Interview with Yellowcard

We are loving Yellowcard at the moment, with their new album ‘Life of a Sail’ which we said was Happy, Energetic Rock & Kick Ass! And the most recent announcement, that the band will be doing a co-headline tour with Less Than Jake, next March! We were lucky enough to catch-up with Ryan Key (Vocals and Guitar) in London during the bands busy scheduale to promote the new album.

RAMzine: Hi Ryan! How’s it going?

It’s good! It’s been a crazy ten days on this press tour we’ve been on, we’ve changed time zones about six times, but it’s really exciting. I feel like Yellowcard as a band is more in demand than I’ve felt in many years, so it’s really cool to be out doing all this stuff.

So where else have you been to on the press tour?

We’ve been in the States mostly, just flying into the city, sleep, get up, do press, onto the next city, every single day. And so we got to New York, and had two days that were jam-packed and then left on the first flight to London on the Saturday morning and had yesterday off, which was pretty awesome. We’re heading back to the States after this, I’m actually moving into a new house in Nashville, Tennesee, then I’ve got ten or twelve days to myself, then we’re off on our fall tour.

What are you getting upto in your downtime?

Moving into my house! I’m quite a nutjob for interior design as well – I mean, not overall, I don’t think that I could do something where someone gives me a specific vibe – but what I like, I’m really obsessed with making my place have the right vibe. I’ll be getting the vibe on and then leaving!

So what’s your interiors vibe?

I would say my ‘vibe’ is kinda like a Southern, rustic restored vibe, so you know, weathered but clean, and yeah, Southern. My grandparents passed in the last year, year and a half, and I’m getting some of their furniture, I’m super excited about getting those items handed down to me – I love antiquing, and finding an old dresser or something, and painting and distressing it. I can’t imagine how much cool shit I could find [in London], but I can’t really take it back!

Well, that sort of took a bit of a turn for the unexpected!

Yeah, a nice opening tangent! [at this point, beers arrive] – Now we’re doing an interview! What did we end up with, Becks or Stella? Becks, all right! It’s my fave! It’s my favourite like, casual drinking beer anyway. I really like the German, heavy alcohol beers, but I can’t as it’ll wreck my life tomorrow. Becks is like my ‘hang and have a beer’ beer.

Good choice! So, the press tour has obviously been for your upcoming album, ‘Lift A Sail’, can you give us a really brief introduction to the album?

‘Lift a Sail’ is our new record out, it’s a pretty monumental record for us I feel, obviously yet to be determined if it actually is, but I think it’s certainly set up to be. I’ve been describing the record…it’s like if all of our favourite 90s alternative rock bands and Coldplay had a love child, and it’s called ‘Lift A Sail‘! It’s a pretty different set of songs stylistically and sonically for Yellowcard, it’s not a pop punk record I think really, in any way – I really got that notion from people telling it to me, I’m not on a mission to say ‘we’re not a pop punk band’, it’s just people have listened to the record and noted that. I don’t want it to feel like we have an agenda to say we’re not a pop punk band, but personally I’ve always had my own issues with ‘genre-fication’ and labelling of music. We’re really grateful to the scene, the community that has carried us all these years to where we are, but don’t want to feel restricted musically to what that is. So we definitely went in a bit of a different direction with ‘Lift A Sail’, but it’s a very natural and real direction for us, we work with a lot of passion and determination to do what feels right for us. As different as these songs sound and feel to the religious Yellowcard fans, it really did come from a very real place.

What kind of themes do you explore in the record?

I would say the one overall theme, the one that appears the most…it’s not 100% as far as all 13 tracks go…but it would be the experience of tragedy, whatever you want to call it that I’ve been through with my wife over the last year and a half. She’s a professional snowboarder from Russia, and we were engaged in the December of 2012, and in April 2013 she broke her back training and was paralysed below the waist. That was eight months before we were scheduled to start working on this record. It’s been just a really overwhelming experience for both of us…overwhelming for me, I can’t even possibly imagine what it’s like to live it, but she is. But as a songwriter, there’s no way that that experience wasn’t gonna make its way into the lyrics on an entire record that I was needing to write. I think that’s the sort of general theme, but in that comes a lot of overcoming and staying positive, moving forward…and for a lot of that, I was solely inspired by my wife and her relentless training and rehabilitation, just watching her. As hard as it’s been on our relationship, individually on each of us, it was tough to decide what to write and what not to write, but I stopped thinking about it at some point and just let it out. I think in the end I got what I wanted, making it something that I hope will be inspirational.

Are there any particular tracks to you that stand out, any favourites?

I really love them all right now! It’s so early, and the fans haven’t weighed in on their favourite songs, so I’m waiting for them to come out with three or four songs that are real standouts for them. So it’s hard to choose a favourite…but I really enjoy the fact that we took a chance on a song called ‘MSK’. The original concept for the song was a piece of music that Sean had written that was just string based, with the violin and cello, and we thought, ‘what if we just have a song that’s only that, just strings and vocals over it?’ That was the original idea, so Sean recorded all the strings and the song has a structure to it, and I wrote verse, chorus, melody and got that down. I think the melodies on this record are far more progressed than anything I’ve ever done before. But anyway, the song’s all done and Nate Young, the drummer from Anberlin who played on ‘Lift A Sail‘, he asks if he could take a shot at doing some programming and electronic elements, kinda giving ‘MSK’ a treatment. We were already integrating a lot of electronic elements into the record, so it made a lot of sense to say yes – and he killed it. As a listener, it’s almost like I’m listening to another band with what Nate did with the song, and in general, the fact that there’s no guitar and no drums, it’s a really different experience as a listener.

You’ve done quite a bit of acoustic stuff, including a few full acoustic releases of previously recorded albums. How do you find your songs translate differently in an acoustic setting?

Almost all of our music originates on an acoustic guitar – when we’re sitting around writing, we all have acoustic guitars. The one thing that it takes a while to get around is taking a section that’s very riff based on the electric guitar, but over the years I’ve figured out a lot of ways to tune the guitar differently and translate the riffs. But as I say, a lot of it starts there, so it regresses back in quite a natural way when we want to strip it down.

You’re co-headlining a tour in the US with Memphis May Fire in the coming months, but what are your plans further ahead?

We’re pretty much booked up until next July, once we get started we’re not planning on stopping! I hope we’re touring this record for a long time. We also haven’t been a part of the big UK festivals yet, but we do have an offer. The only other time we’ve had an offer was Reading & Leeds 2004, and it was the same weekend as the Video Music Awards, and that was the year we actually won an award, and we’ve never been asked to play since!

Well, we hope we see you on our festival stages next summe! Thanks for chatting to us Ryan, and good luck with the album! (It’s a good’un!)