the future with optimism, is the creation of the music itself. "We're just having so much doing this, we're just going to keep on writing music. We all love being on stage, we love to perform, but I think what keeps us all together is [the fact] that we love to compose music and I don't think that will ever stop."

Getting to bring other great bands on tour with them is something else that Maynard finds inspiring. His band is bringing idiosyncratic prog-metallers Sikth out with them to Australia for what is sure to be a scintillating double bill. And the Brits aren't just a great band, they also happen to be a major influence on The Contortionist's sound as well. Strangely enough, however, this will be the two band's first-ever time sharing a stage.

"We were all really surprised when we saw this offer for the first time," he recalls. "We were like, 'Oh my God, that's incredible!' Because we haven't had a chance to perform with them before. We've met a few of the guys, but we haven't had a chance to perform together before. Me and the other guitar player Robby [Baca], we go way back to high school listening to Sikth, and just loving the guitar craft and the way the guitars were written. It was a really cool style that we hadn't heard before and that definitely went into our records.

"We tried to imitate certain things from their sound."

While The Contortionist drew much inspiration from Sikth in their early days, they have certainly channelled that influence into something that's truly their own. The Contortionist love to change up and play around with their sound on every record that they do, and their latest opus Clairvoyant is no exception. Maynard thanks the band's fans for the open-mindedness that they display that allows them to do this.

"Something that is an MO for us is that we always do something that's drastically fresh and we owe that to our fans, too, because they're the ones that empower us to be able to do that. There's a trust that's present with our fans at this point in our careers where they kind of expect that of us now. They know we're going to go and put a wrench in the system, every time."