| A catch-up call with YELLOWCARD's RYAN KEY. |
| Written by Sarah Mudgway |
| Friday, 26 August 2011 17:01 |
 Since announcing their reformation in August 2010, YELLOWCARD have been on a non-stop journey of writing, recording and touring. Releasing their highly-anticipated comeback album ‘When You’re Through Thinking, Say Yes’ in February of this year, the band received positive feedback from critics and fans alike, and immediately began a seemingly endless cycle of touring with shows all across the Northern Hemisphere. Finally returning Down Under to Australia as part of Soundwave’s COUNTER REVOLUTION, Coup De Main had the honour of speaking with singer/guitarist RYAN KEY ahead of their trip, to talk about their new album, what fans can expect from their live shows, if they will ever come back to New Zealand... and a prank that went down on their recent tour with All Time Low... "It’s pretty disgusting, so be prepared." P.S. Yellowcard are set to play COUNTER REVOLUTION in Australia from September 24th to October 3rd! Click HERE for the tour dates and ticketing information. COUP DE MAIN: Hello! How are you today? YELLOWCARD - RYAN KEY: I'm good. I had a little songwriting session today with a friend of mine so I'm just kind of finishing that up as this interview started. CDM: Awesome. So you’re heading to Australia shortly for Counter Revolution - your first time Down Under since reuniting - how excited are you for that? RYAN: We are so excited! I've been saying in a lot of these interviews that it’s not just that we're coming to do these festivals, but also that we're going to Western Australia for the first time. We've been going to Australia since 2004 but we've never gotten to play in Perth or Adelaide so the fact that we get to do that is one of the things we're most excited about. Then put on top of that, all the bands on the festival... it's going to be rad. CDM: What should fans expect from a Yellowcard live performance? RYAN: It's really just solid right now. We've been really focused as a band on where we are going and the future of the band, and inclusive in that is how we are performing and how seriously we are taking shows at this point in our career. We have a lot of fans coming up to us after our recent shows saying "I've seen you guys, you know, fifteen times and that was the best I've ever heard you sound!" - and that makes us feel so great. [The shows are] super high energy, and we try to put together a great set which mixes songs from all the records up and we are just performing well as musicians and as a unit. Everywhere we are going right now we're like: "We wish we would have sounded like this six or seven years ago when we first started travelling!" So it's going to be awesome. CDM: And I have to ask, will New Zealand see Yellowcard for a show here in the future? RYAN: I mean, I'm certainly not sitting around at night thinking like: "Man I hate New Zealand, I never want to play there again!" <laughs> If I had more control of where I went in the world, we would definitely be coming back. I remember that trip and how gorgeous it is there and how great the shows were. I remember how much fun we had, people were jumping off of that building, bungy-jumping and it was awesome... I definitely want to go back it's just all in someone else’s hands.  CDM: ‘When You’re Through Thinking, Say Yes’ was released earlier this year, how are you feeling about the record now? RYAN: Great. The reactions have been amazing, and in the places where a band like us would be critically reviewed all of those have been phenomenal. The positivity surrounding the record from fans and critics has been pretty overwhelming for us - we worked really hard and we had a purpose in mind and wanted to get people excited about our band and try to capture the energy and the sound that made people fall in love with our band in the first place, and it feels like the reaction we're getting is the one we wanted. CDM: Considering that it was the first new Yellowcard album in a few years and there was a lot of media-hype surrounding it, did you feel a sense of pressure and nervousness ahead of its release? RYAN: Yeah, of course. At this point in our career we are pretty good at not paying too much attention to any negative criticism - I don't pay any attention to it, I don't care or need it in my life - like if you don’t like it then you can enjoy your life behind the computer screen where you can talk shit about whatever or whoever you want, it doesn’t bother me. All we were doing was just waiting to read the reviews from our friends or people we knew were excited, but sure we were nervous, mostly about our fans and what they would think. Did we do it right and would they even care? The first song we released on Absolutepunk.net we crashed the site in less than two hours! I don’t even remember but it was crazy and definitely a moment in the band where we were like "all is well, we're okay". There were a couple of days leading up to that where we were like: "Okay what's going to happen when that song goes up?" But it's been epic. We keep getting some new cool opportunity or show; it feels like everything is firing on all cylinders. CDM: In a previous interview you mentioned that ‘For You And Your Denial’ was written for anyone who was trying to overcome the fear of what others think. From your experience of putting your heart on the line with your music, what advice would you give musicians, or just anyone who is struggling with that fear? RYAN: I think the most important thing is if you go onto sites, especially younger bands who read what people are saying about them, they're going to read it online on message-boards, Twitter and Facebook, and so if you're going to open yourself up to reading it, you have to be able to laugh at the people who don’t care for it and appreciate the people who do. If you’re going to let someone sitting in a basement who is in a band you haven't heard of tear you down, then you probably don't have the stomach for this industry. For me, I almost enjoy reading that [negative] stuff as it makes me laugh - it's usually pretty funny, if you can have a sense of humour about it. Have confidence about what you do, and take every positive comment and let that hold all the weight compared to the ones who don’t. It is easy to stop noticing the [comments] of the people who love you, you go searching for the ones who don’t and that's the wrong thing to do. I know that because I did that for a lot of years, and I don't anymore and I'm much happier. CDM: Has it been hard readjusting to tour-life, after having a lot of time to spend at home with family and friends? RYAN: Definitely for me, the break we took, I used it to solely focus on being with my family. I was still writing music and travelling but I moved from L.A. back to the East Coast and was just with my family. My cousin who is like my brother, he and his wife had a baby during that time and I was really connected to them in a way that I wasn’t able to be through my twenties because of how crazy things got with the band. So that has been the hard thing for me. This whole thing is so much less than a party now, it is about my future and doing great work with the band so I'm out there to do that, but I do miss being close to my family as I’ve had three years straight to be with them. But the one thing during the break, the thing I missed the most was touring. I was still able to write and record but without the band I didn’t have a way to go travel and play shows and that’s what I love the most so you’ve got to take one with the other. I feel like I was built to be on tour. CDM: Upon Yellowcard’s return, you guys signed to Hopeless Records. After being on a major label, what was it that drew you to Hopeless? RYAN: I think that their passion and excitement about the band stood out above everyone else. We knew early on that we didn’t want to take the major label route. It's a scary time for rock and roll music - last week another one of the biggest rock radio stations shut down in Chicago, and they had been around forever and now they’re just gone as rock and roll doesn’t have a place on the radio anymore. And that's all you need a major label for, to get on the radio. I mean, what else can't you do with an indie label? I think we went into this knowing we weren’t really wanting to play the radio game, and what was much more important to us was having a family of people who are close to the band and devoted to the band and invested in it and not just trying to create a product or signing us for novelty because we had a hit a few years ago. The guys at Hopeless are going at this the same way we are, we're not trying to play on a stage with old bands, we're trying to do what we love to do and create music that is relevant so that our fans can grow with us. CDM: Your last album ‘Paper Walls’ leaked a month or so before its release. Were there any extra measures put in place to try prevent that happening with ‘For When You’re Through Thinking, Say Yes’? RYAN: I don’t think so. I feel like actually the whole downloading illegally of music has improved a little bit. With sites like Limewire being shut down, I think that has slowed it down and helped with the leaking thing. You really have to be a computer person to go on the torrent sites... I don't know how to do any of that and I’m pretty computer-savvy. So I don't think we did anything different this time around, I think the landscape has just changed a little. The new record leaked a week early and that was awesome.  CDM: Your music video for 'Hang You Up' features you working in a restaurant with an ex-girlfriend-character who isn’t into your music. Is that music video a reference to a real-life situation you or one of your band-mates have experienced? Or is it totally fictional? RYAN: It was not in reference to anything. The director of the video is an awesome dude and an old friend of the band, and it was totally his idea. He came to us and we talked on the phone a lot before we decided on the treatment of the video and he was like: "Look man this song is obviously close to you and it's heavy content-wise but I think maybe we shouldn’t take ourselves too seriously with the video and maybe poke fun at it a little." So that was where we went with it and we'd never really done that before. We've always had fun videos but we had never tried to do something that was comedic or totally disconnected from the actual song so it was awesome and I think it totally worked. CDM: You’ve recently been touring a lot with All Time Low... do you have any tour stories you’d like to share? RYAN: <laughs> Uhmm... well... I guess I can say this... this isn't for Disney Radio or anything right... I can say whatever? CDM: You can say whatever you like. RYAN: Well, we usually do last day of tour pranks where all the bands prank each other, usually on-stage in front of the whole crowd. So this is what we did for All Time Low... the last show of the U.S. tour was in their hometown of Baltimore, Maryland, and it was huge with five thousand or so people there. The night before the show - this is pretty disgusting so be prepared - we went online to find the most graphic-sounding porn we could find, which had as many people involved as possible, like the most huge gang-bang sound we could find. So we found one and recorded it, and [on the night of the show] we went over to the side of the stage to the monitor board. All Time Low would go on-stage and play a few songs without breaking and then they would stop and talk to the crowd for a few minutes, so as soon as the third song ended we blasted the audio into their in-ear monitors while they were talking to the crowd and it was amazing. CDM: That’s a great prank. RYAN: We just wanted to do something extremely ridiculous and over-the-top. Watching them try to talk to the crowd was incredible. They’re great dudes and they’re big fans of Yellowcard so it was cool, when we first got on the tour they were pretty geeked out that we were on the tour with them. CDM: From what I know of All Time Low it seems like a very fitting prank. RYAN: And that’s the thing! It was so fitting for their whole thing! CDM: How did they react, once the audio started playing? RYAN: They had no idea what was going on, they could not figure out where it was coming from or what was happening. CDM: And finally, are there any other newer bands you’re a fan of currently? RYAN: I’m friends with some guys in the band Every Avenue and I’ve written a couple of songs with them. I got a song that I wrote with them on their last record and another one is going on their new record so I’m really excited about that. I’m trying to do a lot of writing and production outside of Yellowcard so be looking for their record in the Fall [NZ’s Spring]. |
