Yellowcard

So it had been exactly eleven months since Yellowcard had last past through Edmonton, and I was pumped to get to see them live again and hear some new material. Before the concert, bassist Pete Mosley was nice enough to sit down and answer some questions for me. It was a great interview, really easy and just flowed nicely. It was easily one of my favorite interviews I’ve done during the past few years. I know I learnt a lot, and I’m sure you will too. So yeah, thanks a lot to Pete for doing the interview, it was lots of fun, and thanks to Anthony for setting it all up.

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Bobby: Starting with the basics, you guys have been on this “Wish We Were Canadian” tour for a couple weeks now, how’s that going so far?

Pete: It’s going great. We’re about two weeks into it and three shows away from the end. There’s only so many places you can play up here. But it’s been going good. We haven’t been on the road since last December. So it’s been a good like eight months since we’ve been on the bus and touring and this was the perfect spot to get started. The fans up here are… you know, the kids are great up here. It’s beautiful country sides to get back into the bus and enjoy while you’re going through it. It’s been going great. It’s been a lot of fun so far.

Bobby: Has there been any really memorable moments from it so far?

Pete: Right at the very beginning we did a few shows with Sum41 that was a lot of fun. Other then that, when you play as many shows as we do, the memorable moments are really hard to pick out. Last night we played in Regina, which is, you know, it’s Regina. But it was a great show, we had a great show. I mean, every show have just been up there. The energy from the kids have been great All the shows have been great, above-par.

Bobby: Why did you guys call it the “Wish We Were Canadian Tour”?

Pete: We kind of called it as a joke; some people took it a little too seriously and thought it was some sort of political statement. Which, in a way I guess it kind of was. Because last year during the elections we joked that if Bush got re-elected we were all going to move to Canada. But it’s a cool place to come, so it’s just kind of paying homage to that. We like to come up here and have a good time with the fans. Good beer. Beautiful women. Sometimes it would be nice, if it wasn’t so cold up here, we probably would be Canadian.

Bobby: It’s still better now, last time you guys were here in October and January.

Pete: Yeah, yeah, it was snow-covered everywhere last time we were here.

Bobby: Isn’t it weird that this tour is called “Wish We Were Canadian” and yet you still have one Canadian band on it with Moneen. Wouldn’t it have made more sense to have all American bands on it? Like, why did you get Moneen on the bill?

Pete: Well, we got them to come in because we like them. We’ve done a couple of shows with them before in the past and we wanted to throw a local or a native onto the tour. It was our idea calling the tour that, all the other bands had nothing to do with it. But yeah, we wanted to throw a band, one of your own, on the tour with us; to go around with us. And they’re great guys; we’ve been having fun with them every night. I definitely enjoy their live shows. It’s been great.

Bobby: Is it true that you guys have a limited edition tour version of “Ocean Avenue” on this tour?

Pete: You know, I’ve heard that we have. When things like that happen, we don’t know too much about it – it’s the label. I think they do it in Japan. I think in certain countries, after you sell a certain amount of records, they’ll re-release it with special packaging just as a commemorative type of release. I did hear… I haven’t seen what it looks like, but I did hear that they kind of spruced up the packaging and re-released it as kind of a collector’s item type thing. But I really don’t know anything about it or why. I think record labels do it to make more money. We have nothing to do with it.

Bobby: Also, on this tour you guys are doing a huge promotion with XBOX, where on every day of the tour, in every city, one person gets to be the “Yellowcard Special Press Correspondent” for the day. Why did you decide to do that?

Pete: When you get out and start touring a lot like we do, it’s nice to pick up sponsors. People to help you out with getting you around and promotion, so you’re not spending a lot of your own time and money trying to get it out there. You have somebody helping you focus on all the areas. And we like to keep up a way to relate and communicate with the fans as we do it. So XBOX set up that whole promotion and every show we’ve had winners that get to come check us out at sound check. And then a special winner gets to come and do their own interview. So that’s basically it. It’s cool to bring kids in and let them be close to you and they come in and watch your sound check and it’s really cool for them to be able to do that. And whoever the lucky winner is, they get to come on our bus and talk to us for twenty minutes and ask us whatever the hell they want to know. It’s a fun thing to be able to do.

Bobby: Has there been any really good interviewer that has won the contest?

Pete: For the most part, it’s not anybody like you that does this all the time. It’s a kid that wrote a paper turned it in and won the contest and they just come up and ask us a lot of the same questions or ask you some silly questions. For the most part, they’re younger, high school students. We’re not being interviewed by the next Tom Brokaw or anything like that.

Bobby: Are you yourself an XBOX fan?

Pete: Yep.

Bobby: Are you excited for the XBOX 360?

Pete: Oh yeah. We went to a promotion party for it in Hollywood and the Killers played at it, and after the Killers played they did this whole unveiling of the new XBOX. And, it’s sick. It looks awesome. Like, have you seen what it looks like? Have you seen the pictures?

Bobby: Yeah, yeah.

Pete: That was the first time they showed it, you know released it anywhere. We were sitting there and Elijah Wood was hosting the show or whatever, and we were just sitting there out in the crowd and they just showed the gaming system. And on your way out, they have gaming systems set up all over the place for you to test out and try.

I’m not a big video game guy. But for some reason, I’ve always enjoyed playing Halo. Like we have two XBOXs in the bus, one in the front lounge and one in the back lounge and we’ll connect the two so we’ll play four on four Halo. And I’m always into that, that’s always fun. I’ve never been a big video game fan, but lately I’ve been addicted to Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. And for some reason, I am destined to finish the game. Before I came here to talk to you, I was on the bus doing missions and doing that whole thing.

Bobby: Have you heard the entire controversy about Grand Theft Auto? How somebody made a patch that if download it off the net you can see them naked…

Pete: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. You can have sex with a hooker and things like that. You can do that on the PC version. And I mean that… like when they try to band it for the violence and the content of that, I don’t know. Like if you’re old enough to play it and understand that it’s a fantasy game, then its fine. But I think a lot of kids wouldn’t really get into it and adopt that mentality of “I can go around and steal cars and shoot people.” I think its pushing it a little far that you can go pick up hookers and have sex with them in a game. That’s just… I don’t know. That’s just a gross thing to throw up for the public for a younger generation to enjoy.

Bobby: What I always found interesting about the story was that it was all started by a grandmother who bought it for her 13 year old grand-son when it says “17 or older” or whatever. And then she complains even thought it clearly says “17 years and older”.

Pete: Yeah, yeah, people are idiots. I mean, I remember when Guns’N’Roses put out “Use Your Illusion I & II” like way back in the day and it had the parental advisory thing on it – you had to be 18 to buy it. So of course, my mom buys it for me and then she’s like “Oh wait a minute! What’s all these cuss words he’s saying?!” And it’s like “well, you bought it for me. It told you I should be 18 to listen to it.” Sometimes they just don’t get it and they like to blame other people for their problems. If you don’t want to get exposed to it, then don’t do it. They warned you about it.

Bobby: Well, now back to the music *laughs*. You guys recently re-released your first album “Where We Stand” on Ben’s label, Take Over Records. Why did you guys re-release it?

Pete: Well, Ben really wanted to do it because it’s… I know for me when I find out about a band, it may be a band that… For instance, Green Day first made it big off of “Dookie.” So many people wanted to go back and buy “Slappy Hours” and “Kerplunk!” and their earlier records to find out where they came from and to get more of a taste of the band. And I guess, that’s basically the reason why. It gives the fan more of an experience of who we are, our background, where we came from. And I personally wasn’t on that record, so it has nothing to do with me, but it’s a cool thing for the fans to be able to kind of see a timeline of how Yellowcard, has a band, has progressed.

Bobby: Okay, I just want to ask this to get it out in the air. What’s happening with Ben?

Pete: Can’t say.

Bobby: You can’t say?

Pete: I can’t say, I’m sorry.

Bobby: That’s what everybody wants to know.

Pete: I know, I know. It’s out there and it’s a bad situation. And it’s just personal and artistic differences and we’re trying to sort through it and it’s reached a legal point so I just can’t talk about until everything’s settled. I’m sorry. As much as I would love to let it all out and let it all off, it just can’t be discussed yet.

Bobby: Okay, fair enough. You guys just finished recording your follow up to 2003’s “Ocean Avenue”, it’s called “Lights and Sounds.” How did the recording process go?

Pete: Amazing! It was awesome. Ryan and I moved up to New York last December as soon as we got off the road and we took a couple months off. We had a schedule started April 2nd to start rehearsing for recording. So we basically had three months after Christmas to write a record. We took the first two months for ourselves to kind of adjust to normal life because we’d been on the road for eighteen months straight. And then we spent the last month just writing. We were kind of worried about the whole “sophomore slump” follow-up record curse. So we had that staring us in the face and we kept putting it off and finally we were like “Okay, shit, we’re supposed to be back out in Hollywood in three weeks. Like, let’s start writing.” And as soon as we started, it just came like that *snaps fingers*. We had a miniature studio set up in our apartment in New York and we demoed everything on acoustic guitars. And a week before we went out to Hollywood, we sent it out to the rest of the band for them to get acquainted to the song structures. We went into the rehearsal room, spent a month just getting it as tight as possible. Then May and June, we just knocked them out in the studio. And we were so prepared, the writing just went so fast, and getting it together as a band went so well, we were so prepared that we cut the studio short by like a week and a half. Which is really unheard-of. Like usually you book eight weeks and you end up extending it another one or two weeks at least. But like we were supposed to be done by the first week of July and we were out by the end of June. It was awesome, it was incredible. With being scared, doing something like that because we’ve had whatever kind of success and we have to follow that up; and you don’t know how to follow that up. You either take the same formula you had last time because that worked, or you just try and do it yourself, on your own terms. And that’s kind of what we went for. We didn’t want to make the same record again, we wanted to keep growing as musicians and song writers and we went for it and we got everything we could’ve ever possibly wanted out of it. I think it’s just incredible. All of us feel that it’s just the best thing that we’ve ever been a part of. It’s the most important project that we’ve ever had and we were successful at it, we feel.

Bobby: You guys have released one song on the internet, “Lights & Sounds”. Can you tell us anything else about the album, like what will it sound like?

Pete: Yeah, “Lights & Sounds” is definitely… We play “Lights & Sounds” tonight in our set and we have another song called “Rough Landing Holly”, and those two songs are probably the only two songs that are kind of upbeat and driving the whole way through and kind of the songs that bridge the gap between “Ocean Avenue” and our new record, “Lights & Sounds.” Everything else we have, Sean really just owned up with huge string arrangements. He went into the actual Capitol Records studio in Hollywood for a day and laid down a whole twenty-two piece orchestra in four songs. So we’ve got a lot of flavour like that, like not classical songs, but just huge string arrangements. We’ve got a jazz song. We’ve got a really, really nice acoustic ballad that we had a guest singer on. I would love to tell you who it is, but I can’t you who it is. Just a female vocalist and she has sold forty-million records – so it’s somebody huge, but it’s the last person you would ever expect. So I’ll leave that for you. We tried to throw a little bit of everything, and the variety on it is just great. But it’s very fluent all the way through. There’s no one time that you’re like “hey, what band is this?” Once you see where we’re going with it, it just takes its path. So yeah, I’d say it’s got a little bit of everything on it. It’s definitely got some surprises and it’s got some good tunes on it.

Bobby: Now I’m curious to see who this surprise guest vocalist is.

Pete: Well, we’ve got two guest artist actually. The second one’s not as big as the female guest that we had. We had a trumpet player come on and play on one of the songs. I think it will be cool for kids to get into be like “Oh wow! Where did this come from? Look at that! That’s who that is!” So it will be cool.

Bobby: Yeah, it sounds interesting. Do you have any funny stories from the recording session? Like were there any weird mishaps or anything like that?

Pete: Let’s see… I think probably, for the most part, it was just the five of us going into the studio every day for three months. But, this is really weird. In between pre-production, which was when we were rehearsing, and actually going into the studio to actually record, we had a week off to go to Orland, Florida to play this thing called “Grad Night” – which is for high school graduates, graduating year. They go to Disneyworld in Orland and we play a show Friday, Saturday, week off, Friday, Saturday. And every night, there’s like fifteen to twenty high schools, or thirty to forty high schools. There’s like twenty thousand, thirty thousand kids there. And they get to come and it starts at like eight at night and runs through till like four in the morning. The kids get to come in, check out all these different acts. Like Ryan Cabrera was there, Ciara was performing, and they get to ride all the rides around Disneyworld and check out all these different kinds of music and what not. So the week that we were there, it kind of interrupted our pre-production schedule. We had to find a studio so that we could continue to rehearse that week off in between shows, and we couldn’t find a studio. We somehow ended up at one of the guys from N*sync’s house. At Chris Kirpatrick’s house. He let us use his basement, his studio basement. He gave us the entire bottom floor to ourselves and it had a studio room that we could use just to rehearse in. Set up monitors and PA and all of our equipment and he let us use it. And every night, he’d throw us a party at his house. It was just really weird because the guy is awesome, the guy was really cool. And you’re sitting there and you’re talking to him, hanging out and having a good time and in the meantime you’re thinking “my God, you were in N*sync.” Just a really weird experience but it was awesome. We met a lot of really cool people and ended up making a really good friend out of it and we still keep in touch with him. Anytime he’s in L.A. or we’re back in Florida, we meet up and hang out. That’s probably the one thing that sticks out the most. Like the one story that is really…

Bobby: Yeah, it’s a good story. You just said that you guys are playing two songs on this tour, how’s the crowd reaction been?

Pete: It’s been great. We’re actually doing a total of three, we’re doing three songs and it’s been great. It’s a really hard thing… I know when I go and see a band that I like live; I really am not too big of a fan seeing new songs. That’s me personally because I really don’t know what’s going. Especially if it’s a loud rock band like we are, it’s hard to really understand what’s going on, you know? If you’ve already heard the song and know what it is, then it’s easier to go into that loud environment and know what’s going on. If you’re just standing there and every thing’s roaring at you, it’s hard to make out what it is. So I’m not a big fan of doing it, but it’s cool because it’s funny. The kids, by the end of the song they are trying to sing along. They think they know what you’re saying and they’re trying to sing along with the chorus and no matter what, you know; they want to know so bad what you’re singing and they try to sing along with you. It’s been great and the reception has been really good. There hasn’t been any like “Okay, here’s a new song” and we play it and the kids are like “Okay, well that sucked. I hope the rest of the album isn’t like that.” Everybody has been really into it and they get excited when we tell that “alright, here’s another new song.” They really want to hear it and they like what they hear.

Bobby: Have you seen the video for the song “Believe” that a kid made at Danny11.com? Have you seen that video?

Pete: Nope, I’ve heard about it but I haven’t seen it.

Bobby: Oh, well it’s pretty interesting.

Pete: Have you seen it?

Bobby: Yeah.

Pete: Well, what is it exactly?

Bobby: They have a guy who looks remarkably like Ryan and a guy who looks remotely like Sean playing and singing. And they splice in a whole bunch of clips of 9/11, like firefighters, and the plane crashes. And when the mayor’s talking, they actually have the news segment of the mayor talking.

Pete: Oh, wow, Oh wow.

Bobby: And you have the guy who looks like Ryan singing along perfectly and him walking through the destruction and stuff like that.

Pete: Oh wow. No, I haven’t seen it, but I’ve heard it’s really good. I’ve seen links for it up on our message board, but I haven’t actually gone to check it out.

Bobby: Yeah, that’s where I found it, on the message board.

Pete: I know I need to check it out. Every time I see it, I’m just not in the mood for downloading videos and I’m like “I’ll check it out later.” But it sounds pretty cool; it would be interesting to see that.

Bobby: Yeah, I thought “wow, that’s cool.” The guy made it all on his computer or something and it turned out pretty good.

Pete: *looking around and grabbing a drink* Hey, do you want a drink of some kind? Water, cranberry juice?

Bobby: Water would be great. *hands me a water bottle* Thanks a lot. Okay, like we were talking a bit about this before the interview, but a lot of kids are just getting back into the daily grind that is school. Like I’m just getting into my final year of grade 12. Do you have any really fond memories of high school?

Pete: Well, like I said, that’s probably the one thing I hang onto most. It sucks having to go into a classroom everyday for like eight or nine hours a day and have people three times your age yell at you to learn something that you don’t want to learn.

Bobby: I know that feeling.

Pete: Yeah, that sucks. But one thing I do regret about high school is not taking advantage of that; having that free education. Now that I’m getting older I feel like I should know more things, or have paid attention more. I’m at the age where I understand that education is important and I wish I didn’t take my high school education for granted. I went to a college prep school for high school and I had to graduate with all these ridiculous requirements, all these AP classes and IV courses. The year I graduated, my high school was actually number two in the country in the US for GPAs. And I do regret that, I wish I had really taken advantage of being handed a good education. I should have taken it as my own and put it in my brain.

But what I miss, what I’ve always missed, is getting there and seeing two or three hundred people daily that you know. And you don’t hang out with them, but you just see them, in between classes, you know. Just seeing all the friendly faces, waving hi across the hallway, what ever it may be. I definitely don’t think that I will ever run into another situation like that again in life, where I’m surrounded by so many friends and acquaintances. And we’re all on the same side. We’re all at school and we hate it and it sucks but “you’re cool, what’s up? Great to see you.” You know? I definitely miss that; that whole atmosphere. It’s really cool.

I tell that to everybody. Their like “man, I can’t wait to get out of high school.” I’m like “you say that now, but you might wake up a little lonely one day.” You go from talking to a hundred people a day to three: your mom, your dog and your sister. You know?

Bobby: Yeah, like even if you don’t hang out with them, you can still talk to them. Like I know right now my school’s volleyball team is in a volleyball tournament at a school a few blocks away from here. The entire team pretty much was just downstairs eating in the food court and we just went and sat down with them, said hi and what not. Where as five years from now, when we see them, we won’t be able to just sit down and have a conversation with them.

Pete: Yeah, exactly. Like I think back and I wonder. Like a couple years leading up after high school… like an hour and a half outside of Jacksonville is a small town called Gainesville which is where the University of Florida is and a lot of my friends went there. And like four hours down the highway is FSU, you know, Tallahassee. So me and some friends, we would always get together. Old high school buddies would be having a party here in Gainesville or Tallahassee. So for a couple years leading up, it was always good to still get to go back and be like “what are you doing now? What are you into?”

But God, for me, I graduated high school seven years ago. I still keep in touch with the friends that I was really close to in high school, but there’s still all the other random people that I’m like “man, I wonder what he’s doing. I wonder where he ended up.” I don’t know, I like to pull out my yearbook sometimes, because I remember faces but I don’t remember names. “Oh God! That’s right! That’s him! I wonder what he’s doing.”

Bobby: Yeah, I’m horrible with names too sometimes. Okay, if you could pick one person or band, dead or alive, broken up or still going, what ever, who would you, personally, pick to tour with and why?

Pete: Let’s see… a band… I would of course love to say The Beatles or Beach Boys. But a Yellowcard/Beach Boys tour just wouldn’t work out too well. I’d say, keeping it closer to the rock family, I’d say Ben Folds Five. I would love to, one; just watch those three guys perform again together. But yeah, I would love to go out with them. That’s one of the few bands that I have every single one of their songs and I love them all. There’s not anything about that band that I don’t like. There’s no song that I even think about skipping. I could just listen to them day in and day out. So yeah, Ben Folds Five.

Bobby: Okay, here’s a little odd one. If you were a member of the opposite sex for a day, week, month, however long you wanted. What would you do and why?

Pete: If I was a girl, for a day, week or a month?

Bobby: Or however long you wanted.

Pete: I guess, if I was a girl, I would go around… I would see how much trouble I could get into and get out of it because I’m a girl. I would speed down the highway, get pulled over and start crying to see if I could get out of a speeding ticket. And yeah, I don’t know.

Bobby: That’s an interesting idea.

Pete: Girls always seem to get that advantage. That “oh well, you’re a girl” or “oh, you’re very pretty, here, take this. Let’s go shopping.” I’d take advantage of that. I’d find some guy, have him take me out shopping, treat me to a nice dinner, try to impress me with a fancy car. I guess I’d do that.

Bobby: I guess that’s about it. Thanks a lot for doing it. Do you have any final thoughts you would like to add?

Pete: Well, our Canadian tour’s coming to a close, only a couple of shows left, but I’m definitely excited to come back. To get back up here. Everywhere that we’ve been, all the shows have been amazing. I hope everybody checks out the new record, comes out in January, and see you soon!