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"   Photo: Valeria Cherchi  October&amp;#039;s nearly over, and with it comes the close of 2013&amp;#039;s music festival season as the industry readies for year-end lists, reissues of crazy vinyl packages, and numerous global New Year&amp;#039;s Eve shows. For Half Moon Run, 2013 will go down in the record books as a major year: The Montreal indie aficionados (Dylan Phillips, Devon Portielje, Conner Molander, and Isaac Symonds) spent a hefty chunk of it on tour with Of Monsters and Men and have hit a handful of massive international stages, playing festivals like Glastonbury and Canada&amp;#039;s own Osheaga before making their way to the CMJ Music Marathon in NYC last week. In the midst of their multiple shows, Phillips\u2014Half Moon Run&amp;#039;s musically ambidextrous man on vocals, drums, and keyboard\u2014met us by the bar at the Bowery Hotel to talk about life on the road and how the group has come to be such a well-oiled machine. Looking at the festivals you&amp;#039;ve played, the list is long: Glastonbury, Osheaga, South by Southwest, etc. Are you a band that thrives on the chaos surrounding the festival machine? We became a bit desensitized to it out of survival, really, because if you get too stressed out and freaked out, it&amp;#039;ll kill you. You can&amp;#039;t do this forever and be stressed out about everything all the time. It even becomes kind of funny, or kind of a game. We&amp;#039;re just like, &amp;quot;Whatever! We&amp;#039;ll show up and do what we do.&amp;quot; Sometimes we get [to the showcase] and it&amp;#039;s complete chaos and everyone&amp;#039;s screaming and freaking out at each other, and we&amp;#039;re just like, &amp;quot;It doesn&amp;#039;t matter if we freak out! Let&amp;#039;s be efficient and not stress out.&amp;quot;   Photo: The band performing at Lollapalooza / Getty Images  Were there any bands that struck your fancy on the CMJ lineup this year? Apart from the showcases we&amp;#039;re doing, we don&amp;#039;t have time to go do anything. It&amp;#039;s a good thing and a bad thing at the same time. This happened with a lot of festivals over the summer. We tried to not even look at the lineup, because when we would, we&amp;#039;d go, &amp;quot;Oh, I&amp;#039;d love to see them! They&amp;#039;re playing, but we have to play our show and leave right away!&amp;quot; I really wanted to see Moderat, and they played at Lowlands in the Netherlands. I even saw them at dinner, and I was like, &amp;quot;Damn!&amp;quot; What&amp;#039;s the biggest lesson you&amp;#039;ve learned playing festivals together? It&amp;#039;s definitely an exercise in endurance in a chaotic situation. We&amp;#039;ve built a good system we can rely on where we don&amp;#039;t stress ourselves out anymore. Everyone&amp;#039;s got their job, everyone knows what to do. We just do it efficiently and calmly. Now that you&amp;#039;re a well-oiled, mobile machine, are you guys able to work on new material while you&amp;#039;re juggling a demanding touring schedule? We try to. It&amp;#039;s tough for us, because we usually take a long time to get stuff together, let stuff grow, work on it a ton, and come back to the space and work on [the music] some more. Lately, it&amp;#039;s been like, &amp;quot;Okay, we&amp;#039;re home for three days\u2014let&amp;#039;s write a song!&amp;quot; And then we try it out on the road. Sometimes, when you miss the spark, it&amp;#039;s hard to get back to it. We have a lot of new ideas that have kind of hit the graveyard, which is unfortunate. What we really want\u2014and I think we&amp;#039;re gonna get it\u2014in 2014 is some real time to write.  Is Montreal a good city for that? Would you say it&amp;#039;s a good city for cutting your teeth in, creatively? Yeah, I think it&amp;#039;s that kind of city. For me, I wasn&amp;#039;t planning on being in a band, really. The opportunity just kind of came up because so many people are doing that kind of thing. I tried something out, and it ended up becoming my life.  What are you most homesick for when you leave Montreal? You kind start to lose your sense of home without really realizing it. On the road, you just kind of go day by day. You have this baseline happiness because amazing, exciting things happen, but you don&amp;#039;t really realize how distant home becomes until you get back. The hardest thing I think is feeling alienated when you&amp;#039;re back at home, when all the friends you&amp;#039;re close with have been up to different things and your experience pushes you further away.  See a video of the band performing recently at the CBC festival, below.      "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.elle.com/culture/music/news/a16434/half-moon-run-cmj-2013/>