Since Keep Calm and Carry On began, many bands have been on our pages and played on the show. However, there are very few who have proven to be as fascinating, influential, and downright talented as The Wonder Years. A band forged in sweat and a non-stop DIY attitude, the band has reached heights many thought pop-punk bands would never achieve again. This year, the stakes are even higher, as the band is set to release its third full-length on Hopeless Records, titled The Greatest Generation. Due out May 14 (now is a good time to pause and mark your calendars), the album is atop anyone and everyone's "Most Anticipated" list, and the band will be supporting the album this summer on the Warped Tour's Main Stage. To gear up for this venture, the band kicked off a small US headlining tour with Fireworks, Hostage Calm, and Misser, and Keep Calm and Carry On was lucky enough to sit down and talk with vocalist Dan "Soupy" Campbell to talk about where the band is headed, where they've come from, and much more!
Keep Calm: You guys are here at the Stone Pony, opening up your Spring Headlining Tour, with Fireworks, Hostage Calm, and Misser. How excited are you for this tour to start?
Dan "Soupy" Campbell": You know what, the word is "jet-lagged." We were in Australia 48 hours ago, and the past 48 hours have probably been the most stressful of my entire life. We're getting everything together for the new record. And it's just deadline after deadline, the trailer's getting repaired. So the excitement hasn't even sunk in yet. Honestly, what I really want to do right now is fall asleep, because it should be, like, 7:00am Australian time. But I think that once the show gets rolling tonight, the excitement's gonna barrel over. We're with so many of our friends, and the bottom line to it is that every band on the tour, we've been friends with for so long.
KC: And was that kind of the mindset going into this? I don't want to say this is a smaller market tour, but you guys are playing venues that you haven't really played in a while.
DC: I mean, it's a B-market tour. I don't think there's any shame in saying it. This is a tour where, we're announced on Warped Tour, this is a tour that has to avoid where Warped dates are so we can keep everybody happy. But for us, it was also an opportunity. The last tour we did was with Yellowcard, and it was all House of Blues-sized rooms, it was an expensive ticket, and it was with bands that are a little outside of the world that we usually live in, outside of that bubble. This tour is an opportunity to go back, and say, "If you were bummed that we played too big of a room, if you were bummed that the show cost too much, if you were bummed that you didn't necessarily love all the other bands, here's a tour where we're gonna play small rooms, we're gonna keep the ticket prices low as s***, and it's gonna be us, and Fireworks, and Hostage Calm, and Misser."
KC: All bands that you've toured with before, with the exception of Misser, but you've toured with their members before.
DC: Yeah, we've toured with Transit, we toured with Mikey from Set Your Goals, who's playing drums. With every tour, the point of the tour is to go out and play. Every time we do a tour where we're touring with a band you might not love, the ticket price might be a little bit too high, and it's not what you're used to doing, we try to say, "Well, a couple months later, here's a tour where the ticket price is lower, you're gonna love the bands that are playing, et cetera, et cetera."
KC: And I think you guys have kind of already done this before, when you guys did the Pop Punk's Not Dead Tour with New Found Glory, although they fit a little more into that bubble, and then you guys come out and headline the Glamour Kills Tour.
DC: Yeah, definitely, to a degree. When we do support tours for larger bands, it's an incredible opportunity, and we've never felt anything but lucky, and excited. I want to put that image out there. I love doing support tours. They help our band grow, and when you meet bands that you don't already know, it's expanding friendships. But the calls are not ours to make. So we like to also be in the position where we're gonna do a tour following that where the calls are ours to make. So we got to kind of call the shots on this tour. Not every call, you can't control everything, sometimes the venues make the calls, sometimes the promoters make the calls, so you can't win every battle, but we do our best.
KC: I think first of all, that congratulations are in order. You guys are on Main Stage Warped Tour this year. Coming from where you guys were before, how does that feel? Like you said, you guys have always built this image around the sweaty basement shows, making an effort to play smaller shows. You're to be in front of probably tens of thousands of people on some of these dates on the tour, so how are you guys approaching this? Have you even begun to approach it at all?
DC: Well, the first thing to say is that we work very hard at our shows to make them always feel intimate. We always put on the same show, with the same energy. I remember when I was younger, going to see bands, and I'd see videos of them playing really small clubs, and I didn't get a chance to catch them until they were playing really big clubs, and the energy was sucked the f*** out. It was just, "Here's us, my foot's on the monitor for literally the whole set. I don't move. I don't care--not that I don't care, I don't want to speak for those bands, but that was the vibe I got as a kid. I don't want to give off that vibe. So, 10 kids, 100 kids, a thousand kids, ten thousand kids. The venue's different, the show is going to be different, but we will always do our best to make it feel the same. But at the same time, it's humbling, and it's daunting. The Main Stage of Warped Tour is a huge f***in' deal, man. I'm sure you know it. We grew up going to the Warped Tour, and I think everyone that's a part of this scene has been to a Warped Tour. If you're like me, it was the highlight of your summer every year. You took the train down, you took the ferry across the river, and got to hang out all day with a bunch of people like you and watch a bunch of bands you love. It was cool enough in 2011, when we played the Warped Tour. We had incredible crowds, worked with incredible people, it was just blowing my mind every day. I couldn't believe how well we were received, I couldn't thank everyone enough. To get a chance to take that up another notch is really exciting for us. We're gonna make an effort to do a signing every day at our tent. We're gonna go out and play hard. We're gonna be playing some new songs, we've got a new record coming out in May, so the songs will have time to percolate. I'm really excited to get out and play some new stuff. You don't think about it before you're touring, but you start playing the songs so often. And then tonight, we were like, "Holy s***, we haven't practiced in forever," you know? We did Soundwave, but you know that was only a certain amount of songs, and those were the standard songs, and we gotta get in some deeper cuts, you know? Everyone's heard these songs, but we had no time to practice.We had two days, but we also had record deadlines and jet lag, so we ran through a couple of them onstage during our soundcheck, and we're gonna do a couple more tomorrow, and I don't want to short-change anyone. We're doing the best we can. As the tour progresses, you're gonna hear some more songs from us.
KC: And as a fan, I think that's all we can ask for.
DC: Yeah, we're definitely doing everything we can.
KC: So I wanted to avoid it for a little bit, I know you hinted at it a couple times, but let's just get it out there: you guys have a brand new album coming out May 14, it's called The Greatest Generation, due out again on Hopeless Records. You guys are working with Paul Leavitt again.
DC. No, we've never worked with Paul Leavitt before. This is Steve Evetts.
KC: Oh, that's right. Their last names rhyme, I'm sorry. Steve worked with you guys on Suburbia.
DC: Yeah, he did all of the Lifetime records, Kid Dynamite, Saves the Say up through Through Being Cool, he's done some Say Anything stuff, some Senses Fail stuff, Two Tongues, all of The Dillinger Escape Plan stuff, Every Time I Die, Snapcase, he worked with The Cure. He did a Limp Bizkit EP that never came out, that was apparently incredibly expensive. He's the man. So he produced it, but we decided to go a different way with the mix this time. We loved the mix on Suburbia, so it wasn't about that. We want every record to sound different sonicly, and so we worked with a different procucer from Upsides to Suburbia, but if we were going to work with the same producer from Suburbia and forward, we want to do something different so that it differentiates. So Mark Trombino was at the board for that. Mark did blink-182's Dude Ranch, Jimmy Eat World's Clarity, Bleed American, Rilo Kiley, he mixed Commit this to Memory from Motion City Soundtrack, The Starting Line's Say It Like You Mean It. I mean, Mark is the master.
KC: Did you feel he brought the perspective that you guys were looking for?
DC: Yeah, with the mix thing, it's not like we were there. We were actually in Austrailia when we heard the mixes, and we were on a 14-hour time zone difference, so we're getting them when he's going to sleep, we're sending him notes when he's waking up. But we feel like he added his touch to the record. I can't tell you how excited I am for everyone to hear it. It is, bar-none, by far, as a complete album, the best thing we've ever done. You always look back on your work, and you're always going to criticize it. So I look back at Upsides, I look back at Suburbia, and there's songs that I say I wish we had done this, or I wish we had done that, and we were on this time crunch and forgot this. This one just feels so full, so complete. Every song is a piece of a puzzle, the record relies on every song to become a whole.
KC: You guys had mentioned in a couple of interviews that this is going to be part 3 of a trilogy about growing up. I just wanted to know, when you sat down and you first began writing The Upsides, was this the plan all along, to do a trilogy about growing up, or did you kind of see it as something that you wanted to do when you started Suburbia, or something that you did when you started The Greatest Generation?
DC: I think when we started working on this record. I had this concept, but it was so loose, it was these thoughts, and I knew they all fit together. I knew that they belonged together, but I couldn't quite connect the synapses. They were there, but there was something missing. And then I came to the realization that all three of the records, they fit together in a certain manner. And I don't want to speak to much on the theme of this, but it is to say that there was a serious realization that came with this record, and that came with the age bracket that we are now in. I turned 27 a month ago. There is an inter-connectivity to it. It gets dangerous when you start to talk about a theme for the record, because then you expect every song to carry the theme, which is not the case. The theme is the sum of the part. So each speaks to a specific event or realization or memory, all of which have forced catharsis, culminating in the last song when the realization comes about. And you'll hear about it a ton in the next couple months.
KC: And you're going to be doing a ton more interviews, a ton more press for this album, I just want to end with this, and since there's so much that you guys have planned for this, so I don't want to step on your toes. So it's March 8, 2013. You guys are about to go out on your B-market headliner, you've got Warped Tour coming up this summer. What do you want to tell me, right now, about The Greatest Generation?
DC: I can't tell you a whole lot. It's dangerous because we've promised exclusives to people so I've got to tread lightly with these kinds of things. But I want you to know that we've never been more proud of anything. I want you to know that we've never worked as hard on anything. I want you to know that when you're expecting to hear it, don't expect us turning our back on you, if you've been a fan of the band the whole time, this is not jump to a different genre. This is a natural progression for us. It's not about us flipping the switch and writing a math-rock record, or an alt-country record, although I would love to. But it's also not about writing the same record again. There's going to be growth, and what's difficult is that you grow at a different rate. Everyone's going to grow at a different rate. And that's not just the band, I mean our fans. So, you grow to perceive things a little differently, and so some of our fans may want a certain thing, some of our fans may want the total opposite thing. We're gonna be somewhere in there, but we do know that we have delivered the highest-quality product that we could have delivered. It's heartfelt, it's passionate, it's personal to a fault, almost. I've never gotten this personal on a record. Actually, to the point where for the first time I've had to change a name. And that's something we've never done. So what you're going to get is the next step in the evolution of The Wonder Years, and a record that we bleed for, a record that our entire hearts are in.
Keep Calm and Carry On would like to thank Dan Campbell and the rest of The Wonder Years crew for making this interview possible, and make sure you check out The Greatest Generation when it drops on May 14. You can check out the album's trailer below!
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