| Chicken Soup for the Soul: THE WONDER YEARS edition! |
| Written by Sarah Mudgway |
| Monday, 09 May 2011 09:17 |
 It's 8PM on a Monday night in Birmingham, Alabama, and DAN ‘SOUPY’ CAMPBELL - the vocalist and lyricist for THE WONDER YEARS - is spending a night off from their current U.S. tour sitting outside his friend’s house in the band's tour van, at the tail-end of an evening full of interviews. It’s been a non-stop year for the ‘realist pop-punk’ band from Philadelphia who thanks to a relentless touring schedule, an unreserved honesty in their lyrics and a determined work ethic, has captured the attention of critics and fans worldwide, catapulting the band from a life in the suburbs to one of the most respected and popular pop-punk bands in the scene. "I think my body wishes that [it could take a break] a lot more often than my mind does. There are certainly days where my back will be like 'fuck you dude, you’re really taking five years off of your life by doing this' - you can feel it in your muscles and in your bones that you’re destroying your body. But mentally, we have this drive and we just go." With the release of their upcoming record ‘Suburbia I’ve Given You All And Now I’m Nothing’ fast approaching - an album which has been listed across many sites as one of the most anticipated albums of 2011 - Coup De Main was lucky enough to speak with Soupy about the meaning behind the album, the state of the pop-punk scene, and the importance of honesty... COUP DE MAIN: First and foremost, the thing that all your New Zealand fans want to know is... will we see The Wonder Years in New Zealand anytime soon? THE WONDER YEARS - DAN ‘SOUPY’ CAMPBELL: I would love to play New Zealand, that’s a thing we’ve talked about. The thing with this particular tour was that there was an option to possibly play New Zealand dates I believe, but we financially couldn’t handle it. We would have lost a lot more money which, you know, that factors into the decision in some way. We don’t have money to lose. If we lose money it means we don’t pay our bills. CDM: Your new album ‘Suburbia I’ve Given You All And Now I’m Nothing’ is being released in June. What can you tell us about that album in general? SOUPY: I have a serious issue with brevity so this might drag on but I’m going to try my best to get it all out. Musically, The Wonder Years has always been a pop-punk band and we still remain a pop-punk band on this record, but we decided that we are influenced by all sorts of incredible artists and it would be dishonest of us to not allow those influences into our music. So we wrote a pop-punk record that was influenced by bands like The Mountain Goats, American Football, The Hope Conspiracy, Envy, Thursday, and The Hold Steady. I think that on a lot of levels there are some new dimensions to pop-punk that we’re exploring on this record but at the same time it’s still rooted firmly in the genre. Thematically and lyrically, this is a record about deciding where home is for you. It’s a record about weighing your discontent with the place you’ve always considered home, versus the positive feelings that make you call it home in the first place and taking that conversation and using it to make an educated decision on where your place in the world is. I feel that too often our mentality is “I will go anywhere but here...” but when all you do is run, when you get to the next place there is nothing there for you either. You can’t just go anywhere else and expect it to be better - it’s only better if there is a reason behind it, in my experience. So this is a record about deciding where you want to be, and why you want to be there. If you want to leave, you should know where you’re going and why you want to go there. CDM: Does that relate to the lyric in your song 'Coffee Eyes', which states that "you’ll always end up right back where you left..." - like you can run to the next place, but while it may be a different location, you’re still the same person with the same issues... SOUPY: There is a lyric on a track you haven’t heard yet... it goes: "No-one knows where they’re going they just know they want out of here... they’re like cigarettes dropped on a highway, they’ll smash and scatter on the ground somewhere else." So it is kind of like, you can disperse and run somewhere else but if you don’t have any desire, or passion, or reason for doing it, you’ll just burn out there. It doesn’t really matter, you could have burned out here. It is about finding out where your heart is and why your heart is there. CDM: Tell us a little about the title of the album... SOUPY: The name of the record comes from an Allen Ginsberg poem - it’s an adaption of a Ginsberg line. The line is "America I’ve given you all and now I’m nothing..." and that poem ‘America’ is one that I feel embodies the same dichotomous relationship that I’m talking about on the record. In a lot of ways, I feel like our record is, unbeknown to Ginsberg, in dialogue with his poem. CDM: The first track released from the record ‘Local Man Ruins Everything’, contains the line: "I’m not a self-help book, I’m just a fucked up kid." How did you handle going from being a guy writing songs in your apartment to this somewhat elevated ‘self-help book’ status with fans continuously saying how much your lyrics have helped them through their own life struggles? SOUPY: The difficult thing is that when we wrote ‘The Upsides’ I thought that the record was a decree of victory. I thought that ‘The Upsides’ was my catharsis and that I had realized how good life could be and that I was set to appreciate that forever and my depression had been washed away. Then right when ‘The Upsides’ came out, that month, the bottom fell out from me and all of the things I had going for me in the life I was happy with, had gone. So all of a sudden I was this dude that was writing a record about how I wasn’t depressed, and I was horribly depressed. But what I realized through that, is ‘The Upsides’ wasn’t a record about winning, it was a record about fight. If you’re fucked up, if there is something wrong with you, it’s always going to be wrong with you. It’s your brain creating those chemicals. The depression is in you, and it’s always going to be there. The thing I came to realize about ‘The Upsides’ after the release date wasn’t that I won, it was about the fact that you can’t give up. You’re never going to win, it won’t ever be over... but you should always keep fighting. And so the reason that line was written was to explain that I didn’t win; I’m not like some guru, I’m not going to give you a seminar, I don’t have the answers, you know what I mean? It’s less that I have the answers, and I can’t even help you by giving you the answers. The only way I can help you is to say: “I’ve been there, maybe I’m there right now... maybe I’m back there, who knows. But I’m fucked up too, and it is not the end of the world.” CDM: You are known for writing lyrics straight from the heart - an open and honest ‘ripped straight from the diary’ view of your life. Do you ever get nervous about putting so much of yourself out there? SOUPY: It’s funny, I have never been asked that question before, and I’ve gotten it three times today <laughs> and I still don’t think I really have an answer. It’s never something I really thought about, I just write what I think is the right thing to say. I guess it does make sense that I am inadvertently putting myself out there more than I would if I was writing songs about other people’s lives, but I think that we are an honest band and the art that is inside of me is this art, and I don’t think I could do it any other way. This isn’t some sort of like high and mighty speech about the nature of art, but I will say that this is what I have in me and this is what I’m putting out there. CDM: You’ve got to be honest to what’s inside you, that’s what it’s all about... SOUPY: Right! CDM: You worked with the legendary Steve Evetts on this album, a man who has produced some great albums such as Saves The Day’s ‘Through Being Cool’ - what was it like working with him? SOUPY: Working with Steve was really, really dream-come-true cool, not only because he made a lot of my favourite records, but because he was aware of the record that we wanted to make and he never tried to curb that. He never said "well what if we tried these things instead..." and like try to push us in a different direction - he was less of like a re-directional tool and more of a guide. He, with his experience, could almost see our goal clearer than we could. We’ve only made one... well we’ve made two, but we’ve really only made one full-length record in our lives, and he’s made hundreds... so he knows how to get to that goal and make his way towards it easier. He helped to lead us there and that was really amazing for us. CDM: ‘The Upsides’ leaked about a month or so before it was due to be released - has there been extra efforts put in place to prevent the same thing occurring with ‘Suburbia’? Do you feel more prepared for a leak, if such a thing should occur this time around? SOUPY: 'The Upsides’ leaked because of a service called Spotify which is supposed to be a service for artists which sells subscriptions and people can listen to the music. They were careless and they put our record out way before the release date. That same thing happened to Title Fight recently with Pandora, so we limited who got the record this time round. Most people in the press, instead of sending out 150 copies of the record or putting together a password protected stream, most people only heard three songs. And surprisingly those three songs haven’t leaked yet and I almost thought that they would so I’m really grateful to all the people who were trustworthy and held those close to themselves, but we were pretty particular with that list as well. As far as the actual album, I want to say that a total of less than ten people in the entire world have a copy of that record right now that aren’t a part of The Wonder Years team. So we’re just trying to limit it, but you know, we’re living in a world where a leak is more or less inevitable - records leak, that is what happens - the Internet has won. But we can do our best to put up a little bit of a fight, and when we lose that fight, which we will because everyone does, we can bow out graciously. I think the important thing in regards to leaks isn’t that people are not paying for what they used to pay for. Obviously that sucks, but it’s also an accepted fact in the music business today and that’s where it is. You have to figure out a different way to monetize your career and pay your bills and get people’s money for this creation, or you can’t really keep being creative. But the real tragedy is that music has become this commodity. It’s no longer difficult in any way to get. There’s no longer any money, or effort on your part as a fan. A record drops onto the Internet, you press a button, and then you have it in three minutes or less. Then you listen to it, and if you don’t like it you write it off. When I was younger, at times it was hard to even find a record you liked. I remember it took me two months to find Rufio’s 'Perhaps, I Suppose...' - I had heard a couple of songs that a friend had put on a mix CD but to actually buy the record I couldn’t find it, and I had to search for it and put in some time and energy. When I bought 'Four Minute Mile' by The Get Up Kids and I listened to it the first time, I didn’t like it. I didn’t get it, it didn’t hit me. But I spent twelve bucks on it, and when I was fourteen, twelve bucks was a lot of fucking money so I listened to it again and again and by the third time I loved it, and [by] the fourth time it was amazing, and now ten years later it’s still one of my favourite records of all time. Because music is so easy, because fans don’t put in any energy to get it, it’s really easy to just write it off and that becomes a serious tragedy as you could miss out on something that is amazing. I can’t imagine what my views on music would be now if I had written off ‘Four Minute Mile’ after the first listen. CDM: Speaking of The Get Up Kids, the genre of pop-punk seems to have been making a comeback over the past couple of years - bands like Blink-182, Yellowcard and The Get Up Kids, have reunited after going on hiatus… why do you think it’s having this resurgence and also who are some of your favourite up-and-comers? SOUPY: Why pop-punk is having a resurgence [and] why are these bands getting back together? For some of them I want to believe that it is a genuine love for what they do. For others, I feel like they’re seeing that there are bands that sound kind of like what they used to sound like that are growing in popularity and bands have realized "fuck we could put out another record and make a ton of money again..." and they’re almost playing off the success of bands like Four Year Strong that are coming up really hard right now, or bands like New Found Glory, who have been at it the whole time sticking it the fuck out. Some of these old bands I think genuinely love what they do and are really pushing for it, some of these bands need to pay their mortgage and you know what, who am I to judge if you want to pay bills? The climate that brought that about, the up-and-coming climate, is a scene full of bands that are all friends that may not all sound the same. I would put us in the same scene as La Dispute, as Into It. Over It and as Fireworks. Those four bands sound nothing alike but we are all a part of the same scene as we all share the same ethics. We all do this because we genuinely love it. We all have the same honest approach to it and we all said: "Fuck the world, we’re doing it whether you want us to do it or not. We don’t need your agents to book me a show, I’ll book my own. I don’t need your label to put out my record, I’ll put out my own or my friend will start a label and put it out for me." We kind of circumvented the whole system. None of these bands who are a part of this scene made Myspace profiles and begged people to sign them. Everyone that is a part of this scene is a band that worked hard, that clawed up from the bottom and said: "It doesn’t matter if you want me here or not, I’m coming." We’ve been in a climate for years now where you were provided with soulless heartless music... and nothing against soulless heartless music, I mean, you do you, but at some point kids are going to want a return to form, for people to care about what they do. CDM: People are craving for the honest in a world full of fakes? SOUPY: Yeah! CDM: That brings us to the end of our time... is there anything you want to say to your New Zealand fans? SOUPY: Yeah, June 14th - ‘Surburbia I’ve Given You All And Now I’m Nothing’... and hopefully I see some of you at the Mix and Mash Tour in Australia.  |
