Sep. 21, 2005 - Issue #518: Superstud
What are you, yellow?
So-Cal punkers Yellowcard are back with an album that's political... but,
like, not
When pop-punkers Yellowcard set out to write their latest album, Lights and
Sounds, they chose to do so not in the comfort of their Southern Californian
home, but in New York City. Rumour has it that it had something to do with
the album’s expressed distaste for L.A. and the Hollywood environment,
but according to Yellowcard, the retreat to the east coast had much more to
do with reconnecting to a more real, non-show-business lifestyle.
“We spent the first couple of months in New York just getting back to
regular life,” says bass player Pete Mosely. “We’d been on
the road for about 18 months straight, touring on [previous album] Ocean
Avenue, so we kind of wanted to take time to ourselves and find a favourite
restaurant and favourite bar—the normal things that we hadn’t
been able to do for a while. We spent a few months doing that before we
realized that we had to be in L.A. in a month and had to get writing the
record. But we really needed that time to just become civilians
again.”
An apt choice of words, it seems, given the assault that the band has
launched on President Bush in recent years. Having appeared on the Rock
Against Bush compilations and spoken out against the administration in
interviews, it’s no surprise their new album contains anti-war lyrics
and a song about a GI getting killed. When pressed about the ubiquitous
nature of anti-Bush sentiment in today’s music, Mosely admits that
while the band clearly injects a message into their music, changing
anyone’s mind about politics isn’t what Yellowcard is really
about.
“Politics and music don’t run hand in hand—at all,”
says Mosely. “We come from a punk-rock background, so we’ve been
exposed to those band who do make it run hand in hand, but their sole goal is
to be a political band. We personally feel that we’re not a band
because of politics, but we do want to use it. There’s definitely been
a certain amount of deceit, and we’re not trying to tell people how it
is. We do want to use our position to provoke, though. A lot of the American
public is really blind; they hear what they want to hear and go on about
their lives.”
Just as Yellowcard hasn’t abandoned their outspoken ways, they
haven’t abandoned their ideals, instead adjusting their mode of
delivery to accommodate a music-loving public that has been inundated with
artists protesting against Bush. “The song on our new record,
‘Two Weeks From Twenty,’ is a story we made up about a guy who
went off to war and at a young age and lost his life, and we’re
throwing it out there and you can either see it as fair or unfair,”
explains Mosely. “We don’t use the word ‘war’ in the
song, though, or mention anything about the president.”
While the band have toned down their attack, Yellowcard is still very
conscious of preserving the sound that propelled them from a their lot as a
little-known pop-punk band to mainstream stardom. And while their breakout
album Ocean Avenue may have taken a few critics by surprise, anything new
they produce from here on in will be scrutinized and talked about even before
it hits the shelves, a fact that Mosely and the rest of the band are very
aware of.
“That’s a lot of the reason it took us a few months to get around
to writing the record,” he explains. “We reached a certain point
and just had to take a step back to get perspective. We had a record that was
successful and we had to keep that up to avoid the sophomore slump. There was
a feeling that now we have someone to write for beside ourselves, since
people are now paying attention to us as a band. We have a huge MTV audience,
and we knew we could write a record to please them. We kept away from that,
but we definitely are aware that more people are going to be looking to what
we are doing from now on.” V
Yellowcard
With Moneen and Rufio • Red’s • Fri, Sept 23
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