Today, I got to talk with Josh LeMay, the singer and guitarist for Detroit rockers Citizen Zero. They're coming to have some Christmas fun with us on Tuesday, December 20th at the Stache for the GRD Christmas Party! Josh and the band are really looking forward to the show, and hanging out with Grand Rapids.

Citizen Zero visited us this summer to play some songs acoustic for us, and the weather was very different than this week, and that and the beer helped Josh fall in love with Grand Rapids.

We talked a bit about the formation of the band, and the things that led them to their latest album, State Of Mind.

"We grew up in a little town outside of Detroit called Rochester, and it was one of those thing where we're all third generation musicians in our family, and just decided at an early age that this is what we want to do, so we started chasing the dream. Kind of met the Dudley family, the drummer John and I connected and kind of started this idea of Citizen Zero, and started writing. Sammy actually came into the band in 2013, and believe it or not, the very very first idea musically we came up with was "Go (Let Me Save You), the very first single."

The band had released an EP in 2012, and then things changed with some tragedy in the band.

"We actually lost a member, Matt Dudley, John's brother, passed away in early 2013, and obviously that kind of derailed things for a little bit. We didn't know what we were going to do. Kind of took some time, soul-searching, and that kind of thing. Ended up finding Sammy, and musically stayed as an aggressive rock band, but kind of turned the tables a little bit, and became what we are now, versus what we were then. And I think that even without that, it was still always heading in a direction of just kind of as you get older, as you play more together, as you do more shows, there's kind of this natural progression of the band that takes hold of you, and you gotta let it guide you and move you in the direction you want to go."

Talking about the song "Lure and Persuade".

"This is my absolute favorite jam live, man. It's just got a cool energy behind live for us to play. The song itself, was just written about this person in my life that kind of, at the time, seemed like they had everything I needed, but was constantly trying to change who I was, kind of fit their mold. It was just a toxic, toxic time. And when it finally didn't work out, that story deserved to be told. So it was pretty much a song about sticking to your guns, and no matter how enticing someone says, and no matter how much it hits in your head, you gotta stick to your guns, and don't let anybody else tell you they know better."

Today being the fourth anniversary of the horrible incident in Sandy Hook, Josh talked about the song "Go (Let Me Save You)".

"I still havent' been able to talk about that one without kind of going back to that exact moment, but the lyrics came from, unfortunately, inspired by the Sandy Hook tragedy. As that was kind of unfolding, the television media, the way they were reporting as they came out with bad facts right off the bat, and then with kind of their own political agenda, and all this other stuff that they would be doing, where they were pushed back from the actual scene, but they were still using their cameras to get the shot of the crying parents with headlines of 'Parents Devastated Over Loss of Children' in arguably one of the worst things that's ever happened in our country's history. The loss of the most innocent human beings on the planet. Just the reporting that was done with such a lack of compassion, and so inhuman to me, that it was just, kind of sparked this thing in my that was like and f-you to the way it was handled. We should have been coming together"

Check out the complete interview above, and enjoy the acoustic videos from their last visit to Grand Rapids below. Then, get your tickets to the GRD Christmas Party, and come rock with Citizen Zero, Deepfall, and WGRD!

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