Music > Interviews

Interview with Taking Back Sunday

13/09/11

It’s a dream team moment for Taking Back Sunday fans; akin to being able to put Lionel Messi and the Maradona from 20 years ago on the same starting squad. From numerous bodies in the varying line-up, John Nolan and Shaun Cooper – two of the band’s early members, who left in 2003, were brought back to the ranks, and with Taking Back Sunday max-power, they used full force to bring out their recent, fifth studio album. We caught up with the original member, Eddie Reyes, a Long Island boy with the ability to play ball, and cut the crap, whenever this industry calls on it…

Are you having a good day so far, sir? I’m having a pretty good day, yeah. 

You must be a busy guy at the moment; you’ve got a ridiculous schedule at the moment… Yeah, we’ve been pretty busy.

You’ve got some dates left to do still in the US, then you come over to the UK to do a load of dates for your rescheduled tour – how do you prep yourself for a big run like that? Y’know, I think there’s no way to prep yourself. You just go with the flow and then you start to get used to it; every day becomes a routine, you know.

So there’s almost a routine in not having a routine then? Exactly! That’s exactly how it is, just going through the motions every day.

You’re taking in one festival while you’re here, the Reading and Leeds festival, which is a big deal, but do you think it’s more important to be reinforcing the new album in your own headline shows? You know, the festivals are always fun to play – we love playing the festivals, but I’m very excited to do the make-up shows because it is important to push our new record out. At the least, it’s more personal, that they’re there to see you playing – you’re there to play for them, whereas at a festival, yeah there are people there to see you play, but y’know, there’s a million other bands as well. It’s just one of those things I guess.

You must be a seasoned professional though Eddie… With many of us packing our tents up at the moment to go to those festivals, what are your festival essentials? Well, I usually have everything with me – all my luggage! I don’t know, a lot of time at festivals usually tend to stay hidden, like either in our bus or in the dressing room ‘cause it’s overwhelming; so many different bands and a million people backstage who I have no idea what they’re doing or how they got backstage. So usually I just kinda stay away from all that and when it’s time to go out, we play.

I know you must have to talk about this a lot, but it is such positive news: you made fans’ wishes come true last year when you announced you’d be returning to your original line-up. Can you tell us about those initial first conversations? Those tentative steps towards the reformation… It was just an idea that Mark came up with, to get the old guys back in the band because the band was… Y’know, there was lots of smiles in the pictures and lots of positive interviews but behind closed doors it wasn’t really like that. I think we just got fed up with that and it was either end the band or rejoin with the guys that we always had the best time with. We just sat around and called each other and worked it out. We all met up in El Paso and basically got really drunk, talked all our shit out and wrote some good songs. There’s really no dramatic story to it; it’s just five dudes who BBQed, got wasted, yelled and screamed at each other and laughed and got it all out, and now we’re all friends again, just writing good music again.

El Paso seems to be quite a landmark place for you – it’s inspired one of your new song titles. Do you take much inspiration from where you travel / record, or was this place just a mark in the sand that meant a lot? No, it really did have a lot to do with our record, for me anyway. We were staying in this small town called Tornillo, which means ‘screw’ in English and it was actually 40 miles outside El Paso on a Pecan farm in the middle of the mountains. Yeah, just being surrounded by – the studio is surrounded by all these rehearsal rooms and the guy who owns the farm owns that, and just to be there, looking around; all your surroundings and stuff definitely influenced us. It was hot, it was dusty, it was very beautiful too, plus El Paso is a Texan city that’s pretty much in the middle of nowhere but people live there and they love it and they’re tough. I guess that toughness came out in our record.

The new album’s just out really – did you recapture the excitement of when you approached your first album, in light of the band’s coming back together? I think so, personally. I mean of course we’re a lot older, so we’re a lot more mature in how we write music now, but I think definitely that vibe was there again.

Was it an agonising wait when you knew you were back together, you had a full album to bring out to people and then a full rescheduled tour – were you chomping at the bit? Yeah, it was long, tedious work; it took us a year to write the record – not to write the record but we spent a year recording it and yeah, it wasn’t like we wanted to kill ourselves at the end of it, no, we were more excited to put it out. At the same time, we also had to reschedule the tour of course, and lots of people were unhappy with us, but we just felt that it wasn’t the right time; I guess ‘cause we were still dealing with the record and had other issues. But yeah, we were excited to get the record out, it really wasn’t hard writing with these guys, I mean, when the five of us are together, songs just pour out of us. It wasn’t like with other members where I had to pull teeth.

Very natural, I guess.It really is natural; it’s hard to explain. 

You touched, Eddie, on your maturity, which is inevitable getting older, but when you listen back to your first album compared with your latest, you can hear the jump between that raw young aggression and well-directed energy. Do you think age and experience has helped you add structure to your ideas?Yeah, definitely, just from the years of touring and years of writing music you definitely start to mature and change and I would say become better with your instrument, or become more able to say – as far as song structure – what part should go here and what shouldn’t go there. Back then, we just didn’t care; we just wrote music and didn’t care, so I think that’s a big part of the band nowadays that we’re older, we don’t like the same bands that we did… I mean, it’s not that we don’t like them, but you get older, you listen to different music, you change how you write music; that’s how it is – natural progression. Some people hate it though - you get bitched at all the time! ‘Why don’t you write the first record again?!’ It’s like, ‘really dude?’ I’m pretty sure the Rolling Stones or The Who got a lot of questions like that? Come on…

Albums are traditionally harder to sell nowadays, but you wouldn’t think that if you looked at your consistently strong sellers – what do you put that selling strength down to? Is it a loyal fan base or just quality music? Loyal fan base – totally, I think. I mean, we like to write music that we love personally, and at the same time, we’re lucky because we have such a great fan base and such great support in this music industry. It doesn’t really matter to us about record sales or not, I mean, the kids are still coming to the shows and people are still liking our records, so I’m happy about that.

We’re honoured to be talking to the founding member of the band – throughout the band’s flux, have you retained the same ethos or strong core focus? For me, I don’t think I’m ever gonna lose interest in it; it’s all I know, and all I know how to do – plus these guys bring an energy to it that keeps it alive in me, so even though over the years it was hard, and there’ve been moments where it seemed like it wasn’t gonna continue, for some strange reason we’ve always had this energy that keeps us going.

I find it interesting that your music has been licensed to film and game soundtracks a lot – is that aspect a nice compliment for you guys? Yeah, it’s cool, I mean you can have people tell you, ‘Hey, I just heard your song in a movie’, or ‘Dude, I just played a game and your song was on’… that’s kinda cool. It doesn’t really change anything for me, but it’s kind of a compliment, I guess, when companies are choosing your music to link to their product, you know.

Now Eddie, we run a Tattoo Convention, which is on this month, so I wondered if you could tell me a little about any of the band’s body art? Well we all have very strange tattoos. Recently the band all got panther tattoos, I guess as a kinda like ‘band tattoo’ in Salt Lake. I’ve had my own panther for years and it’s one of the designs we have now, as a back-drop. A lot of them have all different tattoos, and some of them don’t make much sense. Mine are pretty stupid! I have random tattoos on me, like I have a tooth tattoo, ‘cause I lost a lot of my teeth touring –

- So you wanted a tooth you couldn’t lose! Yeah, yeah! It’s a shout out to the teeth I lost on tour.

Now Eddie, you come to Norwich this month and we’ll be there in force, but we ask this a lot – what would you like from your audience? I just want everyone to put as much energy and effort into it as we are, because we’ve been busting our asses and just going crazy at every show ‘cause it’s fun again to play and we want people to see that, and we want people to have fun again. I don’t want any stupid questions either! I hate it when people shout things out from the crowd – random, dumb things like, ‘play this song…’ No.

Emma Garwood

Taking Back Sunday come to the UEA on 30th August. For tickets, go to www.ueaticketbookings.co.uk.