The Rise and Fall of Matt Litter

CHAPTER 5: Not like the others

After one more week touring, we've played in three different new cities —Nashville, Atlanta, and Orlando. We play on the last one on a Saturday night, and spend the rest of the night at a bar, with some of Freddy's friends. We sing there, alongside them, and play instruments and do some sort of intimate show. People seem to like it —even if we're wasted.

The next thing I know, I'm waking up again. It's Sunday, we are in a Hotel room in Miami and we have an interview to give at eleven. Interviews frighten me. They truly do. They've always frightened me, but now, they do more than ever. And still, they frighten me now more than ever, more than they ever did before, because I feel as if interviewers, journalists, and music business people have more things to talk about now.

Interviewers tend to ask the most infuriating questions when they speak of personal life. They tend to ask about life and childhood and how was it all back home while growing up and, even if I hate them for that, I don't care. The past is the past, isn't it? My family wasn't nice enough so I could care about them, meaning I don't exactly care about it when they ask about it —although that doesn't mean I don't get nervous.

I was supposed to get up at nine, but at a quarter past eight, I was wide awake already, sat on the balcony of my room, and eating gummy bears. There's nothing I love more than gummy bears, I think everyone who knows me knows that and, if they don't, they certainly should. Boy, even my fans give me bags of gummy bears when they meet me outside venues, so now, even if the tour has just started, I've collected a total of eight bags. And of course, who wants to have a bowl of cereal for breakfast when you can have this?

Demian wakes up with the alarm sound, naturally. He finds me on the balcony, still eating from my gummy bears' bag, and after taking a shower, he insists on going downstairs for breakfast. And I say yes, of course, because even if I've been eating candy for like half an hour, I could eat something else. And drink coffee, of course, it wouldn't be me if I weren't drinking coffee.

Do you know what's the greatest thing about coffee? It can go with everything. Yes, of course, you drink it for breakfast, but you can also drink it with fries, with pasta, chicken, a salad, anything, you name it. If there's one thing that we've got always at home is coffee. And cereal, because Demian's a big fan. We usually get into these little and stupid domestic arguments regarding cereal, by the way, because he insists it should be put in a bowl before milk, and I do it the opposite way. I don't think it matters, anyway, but we wouldn't be us if we didn't bicker over stuff like that.

Anyway, we have breakfast and then we head to the studio, twenty minutes before eleven. They introduce us to the staff; they offer us some glasses of water and begin the interview at eleven.

I love it when they interview the five of us together because we have time to mess with each other, all of us. I mean sometimes that even makes me forget that I am being interviewed, that I'm doing one of those things I truly hate... but just sometimes.

The boys don't hate it as much as I do, by the way. I mean, Nick is the most reluctant when it comes to these things, but that's just because he doesn't give a damn. Yeah, he hates having someone with a mic talking to him, and to have to answer, but he usually takes the opportunity to have fun and mess with them. He once made up a story about how he was born in Mongolia and how he can speak at least seven languages, and as ridiculous as it sounds, people bought it. They believed it all, I'm serious. Martin doesn't really care, although he gets easily bored when they don't ask stuff he wants to talk about, but still usually takes the spot to do some good, like, I don't know, remind fans that it's not okay to be stalkers, or to try to convince people to become vegetarians, stuff like that. And Freddy likes to talk about random stuff, although if it were for him he'd miss all the interviews and do something else entirely. Demian, on the other hand, seems to have been born for this, because there's no one else in the entire world who could speak so comfortably in interviews as he does. I don't know how, or why, but it's just part of his magic.