Yellowcard_-_2016

Yellowcard on 2008 hiatus: "We didn't know what the future held"

While promoting the band's farewell tour and self-titled album, Yellowcard's lead singer, Ryan Key, created a Best Of Pop Punk Spotify playlist with added commentary—and we learned a whole bunch of stuff about the band's influences and earlier records.

From their near breakup in 2008 to the band that has influenced every single song they've ever made, read some of the best responses from Ryan.

Read more: “It was a long process of coming to terms with why this needed to happen”—Yellowcard on breakup

1. Lights And Sounds was a huge experiment.
Key: After Ocean Avenue, we went to the studio for Lights And Sounds and really chose to head in a new direction. I think we really wanted to push ourselves and see what we were capable of. We’ve always been a band, I think, that hesitated to write the same record more than once. We’ve always been conscious of trying to do new things with each record we make and Lights and Sounds was certainly an experiment.

2. So, this is how Yellowcard got the Dixie Chicks' Natalie to guest vocal for them.
Key: We did have Natalie Maines from the Dixie Chicks record on a song called “How I Go”—they were making their record next door to us while we were recording Lights and Sounds. So that was a huge moment to have an artist at that level and Grammy-winning and the highest-selling female group of all time, it’s pretty legendary.

3. The whole band shares the same favorite Paper Walls track
Key: I think we share our passion for playing a song on that record called “Cut Me Mick” that riff that opens that song is just such a barn burner, it’s such a rager. We’re looking forward to playing that song hopefully on the fall tour and I think that’s a common song from that record that we all definitely love.

4. 2008 was a very rocky year for Yellowcard
Key: In 2008 the band decided that we were going to take some time off the road and get away from making records and touring for a while just to recharge the batteries and recalibrate, I guess. We didn’t really know what the future held or when we would get back together to make music again. We weren’t necessarily breaking up the band, we didn’t really know what was going to come next.

5. We learned who “See My Smile” is about
Key: We wrote it for a friend that we lost to juvenile diabetes in 2001, he’s made an appearance in many Yellowcard songs. We wrote this song for him and it’s definitely an emotional moment when we perform that song live.

6. Lift A Sail was basically therapy for the whole band
Key: Lift A Sail was a record that was written through amidst turmoil. The band was going through a lot of posts in our personal lives individually. We shared a lot of these experiences. It all kind of happened at the same time and that went into working on Sail. It was a big adventure for us and it was an extremely therapeutic record for us.

7: Jimmy Eat World has influenced them the most
Key: We are all massive Jimmy Eat World fans. I think that band has reared its head as an influence on almost every record maybe, even in some way, on every song we’ve ever recorded.

Watch more: APMAs 2016 Interview: YELLOWCARD | PRS Backstage Lounge