YELLOWCARD

A Day Away With Yellowcard

(Interview With Ryan, Sean, Ben, Pete and LP Taken From Black Velvet 41 - Aug 2004)

By Shari Black Velvet

It's not every day that you get to hang out with Yellowcard. It's not every day you get the opportunity to take Yellowcard out to wherever you want to take them. But when the UK tour with Less Than Jake was announced and Black Velvet decided the band were so good they deserved another feature right after the last one, and not only that but a cover to go with it, we were told we could spend a day with them.

Do 'something different', their press officer prompted. He suggested going snowboarding, or even to Warwick Castle. We can't snowboard… what if we break our legs!? Warwick Castle was a possibility but was an hour's drive away. We pondered, we searched the net for cool places to go, we pondered some more. We even looked in the Yellow pages (no pun intended).

Yellowcard on the cover of Black Velvet 41. This issue is now sold out at Black Velvet HQ - although www.vags.net, and www.waterfrontrecords.com have copies available

We made a list. Tobogganing, Bingo in Redditch, Ragley Hall, the afore-mentioned Warwick Castle, paintballing, Lazer Quest, bowling, Go-karting… you name it we thought of it. We weren't sure though. They were either crap (ie. Bingo), too far away (tobogganing), too expensive (Go-karting) or you had to be there for full or half days (paintballing). In the end we plumped for Cadbury World. It is after all a local landmark that Birmingham is famous for, not too far away and not too lengthy. And they'd get free chocolate! Let's get Yellowcard sampling some of our local trademark delights, we thought.

So that was it. The decision was made. All we needed now was the band!

So on the day of the Wolverhampton show, we made our way to the Civic Hall to meet up with the Yellowcard camp (that's Ryan Key on vocals, Sean Mackin on violin, Ben Harper on guitar, Pete Mosely on bass and Longineu Parsons on drums) and then we all trundled off to Cadbury World in Birmingham to see how chocolate is made. Good thing the band eat chocolate… 'cause being vegan we don't!

While in the cab on the way there, Black Velvet found out what a typical day on the road for Yellowcard is actually like.

Ryan jokes that the band get up at 5am each day. "No way!" gasps Ben. "At least 9am". "I get up at noon pretty much every day," Ryan then truthfully reveals. Turns out that they're sleeping on the tour bus, although occasionally when there's a day off they have a hotel room. The day before Wolverhampton was a day off that saw the band wandering around the capital. Ryan says that he and Pete "walked around London for about two hours trying to find a place to play football, and there were no fields with any goals, so we went back to the hotel. Then we went out and had really good Italian food and went to see a movie."
He says that they watch a lot of movies when they can. "When we have days off that's usually what we do. We go check out movies because we get really behind in movies as we don't have time to go ever."
While on the recent US tour, Ryan watched the Godfather box set.
"I like movies, I just never have the patience to sit down and watch a whole movie," Ben contrastingly reveals. "He's always got something else to do!" laughs Ryan.
Ben indeed is busy with his own independent record label in the States, Takeover Records. In March they reissued 'Where We Stand', an earlier Yellowcard album that was previously hard to find.
Sean speaks up for Ben. "Ben wanted to give to the kids where Yellowcard came from. The recording isn't very good. I think the performances aren't superb, there are other singers, but it's more for the really devoted fans that wanted to see where we had come from and give them an opportunity to go back in time and find out those years prior to where Ryan came from. It's nothing more than that. We won't be performing any of the songs. It's just a really good start to jump-start Ben's record label and to show the fans. It's more of a novelty thing I think. I don't know if it has distribution over here but I know that it's available at takeoverrecords.com."

Takeover Records has quite a few bands under its belt already including Stole Your Money whose new album 'In Your Box' features Ryan, Ben and Sean. Sean tells us he also just sang on an Over It song on a three-way split that the label put out. "Us as musicians are kind of like a community. It's always been like that. Our old friends in Pete's old band Instruction 12 would always do that. They'd have friends come out and sing. I've played on Inspection 12 records before as well. It's kind of us giving a helping hand, giving Travis and the Stole Your Woman guys other avenues to expand their musical horizons as well. It was a fun thing to do."

Talking about the band's own music, Sean says of 'Ocean Avenue' a year or so after it's US release, "I think it's surpassed all we ever thought it was going to do. It's a really great introduction of us to not just the scene but the whole music industry. The fact that we've had all this exposure, it's very exciting. I think we're very happy with where it's taking us."
More recently the band have written a song for the Spiderman 2 soundtrack, entitled 'Gifts And Curses'.
"I arranged it with a really big string section," says Sean. Looking to future recordings he continues, "We're really experimenting with our own songwriting and all of our influences. I think we're still testing the boundaries. The music's still changing so I don't really know where we're going to go or how to put it into words but it's already growing, already changing a little bit. It's all part of growing up and the evolution of music."
"We wanna sound like The Beatles," pipes up LP.

Pete Mosely on bass rejoined the band after Yellowcard's first headline UK tour. Pete had written and recorded 'Ocean Avenue' with Ryan, Sean, Ben and LP but then quit before Alex Lewis took his place. Pete says he originally left for personal reasons.
"When I first came out to play with them I wasn't as ready as I thought I was to leave home and go out on the road and I just had a lot of personal stuff go down when I was out, and I just thought it was worth it to give it up and go home and see what I could make amends with."
He says he knew that the band was destined for success. "When I left I knew the record that we'd just made was really good and I was proud to be a part of it. It was cool to be at home and watch them have their first video on MTV and perform on the late night shows and whatnot. I still felt that I was part of what was happening. I just wasn't directly involved in it."
During the ensuing year Pete missed the traveling and playing shows with his friends though.
"It's a great thing to be able to get up and play every night. I love traveling and seeing all the different places, meeting all the people."
Now that he's back in the band (Alex Lewis was thus dismissed), he says it's been wonderful. "It was about a year since I was gone and when I came back into it, it was like no time had passed at all. I hadn't played with the guys since we did the record. That was in March of 2003 and I came back in March of this year and it seemed like I'd had maybe a month off and that was it. I slid back into it really well."
So it's not weird at being at a different success level?
"No, I take things pretty light-heartedly. Yellowcard are definitely on this whole new level, the sizes of shows that we're playing, the amount of exposure that we're getting and I usually just let that all pass by me. It's definitely cool though, all the opportunities and experiences that we've had. It's a lot of fun."

Getting back to a day in the life of Yellowcard, we talk about food and riders. A rider is what the band actually request each day on tour. Ryan says that they have a pretty normal rider. "I think the most special request we have is Hot Pockets."
Hot Pockets?
Ryan tries to explain what they are for us UK folk that aren't accustomed to them. "Almost like pastry/bread on the outside but ham and cheese on the inside or pepperoni pizza on the inside. It really fills you up and they're really easy to make. They're really big but they're really easy to cook. They're good to have at three in the morning on the bus when there's nowhere to stop and eat. But we don't have anything weird or crazy on our rider. No bowls of only green M&Ms or anything."
The band also eat out at restaurants. They frequent steakhouses. "We only have one vegetarian in the band and he's just become one."
That member is Pete, which means he wins Black Velvet points. We do love our fellow veggies/vegans, although later he tells us he eats fish - which means he isn't really vegetarian after all. But at least he's not eating 'other' meat… and that's something.

The guys try and hang out with the other bands they're touring with when time allows, although with hectic schedules it's not always possible.
"The bigger tours are a lot harder because the drives are longer and you have to leave earlier at night so you don't get so much time to spend like back in the day when there were four bands following each other around the country and you'd show up at whatever bar you were playing and hang out there all day. We don't have that luxury anymore."
Ryan says the band don't get much time to go out into town to sightsee or shop on the day of a show either.
"It's pretty much 'wake up, start press' right away."
"We try and find some time to eat," says Ben.
"Try!" repeats Ryan. "Eating is not on the schedule. We don't get to eat."
It seems that they have more time at festivals where they have a shorter set.
Talking about the hectic Warped tour, which saw them go from town to town with barely a day off, Sean says, "The best part of it is the amazing amount of people you encounter over the summer. It is hard but you're surrounded by your friends. It's probably the greatest experience ever. There are all the bands that you grew up listening to. It's just a really cool thing to be a part of. You get to hang out for the whole day. We meet a lot of fans but also get to hang out with a lot of bands that you don't ever get to tour with. It's everybody together. It's like a giant circus. It's a lot of fun."

Ben tell us he did a radio interview with The Storm earlier. We find out there are a couple of fanzine interviews that a couple of bandmembers have to do upon returning from Cadbury World.
They tell us they find out in advance what press they have to do.
Ryan says, "It's all on our day sheet. So when you get up you know what you've gotta do for the day. It's a pretty regimented schedule."

Following or preceding press (depending on the day) comes soundcheck. This is something the band take very seriously.
"We don't get one on this tour which is a bummer," says Ryan. "We got one in Glasgow and it actually made a rad show but we didn't get one in Leeds which was kind of a bastard. Most of the time when you don't have one something bad happens. We're so used to how we do it in the States now. We have really good monitor systems and really good this and that as opposed to when we used to have nothing and would just plug our amps in and go. Now we've become accustomed with being able to hear ourselves play better so when you come back into an environment where you don't get a chance to dial all of that in it's really hard to play."

Before the band go onstage you'll find them loosening up in the dressing room. Ben says they all do stretching exercises since they "jump around like monkeys". Ryan does vocal warm-ups… scales… to set his voice into action. He also jokes that Ben likes to have ten cocktails. He follows it up by joking that to warm down they have ten more cocktails!
Once in a while they'll go out to clubs. Ryan and Ben have been hanging out a lot lately since the other guys have girlfriends.

They obviously all love touring but have had the odd not-so-nice experience also. In Manchester on their headline tour earlier in the year, someone in the audience threw a shoe at Ryan which narrowly missed hitting him in the face.
Ben says the kid was "throwing stuff on stage all night. And Sean plays the violin - he can watch. A lot of times he's not playing the violin. He caught the kid that was throwing stuff and right as he threw it…"
"He pelted it right at my face and Sean's hand came and caught it at the last second," continues Ryan. "I had my eyes closed, I was singing. I remember opening my eyes right before it was gonna hit me and Sean caught it. And he threw the shoe down and jumped off stage and ran out into the audience and just started punching the kid in the stomach. We all threw out instruments down and ran out off the stage."
"It was really crazy," says Ben. "We were all amped up from being onstage."
"One night kids were throwing pizza at us, calling us 'dirty smelly yanks' and shit," also recalls Ryan. "They were not very American-friendly."

Black Velvet however are very American-friendly and are enjoying our day with them. After a 45 minute taxi journey we arrive at Cadbury World just in the nick of time. Last entry is 3pm and it's 2.55. We get our tickets and are promptly handed free Cadburys Curly Wurlys and milk chocolate bars (I think I need to tell the place they should make a vegan range) and follow the Cadbury Land trail which sees the boys happy to pose for pix in the old history section, sampling more chocolate in the Cadbury kitchen, watching short videos on how the chocolate is actually made and wrapped up, and riding the magical Cadabra which sees us all have our pic taken in our 'beanmobiles' on the way through! Oh and we're given more chocolate. Sean comes to the conclusion that everyone who works at Cadbury World is happy! We also, trivia fans, find out on the way out that Coldplay and Gwyneth Paltrow were there fairly recently also.
It's a fun day out. Hopefully it was a day that Yellowcard enjoyed as much as we did. It was definitely different, that's for sure. And they got to eat!

Visit www.yellowcardrock.com for more info

(Interview With Sean Mackin Taken From Black Velvet 40 - May 2004)

By Shari Black Velvet

There's something about YELLOWCARD... something very special about Yellowcard You see, they're a little bit different to your average rock band. While it's a bit unfair on the rest of the band to pick out one particular member, Yellowcard have something - or rather someone - that a lot of bands don't - and this has helped the band win recognition and achieve success. What or who is that? A violinist. A backflipping violinist actually. And yes, while there are other bands out there that do have violinists, Yellowcard actually play amazingly good music at the same time.