Bree!

The BIG interview debuts the same day as Yellowcard's Paper Walls does (July 17th!!!) but Jason Tate was nice enough to post a teaser. I posted one of the questions, the other you have to go to Absolutepunk for.

Lights and Sounds may not have been as critically accepted as some of the band’s previous work. In hindsight – what are your thoughts on that album?

I suppose it depends how you look at “critically accepted” – I mean, when the album first came out, you could say, in many ways, for a variety of publications that it was released to critical acclaim. It depends what and where you read. For example, many publications that had sort of shunned the band before for - actually similar reasons I read in your review of the new album in reference to “pop-punk” - that very word - and I think some of those people came around and said, “oh this record is very different and it’s sort of taken them out of that genre.” And on the other side we have a lot of kids who were previously fans of the band, and they maybe didn’t like that. You know?

So I look at it like this – first, it’s hard to include One for the Kids in this analogy because that album was so different, we wrote it at 18, and many of those songs came from like 3 other bands I had been in. So if you look at these three records (Ocean Ave., Lights and Sounds, and Paper Walls) you’ll find this: Ocean Avenue was a record that was very much about moving out and finding your place in the world and looking at everything that you wanted to be. Lights and Sounds was then a record that was about the realization that you had gotten lost. And where people grabbed onto Ocean Ave. and applied it to their lives – both in the music and the lyrics – Lights and Sounds was a record that came from a completely different perspective. It was completely introverted and came from – I wish I had a different word but I don’t – “darker” place. And I don’t think I ever expected everyone to grab on to those feelings – I think our hope was that maybe we had done something that could transcend the genre. And I really think you have to go through that – we can’t make the same record over and over again. We change as people and we feel our fans do too – they’ve grown with our band. Now you look at Paper Walls, which is very much a record of hope and finding yourself again. It’s after you’ve come through all of that – going to the height of it – and picking yourself back up again. And by “hitting rock bottom” I don’t mean in record sales or fame or any of that shit. I mean personally – emotionally.

So I suppose there was always the hope that we had done something great and maybe different – Sean and his arrangements on Lights and Sounds, for example, was a huge undertaking. And I remember saying back when the album was about to come out that there were going to be some people that were alienated by the record. But that was necessary for our career and for me as a person to get those feelings and emotions behind me. Because, to not really get specific, I was not taking very good care of my body at that part of my life, falling into a lot of the common pitfalls that come with being in a rock band. And I think if I wouldn’t have made that record, Lights and Sounds, I wouldn’t have made it through it and came out of those pits with a new feeling of hope. And now Paper Walls is the story, the feeling, of what it’s like to be out of those holes, looking back, no regrets, but smarter and having grown through them.
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Who's ready for a hopeful record? I know I am :)