Intimacy between fans and their favourite bands will never be the same, thanks to the Internet.
Before this age of technology, if something happened to your favourite band, you wouldn’t know about it unless you read about it in the paper or in a magazine. And unless the band was on the A-list, the news may have never reached you.
The luxury of immediacy is sometimes forgotten these days. If a guitarist for your favourite band doesn’t play at a show in Fargo, North Dakota, you will hear about it by the night’s end. A fan that attended show will return home, post a message at the band’s popular gathering web site, and the speculation will begin. It may just be a simple cold, but the conspiracy rumours of the band’s impending break-up will be theorized by the next morning.
When guitarist Ben Harper stopped playing dates with Yellowcard last year, fans traded bits of information online before the band said anything about the situation. Yellowcard released a statement in November explaining how Harper was no longer a member of the band, but fans on their message board weren?t the least bit surprised and had already been talking about it for months, laying blame upon who each thought was at fault?Harper or the rest of the band.
That is what is wrong with the Internet, says bassist Pete Mosely.
“Our generation is very consumed with other people’s lives. I guess it’s an escape from their own lives,” Mosely tells andPOP. “The internet takes away from the seriousness of any band. You have access to everybody’s information.”
Growing up, Mosely says he never got involved with his favourite bands’ personal lives.
“When I was a kid, and Matt Sharp left Weezer, I wasn?t writing hate mail about it. Weezer is still Weezer and they’re still going to put out records, and I still appreciate their band. The Foo Fighters have been through line-up changes but I would never be like, ‘I’m not going to buy this new record now; let’s boycott the band just because of one guy.’ It’s very senseless. If you’re a fan of the band, you’re a fan of the music. To pick [sides] over other people inside of the band that actually create the music, that part never made sense to me.”
Harper separated from the band just months before the release of Yellowcard’s second major label album, Lights and Sounds, which comes out Tuesday.
Their statement indicated that Harper and the band grew apart personally and creatively.
Mosely knew things had been rocky for a while, but didn’t expect him to leave.
“I really thought it would be a relationship that could be salvaged,” he says. “But it reached a point where he would have to leave the band or the band would just have to break up. We just had to reach the ultimate decision.”
The band not only has a new line-up, but also a new sound.
With their breakout album “Ocean Avenue,” which was released in 2003 and has gone on to sell almost three million copies, Yellowcard became known as the “pop punk band with the violinist.”
They’re not so worried about that reputation on Lights and Sounds because the members of Yellowcard don’t see themselves as being part of pop punk scene anymore. In fact, Mosely says the music on Lights and Sounds isn’t punk at all.
“At one point, we aspired to follow in the footsteps of the punk rock greats such as Lagwagon and NOFX,” he says. “But as time has gone on, we’ve grown up a little bit and decided especially with this latest record to experiment with rock and roll as a whole and not be confined to the pop punk formula. We wanted to become a more branched out band musically.
“The idea was to create something that would be our own and not be so easily prepared, not up for comparison to anything else, to get our own shape and form, to create a form of music that?s not limited to any sort of label.”
Three of the tracks have a 15-piece orchestra, and one, How I Go, has a 25-piece orchestra. The band’s violinist, Sean Mackin, arranged all of the songs.
“It’s a very technical acoustic ballad,” Mosely says of How I Go. “The song is based on the movie Big Fish. We mindlessly had this idea to see if Danny Elfman would score the music to the song but, of course, he was completely unavailable. Sean really made something for our band that we’ve never put out before. This will be something from Yellowcard that you will least expect.”
The song features vocals from Dixie Chicks lead singer Natalie Maines, who has never been shy about her feelings towards President George W. Bush. Though Yellowcard also don’t hold back if you ask them their thoughts on politics, they did not want Lights and Sounds to become a political album.
However, on Two Weeks from Twenty, their opposition to the war on Iraq is evident in the lyrics.
“I’m a firm believer that unless you’re Bad Religion or Propagandhi, music and politics really don?t mix. As a whole the art culture takes somewhat of a political stance. We have said our piece about certain situations but it’s more so to raise awareness than to preach what people should think. Two weeks from Twenty is an anti-war song, but it doesn’t name names, it doesn’t point fingers. It’s a story of a young solider who goes overseas to war and dies at a very early age and it’s about the misfortune of that.”
After he graduated from high school, Mosely remembers being approached by the navy and the army who were both trying to recruit people.
“It captures a lot of people because they promise that this is the best thing you can do with your life if you’re not too sure about college. In modern times, a lot of people get sucked into it and the next thing you know, we pronounce war on somebody and they end up in another country with a gun in their hands and it’s not at all what they were expecting or wanted to do in the first place. But they ended up there? not to be unpatriotic ?supporting something that they might actually not believe in. But they signed up for it and it’s their obligation.”
Yellowcard plan to tour in support of the new album for the next two or three years, visiting as many countries as they can.
“It’s very clich?, but we really reinvented ourselves,” says Mosely. “We have the opportunity as a band to take all the fans and show them something new. I am extremely excited.”
Yellowcard lead singer, Ryan Key, has formed a new group with former Reeve Oliver frontman Sean O’Donnell called Big If. And according to chartattack.com, he’s “super excited” about it.
