“It feels like we’re a new band, & this is our second record" In The Studio with Taking Back Sunday
To get you stoked for our second installment of BackTracking, featuring Taking Back Sunday’s exploration of one of their Tell All Your Friends classics, coming next Monday, AP is bringing you a few outtakes from our interview with vocalist Adam Lazzara and guitarist John Nolan. The two give us a small glimpse into the progress of their upcoming album.
Interview: Philip Obenschain
Is there anything you can tell us about the new album?
ADAM LAZZARA: We’re recording a good part of it now. They’re tracking drums as we speak, drums and bass. John and I go in at the beginning of next week to get going. We’ll do part of it with Mark Hudson, who’s a great buddy of ours and has a great studio out in Michigan. Then we’ll do another part on Long Island.
Do you have a release timeframe in mind, or are you just playing it by ear at this point?
LAZZARA: Now we’re just playing it by ear. Same with anything else, we’d like to have it done and out sooner than later so people can hear it. We’re just working on getting all the songs where they need to be and have it sounding as great as it can.
Is it going to be a logical evolution of the last album, or are you taking a different approach with this one?
LAZZARA: I think that since John and Shaun [Cooper, bass] have come back to the band, and we have the self-titled record under our belt, we’re all playing better together as a group and everybody’s fallen in with one another, which I think is going to show a lot on this record.
It’s like you’ve learned how to be a band all over again, right? You’ve been newly playing and writing together, so I’m sure there’s a whole settling period, and the need to get a feel for everything.
JOHN NOLAN: It feels like we’re a new band, and this is our second record, to me.
I’m sure that’s exciting.
LAZZARA: It’s fun. We just released the acoustic version of the 10-year anniversary tour that we did for Tell All Your Friends, then we’ll be filming an electric version of it later in the year, which will also be available. That’ll be fun since now we’re so well-seasoned with those songs. I feel like they’re coming out better than they have before.
What prompted you to self-release the acoustic album? Was that something you were thinking about for awhile, or just the logical thing that made sense for it?
LAZZARA: It was just kind of the logical thing, and we also wanted to give it a try.
Have you been happy with the result so far?
LAZZARA: Yeah, everything’s been really positive and really fun. John?
NOLAN: Part of the thing too, was we wanted to give self-releasing a shot. We felt like this was a good way to see what that was like, rather than have the first time we test that out be on a new release. We were talking to our manager a little bit the other day about it, even. She’s realized a lot of things about releasing a record that maybe she didn’t know before. I think it’s been a good learning experience. Now we’ll see. It seems like most likely we’re not going to self-release the next record, but I think we’ve learned a lot by doing this that we can bring to the next full-length we put out.
