The Killers Teach Louis XIV How To Deal With Screamers

Singer Jason Hill says Vegas rockers are pros at playing it cool.

From MTV

Louis XIV are learning plenty from frequent tourmates the Killers, including helpful hints on accessorizing, moisturizing and - most importantly - how to act around throngs of screaming, out-of-their minds teenage girls.

"I watched the Ziggy Stardust movie on the bus the other day, and it's all just screaming young girls in the front of the stage. And I realized that it's exactly the same for shows with us and the Killers," Louis XIV frontman Jason Hill laughed. "They really eat it up. But we've learned from the Killers how to play it cool. I mean, they're pros at it. To play crowds of 16,000 people a night, you've got to know how to do it."

They've also picked up on the Killers' penchant for on-the-road recording. The two bands have already hooked up for one memorable late-night tour-bus jam session , but it didn't end there. Inspired by the Killers' knack for pounding out new songs while on tour , Louis XIV had a studio built on their tour bus so they could be writing and recording at all times.

"If you're on the road too much, there's a lot of debauchery, there's so much partying that you're always looking for a spare moment to work," Hill said. "So we decided to put a studio in the back of the bus. We got the idea from working with the Killers. One time we had [Killers' drummer] Ronnie [Vannucci] come in at 4:30 in the morning and set up his kit and tracked him playing drums on a new tune that [Killers frontman] Brandon [Flowers] wrote, called 'For Reasons Unknown.' It was completely stupid and crazy but it was the right time to do it and it had to be done."

But it's not like writing a ton of songs is something new for Louis XIV. They've been doing it for a while ... just not on the road. In fact, up until pretty recently, touring wasn't even an option for the band. They were just, as Hill put is, "broke musicians" with nothing better to do than write songs.

"We write all the time. We have a lot of songs just hanging around because we were nobodies before we made our record," he laughed. "You have to write songs every day, no matter how you feel. And you have to keep telling yourself that for every song that people might hear, there are 50 they don't."

In fact, the band already has somewhere around 50 new songs written for the follow-up to its debut LP, The Best Little Secrets Are Kept

"We've got a bunch of new songs: 'Ashes and Cinders,' 'Queer Pressure,' 'Cut Your Tongue Out,' those were just ones I've written in the past few days. All we need now is some days off to get into a studio," Hill said. "We had four days off like a month ago, and normally you'd want to just sit around in a bed and do nothing, 'cause you've been on tour for months, but by the second day we were getting bored, and we went back into the studio and started working on a real Motown-sounding album. We always just sort of go into the studio and press 'record' and see what happens."