It’s been a somewhat weird career for Taking Back Sunday.
It’s been a somewhat weird career for Taking Back Sunday.
The band rose to fame at the same time as the emo movement was becoming quantifiable and recognizable in music, but as quick as fans and critics were to label Taking Back Sunday as emo, the band was even quicker to fight against the label. Over a decade later, the band is still fighting against arbitrary labels being put on themselves, though it’s less about the “emo” term today as it is a newer term being tacked on to them for slome reason: “nostalgia act.”
It seems almost ridiculous at first glance. Nostalgia bands are what people talk about when describing bands like Poison or Culture Club still being on tour. Taking Back Sunday started in 1999 and Tell All Your Friends came out in 2002 so how much of a “nostalgia act” can the band really be? It’s even more mind boggling when you realize the band has never gone more than three years without a new record and has released two this decade alone, both of which were some of their most critically acclaimed work yet. For these other late 80s and early 90s band constantly touring the Innsbrook After Hours of the world, not much has changed for them since they last were popular on the radio and their often just riding the coattails of whatever minor hit they had back then. For Taking Back Sunday, each year brings a new sonic development that’s just not possible from a nostalgia band. As rich and celebrated as the band’s catalogue is, the band will tell you themselves that it’s really all about creating new music and becoming bigger and better. Hardly sounds like a band latching onto their previous success, huh?
Taking Back Sunday returns to Richmond this week at The National and before then, we got to talk to bassist Shaun Cooper about everything the band’s experiencing right now at this weird and pivotal point in their career. It’s been five years since Cooper (and guitarist/vocalist John Nolan) rejoined the group after leaving in the mid-2000s to form Straylight Run and in that five years, the band has rekindled their buzz and gained momentum that few bands experience after a decade of being together. No one could have predicted it and as Cooper said himself “no one can predict where we go from here.”
I know you guys keep busy even while on tour so what do you have going on right now?
We just started to work on our new record so we just spent a couple of weeks with our friends in Michigan, just patching out some ideas to kind of spark the idea for what will become our seventh record. We still have a lot more writing to do. We like to come in with a good stockpile of songs before we get down there so I think we need one or two more sessions before we decide to book studio time and then decide who’s going to produce it and all of that. But we should be able to figure all that out this fall. I’m gonna have a baby soon too so we know we need to be home for that. It’s an exciting time. We’ll definitely get around to it and we’re very excited because the first ideas we’ve come up with are heading in a pretty cool direction.
What direction is that?
I think it’s kind of a mixture of stuff. We only have six of seven ideas, not even full songs, but some of it sounds like “dad rock,” but in the Taking Back Sunday filter. I don’t know if anyone’s going to like it, but we’re kind of excited about it. It just seems fresh even though it still sounds like Taking Back Sunday. When you get the five of us in a room, it’s going to have that energy or chemistry that brings out the vibe that makes a typical Taking Back Sunday song.
Is it weird to be talked about as a “nostalgia” act when you’ve still got a lot of new music coming out?
That’s something we’ve been pretty cognizant about. Taking Back Sunday never went away though and a lot of these other bands went away for a few years or so. Unfortunately, we did have a ridiculous amount of lineup changes with Taking Back Sunday, but we’ve settled into this lineup over five years ago now. I think we’re just excited to keep creating and with Happiness Is, we were starting to break new ground, but it also felt comfortable. We’re also on a roll now so it just feels good. We never want to be stagnant. It’s the only job we have and we really enjoy working together. We’ve toured a lot with Happiness Is and it’s been great, but we’re just excited to get the creative juices flowing and write new songs because it’s just so exciting to play new songs live.
But also exciting to play old songs too, right? Or at least the lesser known ones. I’ve seen you guys start to dive deeper into your catalogue for recent shows.
Yeah, it’s kind of bizarre. There are a lot of songs over the years that we’ve liked that just don’t seem to catch on with the fans as much. I don’t know if it’s through streaming services like Spotify or finding songs on YouTube, but these songs that were kind of sleepers or were later on in the records and weren’t exactly singles–we’re seeing a new life for them. We’re getting requests for them from Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. It just makes us say, “Hey, that song was cool. I totally forgot about it so let’s throw it in.” You never know when we’re going to do something like that because it’s fun for us to revisit old songs that we really liked that maybe fans didn’t respond to in the beginning. We have a song from our self-titled record called “El Paso”–I’m still waiting for that one to come around because we love playing that one and only a handful of people like it. We tried to open with that song for like two years straight. Every show we opened with it and no one cared. This song was so much fun, but when the audience didn’t respond, we put it on the backburner so we’re hoping that one comes back around even if it’s years down the line.
Do you think streaming services like Spotify are giving bands like you new life in 2015?
I definitely think there is something to that. I would like the pay structure to be a little better and I think every artist would. I was reading an AMA with Wilco on Reddit and Jeff Tweedy said, “Isn’t it all about just getting your music out there anyway?” Anyway that people are getting their hands on our songs and listening and coming to our shows and getting inspired by it, I feel like that’s kind of a reward in itself. That’s the artist side of me, but the businessman who has to provide for my family and put food on the table is always thinking, “Man, I’d like a little bit more money.” But the artist side is just, “Let’s just have the people listen to the music and enjoy it, man.” The hippy dippy side, you know? We’ve definitely been a big upswing since Happiness Is came out. I don’t know if that’s due to Hopeless Records marketing us well and getting the word out on the internet or I dont know if we wrote a better record. I feel like we did, but our shows have certainly gotten bigger since I rejoined the band. There’s an element of something going on. It could be the marketing or the streaming or the economy getting better or us getting better at playing live. There’s so many things so I can’t pinpoint it, but it’s potentially all of those things.
Back to the nostalgia thing for a bit, is it weird that you guys fought being labeled as emo for so long and now you’re being labeled as something else you don’t agree with?
It doesn’t bother me as so much as other people in the band because I’m just happy people are still talking about us. I feel very lucky that whatever anyone call us, people are still coming out to the shows and the shows have grown and gotten bigger. With the nostalgia thing, I wonder if when we came out, we were kind of at a place in a time where the whole emo thing was big. Guys like us were in their early 20s and were going through their first breakups and writing songs about it. I guess people grew up and thought we were uncool and tried to stomp out those feelings like, “Oh, I’m more mature and past this.” But what we’ve seen with our friends and family and people that have grown up around the same age as us now is that people are getting into the age where they are getting divorced and having these breakups all over again. Maybe they’re revisiting things and those feelings that they had in their young 20s. They’re coming back again as they go through life. If that’s bringing people back to the shows, that’s pretty cool.
It’s up to us to define whether we’re a nostalgia act or not. We’re not going to keep doing a Tell All Your Friends reunion tour or keep revisiting that record every single cycle, just to keep beating that dead horse by advertising the 13th and then 14th anniversary. We’re staying away from that so I think it’s up to us to keep writing better and better songs and to keep growing as artists. Just like the emo term, hopefully the nostalgia term will fade because we’ll just stand the test of time and we’ll keep doing things that make us relevant in the modern time.
You mentioned the lineup changes the band has gone through over the years. Is the current lineup locked in for the near future then?
I think the way the band was going when John [Nolan] and I came back, it was kind of had to be the last change or there wasn’t going to be anymore Taking Back Sunday. Now, we really rely on each other and love each other and we love working with each other and being on tour together. We appreciate each other’s quirks and I think we work really well together and we know that there’s a certain energy that comes out of the songs. That chemistry is undeniable when the five of us get in a room and start working on a song. So for anyone to leave the band, I can’t imagine it happening because I think we all appreciate what we have so much at this point. Who the hell knows though because you can never say never, but I think this is it for better or for worse until there is no more Taking Back Sunday.
Finally, you mentioned having a kid on the way so how hard is it for you to get back out on the road these days with a family at home?
It’s certainly hard, but it’s more interesting than anything. I have a son and a wife I love very much and I hate leaving. Every time we’re in the car on the way to the airport, my heart just breaks. At the same time though, I have more motivation because it’s not just me I have to support because I have to provide for them and take care of them. I want to go out and play shows and do the best I can to keep people interested in this band. I want to write the best songs we possibly can so in a certain sense as much as I hate leaving, I need to work harder and I need to be smarter about the decisions we make and I need to push the band forward. Not just say “that song’s okay, let’s throw it on the record anyway.” No, I need to be more “that song sucks and it’s not going on so we either need to rewrite it or shelve it and revisit it later.” In that sense, I’ll just keep pushing harder and working harder. As much as I miss them, I really appreciate my job and I do love playing shows every night. The travel gets old, but the ninety minutes we’re on stage is the happiest part of my day when I’m away so I do enjoy the hell out of my job.
Taking Back Sunday plays The National this Thursday night with Citizen and Modern Chemistry opening the night. For more information on the show and where to buy tickets, click here.
