Long Island band Taking Back Sunday’s new self-titled album is the first time the original lineup of the band have been together since the debut release in 2002, Tell All Your Friends. Vocalist Adam Lazzara, guitarist Eddie Reyes and drummer Mark O'Connell have reunited with vocalist/guitarist John Nolan and bass player Shaun Cooper who both departed in 2003 when Nolan wanted to pursue his own projects including the band Straylight Run and a solo record titled Height. The band tapped Queens Of The Stone Age and Slash producer Eric Valentine to oversee the project; they had previously worked with Valentine on the Louder Now record, the 2006 release that preceded their last album, New Again.
Taking Back Sunday is a carefully orchestrated cross-section of songs ranging from the thump and drive of "
El Paso," the first single, to the gentle sway of "
Call Me In The Morning." The combination of Eddie Reyes and John Nolan on guitars creates some inspired six-string landscapes as Lazzara’s and Nolan’s vocals switch back and forth in evocative call-and-response routines.
Lazzara, Reyes and Nolan came together at their Warner Bros. Records offices in Burbank, California to talk about the new Taking Back Sunday and all the changes they’ve been through these past nine years apart. As everybody was being seated in the WB conference room, the band found out that this interview was for Ultimate-Guitar and John immediately began talking about the site and how he accessed the tabs there to learn some of the older TBS songs he had to learn for their upcoming tour.
UG: When you put the band together in 1999, did you know what kind of band you wanted?
Eddie Reyes: I knew I didn’t want it to be like the bands I’d just quit. I just wanted to start a band with another guy who played the guitar: John Nolan. I already had this rehearsal room and we just started jamming out there. Do you remember how tiny that room was?
John Nolan: It was very small; it was probably about the area with these couches [John indicates the sitting area in the conference room, which is approximately about 15x15].
Reyes: I was in a band previously, a couple years prior called Clockwise and I remember my friends Phil and George [‘General’ George Fullan] were the singers and I used to love how they’d go back and forth. I knew in the bands previous to that it wasn’t happening [Mind Over Matter] and I wasn’t really happy with it and when I started this band I wanted to go back to that. I remember tellin’ George that, “I want to have a two-singer band or a guy who’s gonna scream in the background or yell or do harmonies.” And that’s basically another reason why we asked John ‘cause it would be cool to have two people [singing].
Did you know about Eddie and the type of music he’d been playing?
Nolan: I did, yeah. Antonio [Longo] who Eddie was talking to, he had been into the whole Long Island scene for years and I went to school with him and I’d known him for years. So I was kinda aware of things through him and then it was only about a year or two before Taking Back Sunday started that I actually started going to a lot of the shows myself and starting to get to really know things. And so I knew of Eddie’s reputation because of that.
When you finally came together as Taking Back Sunday, one of the first songs you worked on was “Great Romances of the 20th Century”?
Nolan: That was once Adam started singing. Yes, I think that was the first song that came together.
Adam Lazzara: I had moved up [from North Carolina to New York] to play bass and then the singer at the time [Jesse Lacey] wasn’t in the band anymore and I became the vocalist. Shaun Cooper came on to play bass and “Great Romances of the 20th Century” was the first song that came together with the lineup that we have right now.
Did “Great Romances of the 20th Century” point you in any musical direction?
Nolan: It was more like after that we knew we were onto something that was better than what we had previously been doing. So then it was just a matter of follow-through and keep going. And with a lot of the bands that were on Long Island at the time, it was sounding very different than a lot of the other bands.
Reyes: Yeah, the pop funk thing was still big enough at that point that a lot of the bigger bands on Long Island were a little more in that direction.
Lazzara: It was a very melodic scene too as far as bands like Glassjaw and stuff like that.
It’s interesting to hear the demo of “Great Romances Of the 20th Century” and then listen to the finished track as it appeared on the Tell All Your Friends album.
Reyes: We owe a lot of that to Sal Villanueva who produced that first record. He would have little ideas in his head and stuff and he’d be like, “Oh, you should try this here.”
Nolan: The thing was too I remember when we recorded that first demo, I think we had just finished writing the song.
Reyes: It wasn’t that old at all.
Nolan: I don’t know if we performed it or anything. And so there’s always a really different feel that a song has when a band has just written it versus when they’ve kind of lived with it for a while and I think you can hear that a little bit too.
You do the Tell All Your Friends record and then you take off. What happened?
Nolan: Bye-bye. Well, there’s a lot of things that factored into me leaving but a thing was so much of what the band was to me was me writing with Adam and our collaborative relationship. By the time I was leaving the band, we had just gone in such different directions and we were not close like we had been at the beginning. It just kind of felt that there was no way I could see doing anything that was like adding anything to the process of what the band would write at that point. I felt like based on where our relationship was at, it just felt like I couldn’t make any worthwhile music with that being the scenario.
"I kind of felt like no matter what, it was just gonna suck for me to listen to them so I just didn’t listen [laughs]."
Reyes: I was like, “Thanks; you’re a real jerk.” No, not really. I’d say it was like that.
Lazzara: There were a couple months there where we didn’t know what we were gonna do. And then everything started to fall back into place once everybody’s head was back into it.
That’s when you brought in Fred Mascherino as John’s replacement. You were specifically looking for another singing guitar player?
Reyes: Actually I was staying in Cleveland with my girlfriend at the time and he called my home. I’d known Fred for years growing up in the same music scene. We used to go play in Pennsylvania with his band and he’d come to Long Island and play with our band. We had a relationship and I knew this guy and I knew he was talented. So, yeah, he calls me and I was like, “This is really random and weird because I was thinking about calling you.” That’s how it started.
What was that dynamic like working with Fred as opposed to John?
Reyes: Honestly? I don’t really remember much. I really don’t. I don’t remember what it was like.
Nolan: There was a lot more finger-tapping after that.
Reyes: Yeah, a lot of that and a lot of me not writing. With John we just jammed and with Fred it wasn’t like that.
When you left and put together Straylight Run, was that the band you wanted Taking Back Sunday to be?
Nolan: Possibly. I think at that point I wasn’t really even thinking about it ‘cause the whole time I was in Taking Back Sunday, I always just wrote songs and would have all these ideas. A lot of times whatever I was writing, there would be like little bits and pieces I’d chop out of some other song idea that I had and then it would end up in a Taking Back Sunday song. So I kind of always was writing songs and I think I just assumed if the band continued and I continued in the band, they would get probably broken up and changed into different things the same way they had been. But then when that didn’t happen instead I just followed through on developing them as full songs instead of just leaving ‘em around for parts and stuff.
Can you characterize the difference between Tell All Your Friends and the second album, Where You Want To Be?
Lazzara: Like John was saying, a big part of Tell All Your Friends—that writing process and when it came down to my role in the band as a singer—it weighed really heavily on what we were writing together. So then with Fred, I tried to include him as much as I could in that process because I think things are always better when you have somebody to bounce your ideas off of; kind of like a filter. There’s even songs on Where You Want To Be were you can clearly tell there’s no reason for two guys to be singing this one part but it’s just like kind of trying to maintain that thing that I thought was a really big appeal for the band at the time. There’s a song on there called “I Am Fred Astaire,” which is totally one guy could sing that all the way through fine but I was trying to highlight Fred a lot more. So that’s kind of one of the mistakes that we made and some of those songs suffered by trying to say, “Hey, we’re still here and we still do this kind of thing.”
When you get to the third album, Louder Now, it’s the first time you started working with Eric Valentine as a producer. Did you sense that he was bringing something special to the music?
Lazzara: At the time, the two big records that he had done that really made us want to work with him was the Queens of the Stone Age Songs For the Dead and the first Third Eye Blind record, which for a long time was a guilty pleasure of mine but now I’m totally comfortable in loving that record. ‘Cause it kinda showed his pop sensibility but also he could make this really dirty sounding rock record. That at the time is what we were going for so he just seemed like the perfect fit. From working with him we learned a whole bunch of stuff as far as little things like God is in the details. He’s really big on that like little details in little things within the songwriting.
A little ear candy?
Lazzara: Yeah; spices. So, um, that’s why we went with him, which was crazy for us because it was our first record for Warners so all of a sudden we’d just gone into this totally different world. And in a certain sense we had gone to the next grade and you could feel it. Or if you’re equating it to going into high school. Or I guess it would be more like going from middle school to high school. And, yeah, everything was just like way more pro but also one of the reasons we went with Eric too was we felt the most comfortable with him. Coming from the east coast, everything out here was kind of flashy and all that and Eric wasn’t; all the proof is in his work and we were really attracted to that. We met with a whole bunch of people.
Then you record New Again and replace Eric Valentine with David Kahne and Matthew Fazzi replaces Fred Mascherino.
Lazzara: I think David Kahne, though he’s a good producer, I don’t think he was the right fit for our band. It was actually Matt Fazzi that brought him working with him and so we go and check him out and one of the records he did right before that was the Paul McCartney record, which was a great record. So we were like, “Oh, man, he just did this Paul McCartney records; let’s go work with him.” And not really realizing it’s a Paul McCartney record and I don’t know how much a producer has to do there.
Put up a microphone.
Lazzara: Yeah, and go. But it just wasn’t the right fit for us. What we were going for was just different than what he had envisioned both sonically and with all of that stuff. So that was a little bit of a bummer because it was one of those hindsight things.
You also thought the New Again record was a low point for the band?
Reyes: Yeah, I honestly don’t remember a lot like on purpose; I kind of forgot a lot about that record.
Nolan: He has it in a little fireproof safe in his brain.
Reyes: David Kahne is a great producer and he’s done some great records. But I remember getting pre-warned about working with him and I didn’t listen to that. And then at the end of that process, I said, “Wow, I should have listened to him.” It was kind of very blank. I think I put my guitar tracks on and then I flew back home and that was it. And then the record was out. I’m just being honest.
Honesty is appreciated. And now the band is back together with the original lineup. John, did you follow what TBS had been doing when you were out of the band?
Nolan: No. It interested me but I kind of felt like no matter what, it was just gonna suck for me to listen to them so I just didn’t listen [laughs]. I just didn’t listen. I heard the singles and the songs that were on MTV and things like that; I wouldn’t go so far as to try and avoid that. If something came on, I’d check it out. But I actively stayed away. I just felt like it was gonna either make me angry or upset or something. I didn’t see any way I was gonna listen to it and be like, “That was fun. I enjoyed that.” So I just stayed away. I kinda got caught up only like right when we started talking about me and Shaun coming back into the band. Then I was like, “Oh, man, I gotta listen to their albums.”
"I feel like the album listens like a book reads because of the up and down."
Nolan: Mark [O’Connell], our drummer …
Lazzara: Marked you into it.
Nolan: Marked me into it. He had this master plan that he was building up in his head, I guess, for a long time. And he gradually started talking to everybody. I think he started with Eddie and Adam and then went to Shaun and then to me, I think, I was the last person. Yeah, he kind of set it in motion and after that we all reconnected and started talking again and things just went from there.
How did it feel when you started working on the Taking Back Sunday album?
Nolan: I felt like it was pretty comfortable and really fun almost immediately.
Reyes: It was weird.
Nolan: But I wouldn’t say it felt like we had just picked up where we left off ‘cause it had been so much time. I couldn’t even quite remember where we had left off. But it just felt surprisingly comfortable. I couldn’t believe it. I’d say within the first 10 or 15 minutes we were all settled in and talking and laughing and having fun.
Do you think from being on your own for all those years and writing for different projects, that you brought back a different perspective when you rejoined the band?
Nolan: Yeah, I’m sure they did. It’s really hard for me to say what those things specifically would be that I learned or brought into the process of these songs. One thing that definitely affected me doing all that stuff with Straylight Run and then finally doing the solo record is going so far in a direction that I felt like I wanted to go in. Without any other input, I realized towards the end of that I was like, “This is fun but I need somebody to balance me out here.”
Reyes: Like a wrangler.
Nolan: Yeah, I need someone to reign me in sometimes. Having explored a lot of what I just felt like doing, it definitely put me in a place where I was more like open to other people’s input about what I was doing. And trying to improve it instead of being like, “No, this is my idea and I’m gonna do it exactly the way I wanna do it.” It made me much more interested and open in having it being developed by other people.
You went back to Eric Valentine as the producer who could pull all of these new pieces together.
Lazzara: Even with New Again we were kinda chasing after Eric for scheduling and things. So it was kinda like early on when we first got together we didn’t even try to play any of the older songs. We just went straight into writing to see if it would still work ‘cause there’s some chemistry that needs to be there. But really early on in that process we were calling Gillian [assistant] and were like, “You gotta find out what Eric’s doing now so he’ll be ready whenever we’re ready.” With New Again, the day it came out we played Jimmy Kimmel [cable television show] and had kind of like a release party afterwards and he actually came to that and that’s when we were first like, “Well, what are you doing in about a year-and-a-half?”
Nolan: So you knew by then? That’s funny.
Lazzara: With me, I just think he’s the best. If I could just make records and be around that dude for the rest of our career, that’s what I would be fine with doing. I don’t know if he would be fine with doing that but I would be fine with doing that.
Reyes: I was just thinking that.
Lazzara: He’s just like a real positive person and he really knows how to work with other people and he’s very smart. A lot of people that you came across, either people that make records or fans or just people in the industry in general, there’s a lot of ego involved and with Eric there doesn’t seem like there’s a whole lot of that.
Reyes: It seems like there’s a lot of producers out there that are good at bumming you out about being a musician. And he’s just really good at making you feel good about it. But I was really scared ‘cause I’m not a trained musician or anything like that. You get the horror stories about a producer sending this guy home and that guy home and replacing this one. And Eric was just like, “No, dude, we’ll take it 70 times if we have to.” He made me be more confident.
You’re a really good rhythm guitar player.
Reyes: Thanks. Just the rhythm stuff.
Nolan: On Tell All Your Friends you had some lead stuff; we switched it up.
Reyes: I can’t tell you what I’m playing though; I don’t know notes and I don’t know how to read or write music. My music teacher told me that he was amazed that I was a complete idiot in his class. He flunked me. He said, “I don’t understand how you can play acoustic guitar and it doesn’t matter what I stick in your brain, it doesn’t stay there.” And I’m like, “I don’t know.”
While we’re talking about guitars, can you describe how you two put together your parts?
Nolan: With this record a lot of times it just comes from somebody having a riff or a chord progression or something and even Mark our drummer would have a lot of guitar parts and so would Eddie. It would just start out with them showing that to everyone and then we’re like, “Cool, let’s just play.” And then that’s usually what we will do is just kinda get together and …
Reyes: Jam.
Nolan: Yeah, kind of work off each other and feel it out. Then once Eric got involved, it got a little more specific with developing both of our guitar parts. It was more about different feel things and little changes and touches being added to them to make it a little more interesting.
Reyes: He’d fix our mistakes; he made ‘em better.
"I can’t tell you what I’m playing; I don’t know notes and I don’t know how to read or write music."
Nolan: Eric kind of took a lot of the amp stuff over and that made a lot of sense because he knows so much more about that stuff. And he has such a better ear for it. But we spent a lot of time messing around with guitar pedals. I don’t if you did too, Eddie? We’d like change out pedals just to find a certain kind of distortion and go through four or five different things. He’s just got walls and walls of pedals and he’d run in and go, “Ooh, we’ll try this one” or “That one’s no good; let’s try another one.” We spent a lot of time doing that and with the pedals I was more involved. There were different sounds sometimes that I was looking for. But with the amps, that was all Eric.
Reyes: He would drive me nuts. He’d be like, “Try this Silvertone. Hey, let’s try this Worm. Nah, take off this guitar.” An hour later we’ll end up with the Silvertone and he synthesizer.
Nolan: Yeah, he does go through lots of different combinations. But I always feel like it was worth it though; I never got mad ‘cause in the end I always felt like it was the best choice and it sounded better than it would have if he hadn’t gone through all of that.
Reyes: I mean that in a complete positive way.
Nolan: Yeah, but it does get a little frustrating.
Reyes: You learn so much from what he did; he’s a mad scientist.
You’ve talked about “El Paso” as being one of the heavier sounds you’ve ever recorded. Was Taking Back Sunday a heavier album in general?
Lazzara: At first we were going back and forth with what the first song on the record was gonna be. Because we made our own different sequencing for it and then we put ‘em all together and kind of made note of the similarities. And with “El Paso,” we figured, “Why not come out swinging?” But it’s cool too because it starts with that but ends with this song called “Call Me In the Morning,” which is a really ballady kind of sentimental tune. More gentle. So I feel like the album listens like a book reads because of the up and down.
There are acoustics on “Call Me In the Morning”?
Nolan: Yeah, I think Eddie and I both played acoustics on different parts of the song.
Reyes: Going back to that question you asked, “When I started the band, what was I going for?” What I wanted for me is what we do together as a band. I wanted to start a band that was like, “Wow” and then really soft and musical. This new record is exactly why I started the band: from heavy to soft to poppy.
A band that could go from “Sad Savior” to “Money (Let It Go)?”
Reyes: Yeah, and I just recalled Tell All Your Friends being like that and the same with this record. It’s like, “Ah, OK, this makes sense. We’re not set on playing just one way. We wrote a heavy song, let’s write a piano-y song.”
At the end of the day, it’s been many years since this band formation has been together. Does the Taking Back Sunday album capture all the pieces you were looking for?
Lazzara: When we first got back together, we didn’t try and play any of the older songs; we just went right into writing. Because we were really realistic about it that there was all this time in-between us that maybe when we got back together maybe the same chemistry wouldn’t be there. Or people wouldn’t be able to play off one another like they used to be able to but that wasn’t the case. So through that chemistry and rekindling friendships, the outcome was all these rad songs.
You’re going out on tour again – how does that feel?
Nolan: It’s exciting.
Lazzara: Since we’ve been back together and after the recording, we’ve done shows but they’ve all kind of been one-offs. There hasn’t been a lot of consistency there and when you’re on tour you kind of fall into a routine even though everything’s different everyday, there are little things that help you keep it together. So, yeah, we’re really excited to be out and be traveling together and having it feel a little more consistent. This is another big aspect of being in a band and being back together and it’s kind of like this new thing again.
Will you be performing songs from the earlier albums?
Nolan: We’ve got a pretty good mix of everything on the setlist.
You’ll have to play songs that you didn’t originally record?
Nolan: Yeah, I’ve been playing a whole bunch. That’s where I had to go to Ultimate-Guitar to see the tabs!
Interview by Steven Rosen
Ultimate-Guitar.Com © 2011
The new album is so good.
What a great songwriter