Page 36 - Black Velvet Issue 89

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THE BEST OF US
THE BEST OF US

n 2005, a group of friends from Tallahassee,
IFlorida formed a band. Over ten years later, vo-
calist Derek Sanders, bassist Jeremy Lenzo, drummer
Jake Bundrick and guitarists Alex Garcia and Brooks
Betts are still together and going strong. Mayday Pa-
rade, released their sixth studio album in October
2015, and are now more than ready to begin the next
chapter. We caught up with Brooks to chat about their
documentary ‘Three Cheers For Ten Years’, pushing
themselves as a band, and how technology has
changed the world of music.

n December 31st, Mayday Parade posted a photo
Oon Facebook of the band together with the cap-
tion 'Three Cheers For Ten Years’. Brooks laughs about
how the band celebrated their ten-year anniversary. “I
guess we maybe just took a shot and that was about it,”
he says. “I mean, we didn’t do anything crazy special, at
least not yet. We have had talks about maybe doing some
special stuff for fans and that sort of thing, but for us it
was more like ‘OK, it’s November, it’s been ten years now.
Wow, that’s pretty cool!’”
Mayday Parade did, however, release a documentary
to accompany their latest record, ‘Black Lines’, that cov-
ers the history of the band, as well as documenting a new
beginning. “We thought it’d be cool to put it out there that
it was ten years, and we wanted to give a little bit more
substance to stuff for people to look forward to with the
new record,” Brooks tells us. “Plus we had never done a
DVD or anything like that before, so it was new for us to
put something like that together. That, and it was special
for fans to see that and we wanted to kind of throw out
there a little bit of where our heads were with doing the
new record, so that was a big part of it too.”
The five members of Mayday Parade have been in the
band since the beginning, so it was special for them to
look back on where they were when they first started.
“Myself, Derek and Jeremy played in bands before May-
day Parade. I started doing music and shows with Derek
when I was 13, maybe 14 years old. I didn’t know Alex or
Jake very well when we started playing shows with them,
but right about then we started to talk and hang out a lot.
We put together Mayday Parade when I was 21. Most of
the guys were probably about 20 years old, so yeah, it’s
cool!”
Derek has said that the documentary ‘documents the
beginning of a new chapter’. Brooks tells us how he
thinks this chapter will differ from the last. “It all kind of
came together in our heads that we wanted to be a little
bit more edgy with what we’re doing,” he says. “Just like
anybody else, I think, after ten years, you’re going to see
some growth and change in people. Of course, we still
make music that references or that feels like the stuff we
were growing up on when we were younger, but we also
have new tastes and things so I think that you’ll see that
in what he’s calling a new chapter. It’s just an evolution of
what we do musically and I think you hear that, you know. I
think that the album kinda gives you that idea. You can listen
to the record and go, ‘Oh, things are definitely a little bit dif-
ferent to what they have done in the past’, so we’ll see where
that goes. But yeah, our tastes and minds change all the
time.”

MAYDAY PARADE