First Interview With Newly Reassembled Taking Back Sunday

Today, Alternative Press posted the first interview with Taking Back Sunday since they announced they were going back to their original lineup. It’s a great interview and gives tons of insight on the entire situation.

Click more to check it out.

Taking Back Sunday frontman Adam Lazzara interviewed with AP editor-in-chief Jason Pettigrew about the band’s reformation and more.

Nobody except maybe your close bros saw John Nolan [guitar/vocals] and Shaun Cooper [bass] coming back into the fold. What’s the timeline on this?
When we first got together, we were all sitting in a room and everybody just started laughing. It was like, “Who would’ve thought?” We didn’t see this coming. Mark O’Connell [drums] has some crazy ideas sometimes and sometimes he’s 100 percent right.

So it was Mark who engineered this thing?
He planted the seed. He and Shaun have been friends since they were kids and they still hang out all the time. Then when John would be in town, he’d hang out with him, too. We were at a place where everybody was really unhappy. Nobody was feeling fulfilled or satisfied or just happy being together or around one another. I remember the first time Mark told me [about the idea]. He called me and was like, “Hey man, what do you think if we went back to all the original members?” and I was like, “Man, you’re out of you’re damn mind because there’s no way that’s gonna happen.” I hadn’t talked to John or Shaun in, like, seven years. Mark kind of kept talking about because if things had stayed the way they were [in TBS], there wouldn’t be a next record. So then, Mark just kept talking to me about it and then I got a call from John. We started talking on the phone as if no time had passed. It [seemed like] it could’ve been a day or two since we last talked, and I think there’s something to be said for that.

So when did this all take place?
When I first talked to John it was probably early in the year–around January. For me, I generally missed having him be a part of my life. At first, we were just playing catch-up. We didn’t really talk a whole lot about, “Hey, let’s try to make music.” It was more like, “Aw man, I missed ya, buddy. Sorry I was a dick back then.” [Laughs.]

So you were working on the friendship more than anything music-related.
Yeah, and then even when we started talking about the music and were sending ideas back and forth, there was always this thing like, “Look, there’s a chance this just isn’t gonna work. I could write something you’re gonna think is awful or you could write something I could think is awful. Or this could just not work.” It wasn’t something we were trying to force or make happen. We were really cautious going back into that part of it.

It’s often been inferred, but never stated plainly: Why did Shaun and John leave TBS in the first place?
Well, I think it had a lot to do with where everybody was at during that point of their lives. I got so ahead of myself and made so many mistakes. John’s head was kind of going in a different direction. Everything happened really fast. Right when that first record came out, we went from opening the Victory [Records] tour to headlining these shows that were sold out at what we thought at the time were the biggest venues ever. That affects you. It can change a person. So everyone was going through this change at the same time and everyone was dealing with it differently.

You said that TBS couldn’t go on the way it was going. Were Matt Rubano [bass] and Matt Fazzi [guitar/vocals] fired or was it a “you can’t fire me, I quit” scenario?
I wouldn’t use the word “fired.” It was more like “let go.” We were all on the phone saying, “Look, this isn’t working.” It wasn’t an easy thing to do. With Matt Rubano, it was one the toughest decisions that I’ve made and it didn’t come about quickly or easily. My stomach starts to knot up just thinking about that conversation. He was a perfect gentleman. There wasn’t any, “No, fuck you,” or anything like that.

Why did you guys make the announcement in a video where you’re at a shooting range?
Actually, we were outside of Juarez, Mexico, on the U.S. side. That’s kind of where we met up. Everybody went into it like, “Okay, look. There’s a great chance this could not work. So let’s just go someplace where there’s no distraction in the middle of nowhere and just, like, see if we could even be in a room together. So in the video, the house you see in the background was the house we were staying in, then on the other side, there was another house that was gutted out and in the back there was a live room and in the front, there was a console room. So we would hang out at the house and then walk over to this other house and work on tunes. But being that we were in the middle of nowhere, you can just walk outside and shoot a gun, so we thought, “Why not?”

A lot of people would be cynical and say this is a pandering situation, but you’re choosing to make a new album instead of going out on tour. I’m sure it’d be very easy to go out on tour, play all of Tell All Your Friends and go for the cash-grab. But it seems like you’re more interested in creating new work together.
Everything has been in the spirit of why we wanted to start a band in the first place and, like, why we made music together at all. It’s keeping that in mind. It was in no way, “Let’s go get paid.” It was, “This is what I love to do and I know you love doing it, too. Together, the combination of the five of us–I really believe in what that combination can do. So let’s play some music.” I kind of want to let people think what they want. Who cares what people say? I wanna be happy. I want to be happy doing what I’m doing and proud of it. If doing this is going to allow me to feel that, then I don’t care what anybody says.

Whose new album will be out first: TBS or Blink-182?
[Laughs.] I don’t know. We’ve been talking with [producer] Eric Valentine. That’s who we wanted to go with on New Again but the timing didn’t work. So we’re really stoked to be able to hang with him. There hasn’t been a date set yet [for the beginning of recording], but in a perfect world, we’d be going into record in mid-summer.

…Read the rest of the interview at the Alternative Press.