Keep Calm Presents: An Interview with Anthony Raneri of Bayside

     At least week's holiday show, Anthony Raneri, vocalist of Bayside, was kind enough to take some time to sit down with KCACO's Madison Ouellette to talk all about Spring tours and the upcoming release of Bayside's sixth album Cult.  

Madison Ouellette: We’re here at your holiday show tonight. This is one of three shows, correct?           

Anthony Raneri: Mhm

MO: And this is the middle one? You’re in Boston tomorrow and you were in Long Island last night, right?

AR: Yes, yes.

MO: So how are performing at these venues specifically for holiday shows different then when you go on tour for the big stuff?

AR: We get to plan things. I mean- these are some of our bigger markets, you know? And Long Island is very much a hometown show but Jersey sort of bleeds into that hometown feel and Jack is from Boston.  Boston is a place we’ve been going to since the beginning of the band so they’re all sort of like hometown feels.  Planning a show specifically for your hometown is definitely a pretty unique thing compared to a tour where you’re trying to please like tons and tons of people from all over the country, you know?

MO: Right. So you just announced two big tours; you have your headlining tour just announced for the Spring and it’s The Great American Cult Tour, is that correct?

AR: Yes.

MO: With Four Years Strong and Daylight, right?

AR: Yup and Mixtapes

MO: So when you’re going on that, how are you choosing your set list? Is anything going to be different, besides obviously playing stuff from Cult, which you’ll be promoting.

AR: Yeah, we always try to mix it up as much as we can.  At this point, we’ve been a band for so long, we have so many records now with singles on them, with videos that we’ve made for songs, and then there’s the fan favorites so every record, there’s new songs that we have to play every night, you know what I mean?  So we’re running out of spots that we can rotate on tours.

MO: That’s one of the best problems you can have though.

AR: It’s true, yeah, it’s true.  It’s funny, like Warped Tour is always the best example of that because you only get like a half hour so that’s like seven songs and that’s like, we just play our singles, you know what I mean?  And that’s all you really have time for.

MO: I mean, I saw you guys on Warped Tour, I think it was two years ago and being from NJ, it was at PNC and you guys just packed the amphitheater and it was really cool to see.  But so, going off a little bit, you’re also going to Europe soon. . .

AR: Yup, yup in the Spring.

MO: With Alkaline Trio.

AR: Yeah

MO: So how is playing in Europe? Is that different than playing the states?  Do you find the fan bases any different?

AR: Yes, it’s very very different.  Our fan base is very different.  For us, Europe, in a lot of ways, is a work in progress still, where we do shows here and it’s very much you’re performing, you’re putting on a show, you’re entertaining people who are fans, you know what I mean?  So it’s a little easier to get into their minds, you know what I mean?  Because I always say I’m the biggest Bayside fan, you know what I mean? So when it comes to entertaining and making our fans happy, I just do what I would be excited about, you know? 

MO: Right

AR: Europe, especially supporting in Europe, it’s a lot more- we’re going to countries for the first time on that tour

MO: Oh, wow. Okay.

AR: So it’s a whole other mindset going into a show with ‘how do you entertain people who don’t know who you are?’  You know what I mean? How do you just be generally entertaining? 

MO: Right.

AR: So it is, it’s a totally different mindset.  And the fans- the fans there are very different.

MO: Really?

AR: Yeah, they’re very very different.  In some places, they’re much more rabid than they are here.

MO: Haha really?!

AR: Yeah, well they’re just so excited you came, you know what I mean?

MO: That’s really cool, though.

AR: Yeah, we’re a little spoiled here. There, they’re just so excited you came. And in some places, they could just- they could care less, you know what I mean? Not that they actually couldn’t care less but they- they’re a lot more subdued, they don’t get as excited, you know? Like Scandinavians, you know, they’re weird.

MO: hahah they’re weird?  Switching gears a little bit, you guys just announced that you guys are coming out with a sixth album Cult.  So  something that was interesting with that way you announced this album was much different than what we really see- it was a whole bunch of hints and clues here and there.  What inspired that?

AR: You know what’s funny is that was just an idea that Nick came up with like last minute.  We put all the symbols and stuff like that that are a part of the record cover was because we felt like the record, Cult- our new record, is really a really good example of our sound from where it started to where it is now, you know?  So we wanted to sort of pay a tribute to all of our past records on that album cover. And then Nick had the idea of, you know, kind of throwing up something on the Facebook and to us, it was just like ‘oh, let’s just do it. . . Oh yeah, cool, yeah throw something on the Facebook’ and then it- then, people got really kind of excited like ‘what the hell’s going on?’ you know? So yeah, it was cool.  I’m glad that it worked.

MO: I was gonna say that it picked up a lot of steam and created a lot of buzz.

AR: Yeah, it really did.

MO: You released the first single off of it called “Pigsty” and from what I found, it was little bit darker and little more cynical than what we found in Killing Time, which is especially interesting because a lot of you guys are now married and you and your wife just had your first kid-

AR: Yeah

MO: So why did it take a darker turn when all of you are reaching a really happy point in your lives?

AR: You know I think the whole record- I wouldn’t say the whole record takes that turn but there’s definitely like- like I said just listening back on this record, it’s like sort of the anger and the cynicism that has always been there but it’s also- there’s songs that have the hope and all the places that we’ve been kind of progressing towards.

MO: Right, well we are all really excited to hear it!  And you guys just. . . released is some way to put it- the second single?

AR: Sort of, yeah. 

MO: But, so it’s, for any listeners that haven’t heard about it yet, you released the lyrics and the guitar tabs, correct?

AR: Yes.

MO: So again, what inspired that?  So it’s kind of for the fans to take their own take on the song but why release a song like that? Or I guess release should be in quotes

AR: We really wanted to see- I mean- we were really interested to see what people would sort of imagine given the chords and the lyrics and I think there’s also the, like the melody of the vocals are in there too that you could read.  We just wanted to see what people would do with it.  It’s really for our own enjoyment.  We wanted hear people just sort of like kind of come up with whatever they could, you know?  And the only way to truly do that is by having them do it without ever hearing the song they’re covering, you know? Because it could go anywhere.

MO: I’ve heard very different renditions of it so we are really excited to see where people take it and everything.

AR: Yeah, me too!

MO: So that pretty much wraps it up on my end.  Is there anything else you want to say?

AR: That’s about it.  The record comes out February 18^th.  It’s called Cult and The Great American Cult Tour starts March 5^th and January 9^th- the tickets go on sale.

Big thanks to Anthony for taking the time to meet with KCACO and thanks to you for listening!

Preorders for Bayside's sixth album Cult can be found via Hopeless Records.

Be sure to also follow the band through Facebook and Twitter!

Keep Calm Presents: Interview with Anthony Raneri

Anthony Raneri has always been a busy guy. From the constant touring schedule that Bayside has developed that even the most loyal members of the "Cult" have a difficult time keeping up with to the acoustic solo shows he will often play when Bayside takes a (rare) few weeks off, it's easy to understand that Raneri is a man who is always thinking forward to his next venture. This year, he was finally able to release his first solo EP New Cathedrals, and even then, he found a way to be involved with every aspect of the writing, production, promotion, and distribution of the album. Aside from re-igniting the DIY attitude that seems to be taking hold of the music scene yet again, Raneri proves on New Cathedrals that his creativity isn't limited to his stinging hooks and soaring choruses that we're so used to hearing from Bayside. And somehow, just before playing at the Rathskellar at The College of New Jersey, Anthony was able to find the time to sit down with Keep Calm and Carry On for an exclusive interview! You're definitely going to want to read this, so check it out below!

Keep Calm and Carry On: 91.3FM WTSR, on the campus of The College of New Jersey, this is Donald WAgenblast, I'm the host of Keep Calm and Carry On, and right now we're here with Anthony Raneri, before his solo CUBRat show. Anthony, how are you today?
Anthony Raneri: I'm doing good, how are you?
KC: Good, thank you. So, you're solo tonight. You've played a ton of Bayside shows, and a ton of Bayside acoustic shows. How do your solo acoustic shows differ from those Bayside shows?
AR: Well, I  kind of get to do whatever I want, you know, that's the nice part. With Bayside, to get four guys on the same page, playing the songs all together, that takes some practice. With the solo shows, if I'm driving on the way, and I hear a song, and I want to play it, I can play it that night, where with the band, I can't really do that. And that's the other thing, I can play whatever I want; I can play covers, I can play stuff from my solo record, I can play Bayside songs.

KC: And you were solo on the Acoustic Basement on Warped Tour, how was juggling your set between your acoustic set and Bayside's regular set?
AR: It wasn't as tough as I thought it was going to be. Going into the tour, as we got closer, I started questioning what I was getting myself into.  I think most of the time, they were pretty good about scheduling me where it was close enough together, where I wouldn't have to get ready to play, cool down for five hours, and then go play again, but also not so close to where I was running to one set while I'm still sweating from the other set.

KC: So what was your approach going into those Acoustic Basement shows? Were you like, "Oh, should I play more Bayside songs?" or did you want to play more songs from the solo record you said you just put out?
AR: I usually feel out the crowd, you know? That's another cool thing about the solo shows: they're living, breathing things, and I can call audibles constantly, so I feel out the crowd. I usually start the set off with a mix of everything, and I see which songs get what reactions. I try to give people what they came to see. It's nice for me to be able to play the solo stuff, and when people know it, it's great, because they haven't seen it before, and it's still fairly new. But then, if I'm doing that stuff and I can tell people don't really know it,  or I feel like I'm losing them a little bit, then I'll start packing in a little more Bayside songs.

KC: Like you said, you had a solo EP come out, it's called New Cathedrals. What sparked the venture into the solo record for you?
AR: I think it was  sort of out of necessity, in a way. I write songs constantly, and I listen to different types of music, and I had all these songs, some of them were as old as 2002. I wrote "Sandra Partial" in 2002. Those songs have just been sitting around for years, and I finally had about six months free from Bayside, which is way longer than I've ever had off, so I figured I'd use that time to record them, and see if anybody wanted it.

KC: Certainly, it's not what you'd expect to hear the lead singer of Bayside singing, you know, "The Ballad of Bill the Saint" to me almost sounds like a country song, and you have songs like "Charleston," and "Sandra Partial," as well, was that by design?
AR: I think, by design, that's what it is. Because if it's similar to Bayside, those songs would have been Bayside songs. I didn't write anything for that record, and say, "This is a solo song," those are all leftovers. They're songs that we said, "This isn't a Bayside song." So by design, it really is different than Bayside.

KC:  So would you say that most of the songs, then, were left on the cutting room floor when Bayside was trying to release new music?
AR:  Sort of. Through the writing process, there are songs that I start writing and then I don't think they're very good and then I throw them out, and then there are songs that I finish and I think that they're great songs, but they're not Bayside songs, so I never even play them for the rest of the band. To say it's on the cutting room floor makes it sound like they were leftovers in the sense that they got "cut" from Bayside records, they just didn't fit with Bayside. Except "Charleston." "Charleston" was a song that I wrote about a month before going into the studio knowing that I needed another song for the record.

KC: New Cathedrals is self-released. What was that like? Obviously, Bayside has dealt with a couple of labels in their career. What was it like actually having to release the EP by your own hands?
AR: It's a lot of fun. I mean, that's the way we used to do things when we first started the band, you know? It was a lot of fun to get back to that. Everything about this record was incredibly rewarding. In terms of success, it's certainly not what Bayside has ever achieved, as far as shows, sales, or anything like that. But it's so rewarding to think that when somebody gets the CD in the mail, I wrote the song, I played just about ever instrument on the record, I produced the record, I engineered it. I even own the merchandise company where we ship it. So when somebody gets it in the mail, I did it all. I touched it, I put it in that envelope you're getting it in. It's really, really rewarding.

KC: Do you think a solo release would be something you'd be interested in doing again? I know it's kind of difficult to look into the future for a guy in such a busy band.
AR: Yeah, definitely. I mean Bayside is definitely always my priority. It's just always going to come down to if I find a bunch of time off from Bayside, if we haven't been touring for five months, and I have a few songs laying around, then I'll do it. I definitely want to, but it's very much a side project.

KC: Earlier this year, you were also on the Where's the Band? Tour, with Chris Conley, Ace Enders, Matt Pryor, and Evan Weiss. How was that?
AR: It's awesome. That's the fourth year, I think, that we've done that tour. It's an annual thing for us. The pieces change slightly, it's been me, Chris Conley, and Matt Pryor have been doing it every year and Dustin Kensrue from Thrice has always done it with us in the past, this year he only did a couple of dates. We added Evan and Ace into it this year. It's so much fun. It's like vacation for all of us. You get four or five lead singers, and you put them in a small box together,  and you think it erupts. But we have so much fun, we're such kindred spirits, we're all musicians, songwriters, singers, we have so much in common. We all just sit around in dressing rooms while we're traveling, and we're all going through the same things. And there are very few people, including some of our own band members, who don't understand exactly what we go through as songwriters and singers, and certainly not your friends and family. So it really is kindred spirits to the nth degree.
KC: It sounds like there's a great sense of community in that tour, with you guys just bouncing ideas off of one another. 
AR: Yeah, totally. We write songs while on that tour. Someone will be working on a song for their band and they'll bounce ideas off of everybody, get opinions.

KC: So, let's move a little bit away from the solo stuff, and get into the big news that's developing with Bayside right now. You guys are set to be direct support for the Tell All Your Friends Tour.  You guys are playing a lot of venues that I've personally seen Bayside sell out before. What led you to say, "Let's support Taking Back Sunday on the Tell All Your Friends Tour"?
AR: If you were to look at it from a business standpoint, like, we've sold out the Electric Factory before. But this is two shows at the Electric Factory. That's an incredible amount of people. But it's their show. It's different people. Even though we may draw  that many people, it's a different group of people, so we want to play in front of some new people. I think also that's a band that we relate to pretty closely, musically at least. I think a lot their fans  are our fans, and if they're not, then they can be. We've been offered some other support tours that are really huge, and we know that those particular bands' fans aren't going to be Bayside fans. When we support bands, it's never about the size, it's about whether it fits. And also, it's an honor. We grew up in the same scene, went to shows together, they started their bands the same time as ours, and I remember just seeing them take off and feeling so proud of them and being so proud of Long Island, and what was happening. So to be a part of this 10-year anniversary of something that I remember really fondly, it's an honor.

KC: Obviously, the big draw of this tour is Taking Back Sunday playing their earliest full-length album, Tell All Your Friends. Is there a chance that we see Bayside playing a little bit more  of their earlier work than fans might be used to on that tour?
AR:I don't think so, it had come up about us possibly doing a record also on the tour. But we don't really want to get in the way. It's their show. A big part of why we're doing this tour is how much respect we have for this occasion. That's their thing. And also, we don't want to necessarily go back and do one of those "record tours." It's not really our thing.

KC: You guys were on Warped Tour this year for the first time since 2009. How has it changed? You guys have been on the tour a number of times. Did you see any distinct differences between this year's Warped and the Warpeds you guys have done in the past?
AR: Yeah, we've been doing it since 2002, so I've seen over the years, and in the 90s, I was going to it. I've just seen it morph into all new things over the years. You know, this past year I think was one of the better years in a while. There were really some neat little niches, but at the same time, everything was blending. You had the Bayside, New Found Glory, Taking Back Sunday, Yellowcard, the Used, you had that generation there, but then you also had Man Overboard, Polar Bear Club, Transit, you had the up-and-coming stuff. And then you also had Breathe Carolina, We the Kings, the pop stuff happening over there, and then they had a whole stage that was almost all hardcore and metal. There's a variety, which is what you come to expect of Warped Tour since the beginning, but this variety bled into each other a lot more. Like I said there was Bayside, New Found, Taking Back, but I feel like those fans could get into Polar Bear Club or Transit, and Transit/Man Overboard fans can be into New Found Glory. And the hardcore bands as well. There was a lot more cohesiveness between genres. In past years, I feel like there was a lot of headbutting, it was really polarizing. You either listen to this, or you listen to that, and if you listen to "this," you hate everybody who's standing over there.

KC: Killing Time presented an interesting situation for you guys. You changed labels, went from Victory to Wind-Up. Wind-Up is a pretty big label, and there's always the worry that the little band goes to a big label and gets chewed up. How has the situation with Wind-Up been for you guys?
AR: It was cool, we're not there any more, it was one-time thing. We're actually not on any label right now, which is cool. It's exciting, free agency. It was totally different ballgame, you know, being on Victory. Victory was great, and they worked really hard to help get our band where it is. We definitely would never have gotten to where we are now if it wasn't for them. It's a great label. When it comes to Victory, if you're having a problem with something, or you have an idea you want to see happen, you call the owner on his cell phone, and then you guys talk about it. If he likes the idea, he gets excited, and he's really passionate about the bands, and he knows all the lyrics to every record he's ever put out. You don't get that at Wind-Up, or a major label. But at the same time, you also can't just call Victory and say, "We want Gil Norton to produce our record, it's going to cost $150 grand." That's what you get at Wind-Up.

KC: Since you guys are all label-less right now, given your experience with self-releasing New Cathedrals, would you consider self-releasing a Bayside album?
AR: We are actually in the process of self-releasing something right now. It's not an album, we're actually announcing it in a couple of weeks, so I can't totally come out and say it. But we are going to be releasing something while we're on the Taking Back Sunday tour. It's going to be similar thing to the solo record where you'll buy it directly from us. We're producing it ourselves, we're funding it ourselves, you'll be able to buy it from us at the shows.

Keep Calm and Carry On would like to thank Anthony Raneri for taking the time to talk with us before the show, and be sure to keep your eyes peeled for the special announcement of Bayside's self-released new material! 

Album Review: Anthony Raneri- New Cathedrals (EP)

(click to purchase)

Creativity is a gift and a curse. On the one hand, the more creative and original one is, the more others want to hear from you, and that demand is then converted to the all-important dollar. However, for a musician (and may lyricist) of a band that's seen their fair share of success, sometimes that creativity doesn't allow for any down time. We've seen the front men of key scene staples like Anthony Green of Circa Survive, Dallas Green of Alexisonfire (City & Colour), and Jonny Craig of Dance Gavin Dance and Emarosa take time away from the bands they had already given their "full-time" commitment to record a solo album, whether it be for the sheer joy of releasing their art or they are looking for a few extra bucks. Either way, Anthony Raneri, after performing for over a decade with his well-known and adored band Bayside, has decided to throw his name into the mix of front men who have gone solo. The resulting five-track EP New Cathedrals is the result of Raneri's downtime between Bayside touring cycles, but will it be enough for Raneri to pursue his new solo ventures in the future?