Fit for a King | A History Of…
By Joanna Lugo

Perseverance. Fit For a King embodies this single word, both historically and with the release of their first full-length album, Descendants. Through various hardships and pressing matters, the guys of Fit For a King have continually proven that fighting through struggle is certainly worth it. In fact, this seems to be a consistent theme throughout Descendants, thus proving that this Tyler, Texas outfit is worthy of the stage and respective recording studios. But let credit be due where it ought to be; to God, a truth that Fit For a King is not ashamed of. As is evident in the following interview with guitarist Justin Hamra, Fit For a King transforms hard work and hardship into a brilliant, first full-length album in Descendants.

If you would, please give a brief history of Fit For a King.

Justin Hamra: The band started in 2007. I actually wasn’t in the band. Jared and Aaron, our drummer and our bass player, are the only original ones that are still in the band from that point. After that, I joined the band in, I want to say 2009. They had just split ways with their first vocalist. Their guitar player at the time, Mason, moved to vocals and then I came in and started playing guitar. After that, Mason actually decided to quit and we had another guitar player quit. Then we actually met Ryan and Bob, who are our newest vocalist and guitar player. We met them on a tour and they just seemed to fit in pretty well. We all had good communion as friends. We wrote similar music, had similar ideas, so it worked out really well; they’re the newest members of the band. We’ve put out two EPs. Just recently we released Descendants, our full length. We’ve toured quite a bit with our old line up and then we just went on our headlining one for our CD with My Ticket Home. That’s where we’re at now; we’re back at home.

So with all of the changes that have happened over the years, what has kept you going through all of that as a band?

JH: Definitely God. It was basically just three of us; me, Jared, and Aaron. We just felt like if this wasn’t what God wanted us to do then He wouldn’t have put us in the position that we’re in to spread His word and do what we do. We just decided to keep looking for people and just seek God for us down the road. We just basically tried out a lot of people, and hung out with a lot of people, and tried to see how the band was going to work without our vocalist and another guitar player, who wrote a lot of the majority of the songs prior to me. It was pretty crazy.

It sounds crazy but it sounds like the Lord was faithful to you in all of that, which is awesome.

JH: Yeah definitely. It felt super right whenever Bob and Ryan joined or before that time when we got together with them. We all prayed about it and just all felt on the same page, spiritually and with each other.

It seems that the titling throughout the album has a certain intention to it, individually and holistically. How does the title Descendants encapsulate the contents of this album? Or in other words, how are we descendants?

JH: Basically, we got the title from… actually Bob came up with it or kind of had the idea for the whole concept of the album. We were just wanting something that had depth and represented us as a band and as people and what we do as our band. We just wanted it to be not just a title that sounds cool; we wanted it to actually have some sort of meaning and represent our band. We all took time to read through our bibles and see what stood out to each and every one of us. Bob called me later in the night after we had done that and he explained this verse he had read, I believe it’s in Revelations. It’s about when Satan sent his warrior people to Earth and started the fires on Earth, started trying to take over. God released His descendants who descended upon the Earth and expelled Satan and all his minions from the Earth. So we kind of took that and made it into: we are put here for that same reason as a band; to spread God’s word and spread His love and try to rid the Earth of Satan’s word and Satan’s work. We just felt like that fit us very well and we kind of worked off that for the album and the titles. Actually, some of the titles in the album… the songs actually were recorded before that happened. So those kind of just came on to there but they still fit in to what and who we are, which is really cool.

Can you walk us through the process of creating Descendants?

JH: Yeah. “Hollow Eyes” and “Buried” and “Messenger, Messenger” were all tracks that were recorded as demos before we even had talked about putting together a full length. Actually before we decided to do a full length, it was going to be an EP, another one. Me and Bob both have our own studios, so me and him pretty much took the time and wrote songs and sent them back and forth to each other and to everyone in the band, and got thoughts and feedback and changed them. As we were doing this, we ended up having a whole bunch of songs in this whole process. We liked so many of them that we were like “maybe we should just do an album.” So we ended up talking about it one night and we were like, “we should just do an album.” We’ve had two EPs, kids had been asking us to put out new stuff, and we had gotten a lot of requests for that, so we just decided to make it an album. Me and Bob tracked everything on the album at our own studios and put it together. We would get together as a band and work through songs and perfect each one of them. It was a pretty strenuous process, I would have to say. It took a lot of time. Actually, we spent a very good amount of time on it. Finally, after we finished tracking all of it, we sent it to Cameron at Chango Studios and he mixed and mastered it. It was an awesome process. It was really fun but very long. And since me and Bob were tracking it, it was extra work to do all the production. It was a long, long journey but it was awesome and it turned out really well. I’m pretty happy with it and everyone else is, so it was definitely worth it.

So why did you feel the need to incorporate other musicians, like Jeremy Grey and Matt Mullins, into the recording process?

JH: Matt and Jeremy are both pretty good friends of ours. We played with Memphis dozens of times; we’ve always connected with them and he’s an awesome vocalist. We just talked about if we wanted to have guest vocals on the CD and who we would want. Matt was definitely one of our first ones that we picked out, also Jeremy. We were kind of stuck; at first we were like “should we just do one? or two? or what?” We couldn’t decide which one out of the two of those guys we wanted to pick, so we ended up like “we should just do both because that might make it even better!” Jeremy’s actually a friend of ours too. I filled in guitar for Ivoryline for a little bit and I just know those guys really well; they’re from Tyler too. They all live right down the street, or a couple of them do now. I just kind of talked him into it. I showed him the song and he liked it and he was like “dude I’m down.” And so we did it. Definitely both awesome dudes, great vocalists. We were super stoked that they were both down to do that.

What has been your overall purpose in being a part of Fit For a King?

JH: Personally, for me music has always been a thing that interests me the most throughout life for some reason or another. I’ve just always wanted to play guitar and do music. It’s been an awesome opportunity to get to do that for the musician side of me. But also, spiritually it’s great because all the dudes in my band are awesome guys who are awesome spiritual leaders. Together it’s just always a great time. We definitely have a lot of great fellowship together. It’s just been awesome to grow spiritually with four or five other dudes, and get to play music and talk to kids that you would normally not get to talk to about God and spiritual things; it’s pretty awesome. I never would have thought that I would get to talk to half the people I get to talk to. So that’s probably the biggest thing for me. It’s definitely hard, but when kids come up to you and talk to you about problems they’ve had in their life. They start telling you about how your music has saved them… it’s pretty mind blowing to me. Personally, that’s the biggest thing for me. I can’t say really for the rest of the band. I don’t really know their thoughts on personal things like that. But for me that’s definitely what it is.

Within the album there’s a sense of spiritual warfare that’s evidenced through each song. You guys seem to dwell on the idea of fighting through that struggle. Simply put, why is it worth the fight?

JH: I guess through our standpoint there’s a lot of struggle in anyone’s life, whether you’re a Christian or not. We all, in the band, have our own personal battles and struggles, but we just always feel like the more you fight through battles and rely on God and take His hand and put your faith in Him, the outcome is always a million times better. There’s always a positive outcome no matter how negative things can get in life. If you put your faith in anything really, except doubting yourself. Putting your faith in something that you believe strongly, the outcome will always be the best it can. We just saw it. In our point of view, it was putting your faith in God and God’s work. We’ve always done that and He’s always taken care of us. The outcome of any struggle we’ve been through as a band or personally, we’ve always seen the best outcome and it’s always made going through what you go through… it makes what you get at the end feel so much better to have. Like you went through all this stuff and you get to have what you’re trying to accomplish at the end, what you’ve struggled so hard to get. Knowing that you’ve put all your faith in something like that is a pretty big deal when it happens. So a lot of our CD goes through those trials and each one having a different situation or a different time in life or a different struggle in life. Fighting through something is definitely always worth it.

How do you interpret these truths into music?

JH: I’m not real sure. Lyrically, I didn’t write most of the lyrics. But I did write a few. For me it’s always like I sit and dwell about how is it that God would want me to say this to where people would understand it, instead of it’s just not me or whoever is saying your generic phrase or sentence to somebody that they’ve heard a million times. How can you get through to somebody else through a different sentence? Just wording it differently to where it’s more interesting or catches your ear, to where you want to listen and read what’s going on. A lot of the lyrics, we tried really hard to make somewhat different so people actually listen to what’s being said or want to read the lyrics.

How about musically?

JH: Musically, it’s a little different in a way. I listen to a lot of different music so I guess I try to put them together into one and play what comes out. I have ideas and I just record this and that and change them. But I always try to play what feels good to me, what I feel is groovy at the time. There’s so many bands now, so it’s kind of hard to be a different band of some sort but we always try to strive to be unique in some way, to stand out a little.

I appreciate that you guys stick to your roots but also are not afraid to try new things. I definitely appreciated that in this album as opposed to the EPs.

JH: We were a lot younger in the EPs, musically. Whenever you’re starting out you don’t know what style you want to be… “I like this band and this band and this band…” so let’s try to make every song sound like a different band. That’s what we did for a while, so now we’re kind of like, “alright, that was enough of that.” We still go through those times where we still talk about, “what if we wrote a song like this?” And it’s usually really dumb. On the album we tried to be diverse but not all have the same feel to every song. We wanted every song to stand out in their own way instead of just having a CD that all the songs kind of run together.

What is to become of Fit For a King?

JH: I think for the rest of the year we have a couple of little runs here and there, four or five little shows in a row. I think we’re going take the rest of the year off for holidays like Thanksgiving and Christmas. Then, at the beginning of the year, we have a couple more tours lined up. We’re getting in the process of being confirmed and what not so we’ll be doing that at the beginning of the year. We just started recently, not really talking about another album, but just recording stuff for fun and sending it to each other again. The tracking process of Descendants feels like a really long time ago, actually it was almost a year ago when we wrote all of the songs, so it’s been a while even though the CD just came out. But we’re kind of getting back into we want to write. We might be doing a little bit of that just to see, feeling out some new songs. but who knows? We’ll definitely be touring all of next year.