Set Your Goals

When San Francisco’s Set Your Goals came out with their Epitaph Records debut, This Will Be The Death Of Us, last year – no one expected the reaction the album would garner. Sure, people were excited to hear it and there was a lot of anticipation; but it would’ve been hard to guess that the record would throw them to the forefront of an emerging genre. It did, and it deserved all the accolades it received because ultimately the record was incredibly well executed.

Since the release of the record, the band has been touring non-stop. I sat down with front man Jordan Brown during their hometown Warped Tour show for a few minutes to discuss the tour, the reaction to their album and why he started a band in the first place.

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Bobby: Starting with the basics, today is the second day of the 2010 Warped tour – are you excited for it?

Jordan: Yeah, yeah.

Bobby: Warped Tour is a very gruelling tour. Its 43 shows in 51 days, long days, long drives, very few showers – what do you do to prepare yourself or do you bring anything special on tour with you that you normally wouldn’t bring?

Jordan: Yeah, we bring solar camp showers. They’re like these five gallon bags that hold water and are very durable, they have a hose at the end so you can take a shower with them.

Bobby: Polar Bear Club was telling me that Joe told them to bring one so they brought one out for this tour.

Jordan: Oh they got one? Cool. Those are really good to have. That and pretty much just sun block.

Bobby: You guys have played the Warped Tour before in the past, do you have any advice for bands – other than the solar shower – for bands doing it the first time?

Jordan: Yeah, I mean, just don’t stress yourself too hard. Have fun with it. Don’t worry about “oh, I have to be out there flyering at sunrise every day.” Find your balance between working hard for your band and really enjoying the time you’re out here.

Bobby: Last year the tour switched up the main stages a bit, taking it from two down to one and thirty minute sets up to forty. This made it so that the kids had to walk around and explore the side stages a bit more, are you glad they did that?

Jordan: Yeah, I think that’s really cool. It helps gets kids into the whole show more, into the whole concert/festival. Like these amphitheatres today, I’m having just as much fun at these stages as I’m having over where our stage is today. It’s just behind these trees and you have to go behind this forest of merch tents. Behind that is our stage and then just beyond that is the main stage which is a ton of fun.

Bobby: Are you guys on the Altec stage?

Jordan: We’re on the Altec Lansing stage, yeah. Today has been my favourite Warped Tour in a long time. I’ve already gotten so many new experiences. I haven’t had this much fun since we first played it in 2007.

Bobby: There’s a lot of bands playing, like every day there’s sixty to eighty bands playing from Alkaline Trio to GBH. Are there any bands that you’re really excited to see and why?

Jordan:  Yes, bands I’ve grown up with – I’m excited for that reason. I’ve been a fan of them for so long. It’s been a dream to be able to tour with them, they helped shape our band and us being a younger band, they’ve taught us some cool things. So Motion City Soundtrack and Alkaline Trio, those are two bands I’m really excited to see on this tour. And then we have our friends in Four Year Strong, Polar Bear Club, The Swellers. I’m really excited about seeing Closure in Moscow, an Australian band. Bring Me The Horizon are really cool, You Me At Six.

Bobby: The UK bands.

Jordan: UK Bands, yeah! Parkway Drive. There are great bands coming from overseas that people might not know about or might just be getting into. So hopefully people in America will end up getting into them because they were very supportive of our band and everything.

Bobby: Warped Tour is a place for kids to really be introduced to new bands. You wander around and you hear all these cool bands that you may not have heard before. I’ll never forget, I think it was two years ago, when Oreskaband played. What are some of your favourite Warped Tour discoveries?

Jordan: Yeah, they were fun – Oreskaband. They were cool. I really, really loved Bedouin Soundclash, I never heard of them until they did the Warped Tour in 08 with us. I just stumbled on their stage one day and I was like “this is amazing. This is what I need right now.” So that whole summer they were kind of my band. I’m trying to think who I’ve stumbled upon so far. I really like White Chapel. I’ve heard of them before, we’re good friends with some of those guys and I got to watch them yesterday and I really liked their band. It just reminded me like “you guys are really good.” We’ve got to play a few festivals with them and hopefully I’ll stumble across a few more. I like Hey Monday, I had never heard them. I’ve heard a lot about them but never heard them.

Bobby: Warped Tour, lately, has kind of been under pressure for the changes in sounds and style – the fact that they can have a band like Hey Monday going into White Chapel. Quite opposite sounds.

Jordan: Yeah, on the same stage.

Bobby: What’s your opinion on the whole debate that Warped Tour should only be punk bands?

Jordan: I think that it needs to progress as it has. I think that this year is the best that they’ve done with it since 2007 in combining smaller, well established bands that are smaller on one stage and bringing bands like Andrew WK and Motion City Soundtrack – that mainstream success too. It all cohesively fits because it wouldn’t otherwise. That’s made the festival successful, having all kinds of different artists throughout the day. When Epitaph was in its heyday at the beginning, great – that was really awesome. Like the Punk-o-Rama compilations came out right when Warped Tour first started and that was their niche right there. Epitaph has played such a strong role and it’s always been a huge part of the Warped Tour spirit at the beginning but then the addition of newer bands that are learning from bands like Motion City and Alkaline Trio and…

Bobby: The Bouncing Souls.

Jordan: Bouncing Souls, right. When I woke up and they were playing this morning, I was like “this feels like Warped Tour, this feels right.”

Bobby: Of course with so many bands playing, it means bands have to go out and flyer, poster and stuff like that. Do you have any plans for what you guys are going to do to try and convince kids to come and watch you guys?

Jordan: Yeah, I think Epitaph are working a whole bunch for us; and then we’ve got a couple of friends from the label riding with us right now and they’re working with people everyday – like street teams – to help spread the word. Then we do signings. We did one with Project 143 today, they’re really cool to check out. They’re a non-profit charity locally from here. So we did a signing with them so that kind of helps to get people excited.

Bobby: You’re touring right now in support of last year’s album, This Will Be The Death of Us, which was a massive success – both critically and fan wise. Were you expecting the reaction that you got?

Jordan: No, we were really excited about it that people really took it to heart. I was really happy to see that critics enjoyed it because we’re friends with a lot of them and we’ve ended up meeting them because we’re all fans of the same kind of music. So to see them really get behind what we’ve done as critics, really giving us a pull – that was just everything to me.

Bobby: The record has a ton of guests – Chad Gilbert, Hayley Williams, Vinnie Caruana, John Gula, Jordan Pudnik – what was it like working with all those people?

Jordan: It was awesome. We wanted to work with everyone on it on each of those songs. It was fun because as we were building and developing and writing the music, we were like “oh, this would sound really cool with Vinnie’s voice here.”

Bobby: Do you think it opens it up for a possible Warped Tour collaboration? I know that Jimmy from Polar Bear Club sang Hayley Williams’ part on that song. With all these guests on the album, do you think you’re going to be able to have guests come and take those parts on the Warped Tour?

Jordan: It’ll be interesting to see. We don’t have any of the songs written in yet that have any of the guest vocals but I would like to do The Few That Remain. We’ve played it with Hayley before which was awesome and the only other time we’ve done it is with Jimmy. We’re very selective about who we play the song with. The same with Our Ethos that we did with Chad. You always want to bring out our very, very, good friend. So that was one that would be cool to do. We had a lot of fun playing that with Jimmy too.

Bobby: Doing all these collaborations kind of goes hand in hand with the cool atmosphere of Warped Tour. How would you describe the atmosphere of Warped Tour?

Jordan: It’s very fun, summer, happy…everyone’s walking around, there’s all kinds of different people; especially up here, the air is really clean. I would just say it’s fun. Sometimes it can be a bit noisy and busy and if you feel like you’re getting a headache, you just need to take some shade and kind of rest your ears or whatever. Its fun, I’m going to have fun meeting people this year.

Bobby: Yeah, it’s really cool just walking around backstage and seeing all the bands interact in the food line-up. It’s a very unique feel that you don’t necessarily get at a lot of festivals or a lot of tours.

Jordan: Yeah, to see people interacting and it being an actual tour.

Bobby: One more question, this is the sixteenth anniversary of Warped Tour. What are some of your favourite memories of Warped Tours long gone?

Jordan: That’s so hard, there’s been a lot. I was thinking back the other day to, I think it was 2004, when New Found Glory had just put Catalyst out. So they had Sticks And Stones and Catalyst as well as all their other records they had put out. And Good Charlotte had just put out Chronicles of Life and Death and they were two of the bigger bands on it that year. I remember they both played in the middle of the day and I remember getting that really good feeling of “wow, there are so many people here and everyone’s just having fun. Everyone’s attention is all on the stage.” Like, really enjoying themselves so I thought that was really fun. Those are always my favourite moments. It’s always during the sets, during the bands.

The same with my first year back in ’99. I started playing in bands after I came back from the tour. I came back with this rush and I needed to find that again. I was like “how do I get that? How do I get that?” I had been listening to punk music for a couple years already and I knew that bands played and there were shows and things but I was so sheltered in my little neighbourhood. I never really ventured out or had friends that would venture out and then I started making friends through punk music, starting going to shows and it was just unreal. So yeah, I think those two are my favourite memories.

Bobby: Awesome, thank you very much.