Sundy Best hails from Lexington, Kentucky as a pair of lifelong friends turned fine musicians. With Nick on the guitar, and Kris on the drums – more specifically, the cajon – they create a unique sound that is a soulful blend of a little country, classic rock, bluegrass and pop.
Atlanta Music Guide sat down with Kris and learned about Sundy Best’s musical influences, how he got started playing the cajon, and why the term “kinfolk” is so important to the band.
How did the two of you first meet?
We grew up just a couple miles from each other, he was a year ahead of me in school, so I actually became friends with his sister, she’s my age, before me and him became friends. But we were just around each other a lot, mainly through sports before music. We were both involved in music before in our churches, we went to different churches but I was playing and he was singing in church. Yeah, we first met through sports and we ended up going to high school together for two years.
When did you decide that you wanted to make music? Why?
I think music was so important and prevalent, that maybe it’s just one thing that we’ve always been passionate about. Some of my earliest memories as a kid involve music in some form or fashion and I think we both would have found a way to make music a part of our lives had we not been at this capacity.
When and where was your first gig as Sundy Best?
There’s a place that really changed a lot for us in relation to downtown called Redmond’s, a venue in downtown Lexington, that a lot of the college kids went to back in the day. We played there our first time in November of 2010 and that’s basically when we started playing as Sundy Best. Really not that long ago, it’s crazy.
Your music has roots of classic rock, bluegrass, and country to it. What musicians would you say influence your band the most?
We’re old school. Growing up we listened to The Eagles, Allman Brothers, Bob Seger, Tom Petty, Van Morrison, Jackson Brown. That music and those artists still influence us today and it’s music that really inspires us. We write all of our own music, and so we look back on those bands and artists that did the same thing; they created their own music and just played and played and built themselves a name. Those artists are an inspiration and continue to be.
When writing and creating songs is it a collaborative process? Describe it.
I think our process, it’s really organic and spontaneous. A lot of our songs, or majority of them are written fairly quickly. Whether it be one of us doing it and just fleshing it out, but recently we’ve been doing a lot more co-writing. We never get together and schedule a time for that or a time, it just happened …one of us will come up with something and send it over to the other, we used to live together and now we don’t
What made you want to start playing the cajon?
I always played the drums, my dad and my older brother both play so I kind of just fell into that at an early age. I bought a cajon in 2010, I saw one in a YouTube video, and at the time it was just me and Nick that were starting to play some gigs, and I was playing the drums, with the two of us it was just a little bit much, especially in the garages or the restaurants and such that we were playing; there isn’t a volume knob on a drum set. And then I was lazy, so I was like man I can play this little drum and not have to pack around my drum kit. But mainly it was just different and it worked, because we started to play gigs and we would do the first half of the show with the cajon and the acoustic guitar and we were getting a better response from that. We just kind of went with it and it kind of evolved into the songwriting process.
Tell me about the “kinfolk movement.” What does it mean? Where does the term come from?
When we started [making music] we decided on the term kinfolk. Being from Prestonburg, Kentucky, it’s a real closeknit community and family oriented and kinfolk is a term that gets used a lot. It doesn’t necessarily mean you have to be blood related to someone to be family, because if you’re from Prestonburg, Kentucky, you’re family by association with everyone else that lives there. It’s a kind of a cool concept, but we just incorporated that into music because we don’t really like to refer to the people that listen to us as fans, because I just feel like it puts a disconnect; we’re not trying to put ourselves up on a pedestal, we’re just making music and singing. It’s just kind of a grassroots, organic movement. One of the biggest ways our music is spread is by word of mouth. For the longest time it was that, now Sirius XM is playing a song of ours, and CMT has been great about playing videos so our exposure is a lot better than it used to be, but still, it’s people that are listening to us that are spreading the word.
What’s your favorite part about performing live?
I like everything. I think the biggest thing is just when you can get a whole crowd singing back songs, that obviously means so much to us and the fact that people can relate to them. It’s just that energy and interaction between what we’re doing onstage and the people that are listening, it’s just really cool. It gets better each time.
Sundy Best perform live on Tuesday, June 24th at Eddie’s Attic.
