 |
Fresh from an impromptu vaction, (the result of lead singer Tyson Ritter's unexpected leg infection), and raring to get back on the road, we join The All-American Rejects' lead guitarist Nick Wheeler, on the second stop in their sold-out U.K tour, to talk about travelling, Timberland, and tattoos. |
How are you guys doing?
“Ok, just had a very large Indian meal, from urm, Al Babi? ‘A-l-b-a-b-i’ or something like that, I can’t pronounce it but it was very delicious.”
Good, that’s a good start to the show.
“Yeh, well we’ll see if I can keep it down.”
Have you guys been travelling much?
“Yeh, well we just had a couple weeks off, which is the most we’ve had off in the year that we’ve been touring on this record, last night in London was the first show back out, it was really fun, a little bit of remembering how to play parts, two weeks can take its toll, but we had a lot of fun last night, and this venue is always great" (Manchester Academy), "We haven’t been here since they re-modelled it but we did a sound check earlier and it sounded great, felt great, so we’re excited.”
When did you get into Manchester then?
“I woke up and we were on this bus", (He laughs), "it was about 2.15 and yeh, pretty much went right into sound check.”
Fair enough! So you haven’t done that much sightseeing?
“No, I mean we had the curry earlier but that’s about it.”
So how did you spend your two weeks off?
“We went to Florida, Tyson and I have a place there, we hung out, watched a bunch of movies, it was cool.”
Just relaxing?
“Well we’re so busy on the road; people say "what do you do when you’re not doing this?" you know what I do? I do NOTHING, absolutely nothing!" (He laughs).
Well I bet it makes a nice change from everything being so hectic?
“Yeh, the other half was in LA, kind of spread-out all over the place, but it was good, then I think we all got a little stir crazy, and had to get back out here”
(Tyson Ritter, the band’s lead singer enters in fancy dress)
Nick: “Is it headdress night tonight?”
Tyson: “yeh I think i’m gunna go full-on native.”
Nick: “Halloween is all-month long by the way, you know like ‘birthday week?, it’s your birthday all week long? Well Halloween is a month-long deal.”
Do you do a different outfit every night?
Nick: “Last night he was a ...”
Tyson: “Jailbird.”
Nick: “Jailbird, yeh, in the old-style, black and white striped stuff.”
So, you guys formed when you were still in high school, and got signed up pretty quickly, how did that kind of over-night fame affect you?
“Well I guess it seems over-night but we definitely put in some time, we were in a van playing birthday parties for quite a while, it’s been baby steps with this band. The first record made a little bit of noise, we got to come over here for the first time, with the second record we went a lot more places, sold more records, and the third record we got a number one song, Gives You Hell, that’s the first time that’s ever happened, but there’s still a lot more things to do, so baby steps. We’ll get there, but to us it doesn’t seem over-night, it’s been ten years now.” (He laughs).
No I guess not then, in those ten years you’ve done a lot of travelling, a lot of touring, have you had a favourite tour?
“Favourite tour, we were talking about this last night on the bus, about this tour that we did through South Asia, like Malaysia, Indonesia, Taiwan, really South Asia, you get it. Then we went over to Australia and it was a really fun tour, and wonderful to look back on that, on this album cycle. Then again, it’s only day two on this one, there’s potential for this to take over but we’ll see”
You’ve got a huge fan base, people are already queuing up out there to get in, some of them have even made posters, have you had any particularly spectacular run-ins with fans?
“There has to be one more recently, we have a couple of classic ‘creepy fan’ stories, but I’m trying to think of something more recent” (Calls to Tyson), “Hey what’s the fan story we decided we were going to start telling?”
Tyson: “I forgot.”
Nick: “Urm, we did have a new one though, I forgot what it is”
Tyson: “it was a good one too”
Nick: “well y’no, there’s some crazies, but there’s also some - ah ok, here you go, last week there was this bunch of kids on Twitter, and there was this one kid who was sending me pictures of tattoos they’d gotten with our lyrics on it, or pictures; there was one Straightjacket Feeling, there were several with Move Along, and I just re-tweet them, sent them back out like ‘here everybody check this out, fucking bad-ass’ and that was really cool, that’s not crazy, that’s devotion to a band and to music. That’s something that’s way bigger than any of us individually, that’s us together impacting a person enough to put something permanent on their body, that’s wild.”
You said you had your first studio album out last year, do you think your style has changed at all?
“We’ve never been a band that’s set out to try and make any type of music, we’ve never tried to fit into a scene, we just do what we want to do, write songs that we have fun playing, we’re not trying to put anything on, I think it’s just a good, natural progression of the band trying to find it’s place, and just have fun doing it. We’ve played around with a lot of things this time, y’no, third record, on a major label and we sold three million records before this so we had a nice budget and some money to play around with. We got to bring in like a full-on orchestra, we got to bring in a choir and go up to Skywalker Ranch, where George Lucas has all his movies scored, and we used the biggest live room in North America, to cut the drums for Back to Me, Another Heart Calls, and The Wind Blows, and we got to do the whole thing to tape, which, most records are recorded on computers these days and manipulated, and what not, tape is not only time consuming, but it’s fucking expensive!” (He laughs).
So you’re given more opportunities as you go along. How about your videos? You won an Award for Move Along, do you enjoy making them?
“You know, when we first started doing them, the first one or two videos were exciting because it was all new to us, but then we had to start fitting them in in the middle of tours, and it got really inconvenient, and I personally, hated making them, but then during Move Along, we really started to embrace them, and we felt like we were doing something really special, with Dirty Little Secret and Move Along especially, and now, Gives You Hell, well, people have talked about that for a long time, they’re definitely important and we take pride in them now, it’s still not anything that I would ever do unless it was part of it, I would never want to act or be on a set of any kind, it’s the most boring thing, it’s so much sitting around and waiting, but yeh, the end result is worth it.”
Well Gives You Hell kind of turned into the anti-Valentine’s Day theme, is that something you set out to do or did it just happen?
“No, our band either has great timing, or God-awful timing, and that just happened to be the right song at the right time, or the right video at the right time, and yeh, it’s funny that you say that because we said that before, it came out earlier this year, and was the anti-Valentine’s Day song, and people have said it’s the guy’s version of You Oughta Know” (by Alanis Morissette), “I don’t know, I don’t want to discount the song but a lot of it was good timing.”
Ok, you’ve toured with a lot of bands, are you planning any collaborations in the future?
“Well we just wrote with Rivers” (Cuomo, lead singer) “From Weezer for their new record, it’s not like a ‘featuring’ or a collaboration of anything, it was just something really cool we got to do, and we might do some more stuff like that, We’ve never been the band to go 'oh let’s go do a song with, I don’t know, Timberland’ or whatever, so yeh, nothing on the Horizon.”
Are you working on any new material at the moment?
“We’re just starting to talk about it, this records a monster, we’re still on this ride, it’s hard to find time but we will.”
You’re obviously spending a lot of time on the tour bus right now, what do you do for fun on there?
“Well we got our new tour bus last night, and it’s really nice, I’m excited about it, we spend a lot of time laying about.”
Fair enough, so, any words of advice for wannabe rock stars out there?
“Yeh, being good at guitar hero doesn’t matter, when you rely completely on MySpace and the internet to get your music out, it’s not going to help your band grow; it’s a great tool to gain and expand on your fan-base, but you’ve got to get out there and play music, you’ve got to hone your crafts, there’s so many bands these days that get signed and get so popular so suddenly, that fucking suck and they can’t play!” (Laughs).
Thinking of any bands in particular there?
“Ah, too many to name!”
What can we expect from tonight’s show?
"Tonight’s show? Like I said, last night was a really fun and exciting show for us, and it was a long one too, so you can expect a lot of fucking songs, you can expect a show, you can expect peaks and valleys, and we’ll definitely hold your attention, and we’ll rock your fucking faces off too, by the way.”
The All American Reject's latest album When The World Comes Down, released on Doghouse, 16th December 2008, is available from online stores: http://hmv.com/hmvweb/displayProductDetails.do?ctx=280;0;-1;-1;-1&sku=761427
