Exclusive Q and A: Mayday Parade Hit The Road
posted in: Exclusive Interviews • Rock
The idea of being on tour for the majority of the year with barely any breaks might sound closer to a nightmare than a dream, but road warriors Mayday Parade are all about staying busy and bringing their energetic live show to audiences far and wide. The Tallahassee rock outfit have been a staple in the modern rock scene since their inception in 2005 and are responsible for scene favorites like “Jamie All Over” “Three Cheers for Five Years” and “Miserable at Best.” Their most recent album is self titled, a choice reflective of how the band took the reins and made the most autonomous release of their career.
OurStage caught up with frontman Derek Sanders at the dawn of 2012, a year which is filled with months of Mayday Parade tour dates. Read on to find out how he feels about non-stop touring, why he loves the Vans Warped Tour and why Mayday Parade is his favorite record to date.
OS: You’re currently out on a co-headlining US tour with We The Kings. Are you satisfied with how the first few shows have gone?
DS: Yeah, overly satisfied! It’s been great. All three of the shows so far have sold out and just been so much fun. We had a day off yesterday, but the day before that was Nashville, [we played at the venue] Rocketown there. Really good times. It’s good to be back on the road again and good to be out with all of these bands. It’s a great tour.
OS: After these dates in the US, you’ll be heading over to the UK, where a lot of your shows are already sold out. Do you think that the shows overseas have a different feel than in the states?
DS: Yeah, in certain ways, they do, but it’s really cool. In some ways, at least in our experience, the crowds have almost been a little better in the UK. Even if they don’t know your band or they don’t know the words, they’ll still have a good time and jump around and get into it, whereas you don’t really see that as often over here. If people don’t know the band, they just kind of stand there and watch. But obviously, the crowds here are amazing and the crowds over there are amazing as well, just small differences, I guess!
OS: After the UK tour, you’re also going to be on the full run of Warped Tour this summer. What are you looking forward to most about going out on Warped again? Do you think this year will be different from your time on Warped in the past?
DS: Yeah, I am so excited about Warped Tour! I love that tour so much. This will be our fourth year playing it, and then we followed it one year before that…so, I guess, our fifth year being a part of Warped Tour. It’s so much fun; it’s a very unique experience, there’s nothing else like it. There’s so many other bands on the tour…that’s probably the biggest thing I’m looking forward to, the amount of hanging out there is. All the buses and vans on the tour all park together and it forms this whole alley of all these people. It’s a lot of fun to be able to hang out and the shows are always great. It’s a long tour, and at that point, we’ll have been on the road straight for several months, so by the end of it, I think we’ll probably be a little tired. [laughs] But I’m really looking forward to it. It’s awesome. And it gets better every time you do it, in a way, because you know what to expect at this point and how to prepare for Warped Tour and have a good time!
OS: You have very few days off from now until the end of August. Have you ever had such an intense touring schedule? If so, how did you manage? If not, what are you expecting from this experience?
DS: Yeah, we’ve always tried to be pretty busy with the band and stay on the road as much as we can. Throughout the six years that we’ve been a band, we have spent an average of seven or eight months out of the year on the road. There was one year, our longest stretch of touring that we’ve ever done without a break…seven months of touring just straight, one thing to the next without ever having a break. That was probably in 2007 or so. But yeah, we try to stay busy!
OS: What are some of your must-haves for being on the road?
DS: I’m pretty simple. The basics for me, I bring my laptop and my phone and my Flip cam, because I love to record stuff and take a lot of pictures on my phone. An acoustic guitar on the road is great, because that’s where a lot of the writing happens or at least the ideas kind of form from writing acoustically on the road. For Warped Tour, I did this last summer, I bought a bike at the beginning of the tour…and that…I can’t even explain. It was like, a $90 bike and it was the best $90 I’ve ever spent. Anywhere that I could go on my bike, I would go…I would only walk if I was going somewhere that I couldn’t take my bike. I would just cruise around on that thing all day long so I can’t wait to do that again on Warped Tour. I maybe should bring a bike on some other tours but it’s not really as convenient as it is on Warped Tour.
OS: About a year ago, you put out the Valdosta EP, which included acoustic versions of both old and new songs. Would you be interested in putting out another acoustic-only album someday?
DS: I don’t know if we’d do an acoustic EP again, but I think it would be really cool to go back and do another EP…five or six songs. I don’t know if the other guys are really into that idea and if it’s something that we’ll do, but we’ll see!
Photo by Amy Lane Photography
OS: You put out your self-titled record at the end of last year. Overall, how do you feel about the reception of the album? Is there anything from the writing or recording process that you would change for the next album?
DS: That album came out October 4th and it’s really been just incredible. WE love that album so much and the response has been great. Playing the new songs live now is just so much fun. There’s this whole new energy in the band from that album, we’re at a much better place because of it. We had very mixed feelings about our album before that, Anywhere But Here. There were a lot of things that we didn’t like about the process of making that record and we kind of had to compromise a lot of things along the way, and we wound up with a CD that we didn’t really truly love or care about as much, I guess. It’s kind of a weird experience, it kind of bums you out as a band. For this album, we didn’t do any co-writes or any of that kind of stuff, we just went in and made an album that we love and I think that’s exactly how we’re going to keep doing it in the future. I wouldn’t change anything about the way we did the last album. We’ve learned a lot over the years and I think that’s part of the reason why we’re so happy about that record, because it turned out exactly the way we wanted. So we won’t change anything in the future, we’ll just get together and write. We got together at a beach house and wrote for a month and I think we’ll probably try to do the same kind of thing in the future.
OS: Since you’re going to be gone so much this year, do you plan on doing any writing or recording of new music while you travel?
DS: Yeah, definitely writing. Like I said, that’s where a lot of the ideas come from…so we’ll have the acoustic guitar. I’ve been doing a lot of writing, and we all do, and sometimes we demo some stuff or record some stuff but we don’t do a whole lot of that on the road. Definitely a lot of writing and I’m excited for whatever we can get together at home with the whole band set up when we start writing together.
With all this touring, we’re sure Mayday is coming to a town near you. Visit their official site for a complete list of 2012 tour dates leading up to Warped Tour!
Like this interview? You might also like…