By Layla Brooklyn Allman
Well, I've finally returned to my hotel room at 3:22 a.m. after quite an eventful day here at SXSW. We actually arrived in Texas late Wednesday, crashed hard and spent pretty much all of Thursday running around Austin playing shows and doing interviews. Oh, and getting our property stolen. But more on that in a bit.
We woke up, wandered around the city and were blown away by the amount of people and the energy on display here. It was sort of overwhelming, but we didn't have much time to dwell on it, as we were off to our first stop of the day: An interview on the back of a moving truck, which was encased in huge windows so people could watch Nick and I answering questions. Needless to say, we've never done an interview quite like this one. The two girls who interviewed us had Southern accents (we don't often get that in California), and we spoke to them about everything from foreign countries to our musical style back in the day (when we were 12) all while driving around in this transparent vehicle on a live feed to various music bloggers. It was sort of crazy, to be honest.
Then we had our interview with MTV News, which went down on a street corner here in Austin. Some guy kept lurking into the frame, but other than that it was a great success and we were so stoked to be a part of MTV News and chat about our song on "Rock Band." We had a few hours to kill before our next show and visited a local music store store, walked around Austin's main drag (Sixth Street) and were amazed at just how much music was being played down here. We left to load in for our first-ever SXSW show at Aussie's, played our set and stayed to watch a bit of the British indie band that followed us.
After we packed up and loaded out, Austin and I showed up to the Sennheiser rooftop party a bit early and the place was packed. We didn't play our set until about 1:30 a.m., but there were still plenty of people around to rock out with us. Unfortunately, my purse was stolen as we were rocking faces off, but other than that dilemma our first day at SXSW has been an incredible experience and we're stoked for Friday!
Up-and-coming California band Picture Me Broken will be covering South By Southwest for MTV News all week (and probably weekend, too.)