How Yellowcard came back to life on Childhood Eyes

Head to the AP Shop to grab vinyl of Yellowcard's Ocean Avenue (20th Anniversary Edition).

“The body was cold for Yellowcard,” Ryan Key tells Alternative Press. The spark that would eventually bring the band back to life came in late 2021, when Yellowcard’s longtime booking agent, Corrie Christopher Martin, who has worked with the band since 2001, reached out with the opportunity to play Riot Fest in 2022.

“I like to be pretty transparent when I talk about the band in interviews… We would be lying if we didn't say it was a little bit about the money,” Key admits. Among the reasons Yellowcard disbanded in 2017 were that it was becoming difficult to sell tickets and for the group to generate enough income for its members. “This was a huge financial opportunity for each of us to play this show — full disclosure: bigger than anything we'd ever received before to do a show,” he says. 

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They decided to go for it, and that Riot Fest performance turned out to be an encouraging reunion for Yellowcard’s members. “For those of us that hadn't communicated in many years after the end of the band, there really was a coming together and a reconciling, and there was a feeling of camaraderie and brotherhood and friendship again in the room,” Key explains.

It succeeded in reviving Yellowcard, and they wanted to keep going. Live Nation offered them a summer tour, which they’re currently on. “It’s like an out-of-body experience every night,” Key says. “We're playing bigger shows than we played at the height of Ocean Avenue in 2004 by a lot, in some cities. It's unbelievable.”

And, to complete their comeback, Yellowcard released an EP, Childhood Eyes, in July, marking their first release since 2016’s self-titled record. 

When did you start thinking about making new music?

Right after Riot Fest. It was not in the plans. There was a lot of rebuilding to do in so many different ways, whether it be literally rebuilding the racks that contain our gear to play shows or rebuilding our relationships with each other to move forward. We had a lot of healing to do. 

After we did Riot Fest, I think there was so much excitement and euphoria coming off of that show that we all agreed it would be really fun to make some music. So we dipped our toes in the water and started with an EP. We really enjoyed the process. It felt so good to get back in the room together and make Yellowcard music at its root source. These songs, I think, are exactly what a Yellowcard fan wants to hear from Yellowcard. We hadn't written Yellowcard music that sounded like Yellowcard music in a long time, so it was a really fun challenge to try to create something that we were invested in and knew that fans would be extremely excited about. 

I think moving forward, if we do more music, we're pretty interested in sticking with the EP model. We don't have any plans to make any more music just yet. I would say the door is very open for us to keep making more music down the road. 

What was the process of making the EP like?

Josh [Portman, bass], Ryan [Mendez, guitar], and I traveled to Austin, Texas. That's where Sean [Mackin, violin] lives with his family. At the time, Sean was still working his post-Yellowcard life job, and we needed to go to him so he could get home to the kids every night. We rented a little Airbnb in Austin, and Sean would come over after work, and we’d pour some whiskeys and get out the guitars... It was wild. It was like, early days, as we were writing and recording Ocean Avenue, when we all moved to California from Florida for the first time, and we were renting a house where three of us were sleeping in the same room, and we would just jam until we had songs we loved. It was really reminiscent of those times, which I think was super cool. 

We all brought different ideas and riffs and things in. Most of it did just appear from the ground up based on one or two riffs that someone brought into the room. “Childhood Eyes,” the single, I had never picked up a guitar to try to put the words to music, but — very rare occurrence for me, [but] it has happened a few times in my life — I woke up in the middle of the night, and I had that melody in my head with the lyric, at least through “I found, I found my childhood eyes.” So I just started typing it up on my phone.

At the end of the process of pre-production, I was like, “Hey, I have this idea…” I hummed the melody that I had as an idea in my head. And, seriously, 15 minutes later, we had the whole song. I was finishing the lyrics that night and in bed, and it came really fast. 

It felt like there was a lot of retrospection and reflection on the history of Yellowcard in the lyrics on the EP. Was it helpful to have the space of five songs to process that?

I think having five songs allows you to be so concise with what you're doing. So we decided we wanted a fast, really Warped Tour-feeling, outdoor festival/concert-type song. We wanted a classic, high-energy rock “Way Away,” “Breathing”-type song, “Fighting,” those types of songs that you've heard from us in the past. We wanted a mid-tempo song that had a little bit more of that pop-rock element to it, which would be “Childhood Eyes.” We wanted a ballad, which ended up being “Honest from the Jump,” and then we had the acoustic song. It’s so well-rounded as far as the different types of songs that you have heard from Yellowcard throughout the decades — there's one of each on the EP. 

How did “Honest from the Jump” come together? That one, to me, sounded like a very Lift A Sail-esque song.

I think it's like a Paper Walls/Lift A Sail hybrid. When we decided to make new music again, we all were tracking a few ideas and demos on our own at home. I had the verse riff for that song. The reason that one feels so Lift A Sail is because the time signature in the verse is just wacky. I don't think I even realized that when I was playing and writing it. I just thought, “This is a sick riff.” So I think that gives you a little bit of that later Yellowcard feel.

The chorus of that song actually comes from a song of my own called “Brighton” that was on my [solo] EP Everything Except Desire. And they were in the same key. Ryan Mendez mixed a lot of that stuff for me. We love that song “Brighton” so much. It was so fun to make. I can't remember how it came about, but someone was like, “I think that chorus would fit here.” I love that because it takes the song back. The chorus is so straight and in your face, and then the verse is a little more experimental. I love that song. It has that “Gifts and Curses”-style bridge to it, building with the strings and the piano.