banner ad
banner ad
banner ad

INTERVIEW – Derek Sanders of Mayday Parade, December 2012

| 5 December 2012 | Reply

By Shane Pinnegar

 

Derek, how are you doing today?

 

How’re you doing?

 

Good mate, thank you for your time.

 

Yeah no worries.

 

So where are you calling from at the moment?

 

I’m actually at my house.  We just got off the tour in the US so we have about a week off before we head down… we do Hawaii and Australia.

Fantastic, so you must be getting pretty excited about the tour?

 

Oh yeah, absolutely; it’s going to be fun. We love it down there and we’ve been twice before and wish we could’ve been even more in the seven years we’ve been a band, but it’s good to be going back and we’re very stoked.

 

Absolutely. So what can the east coast audiences expect from your shows?

 

Oh well we just… you know, we’ll try and do our best to put on as energetic and entertaining a show as we can, and just have fun. We truly, genuinely love to just play music and that’s kind of why we started doing this in the first place, you know? We have a good time at every show and hopefully the crowd has a good time as well and we feed off each other’s energy and it’s always a lot of fun.

 

Awesome. So when you were down under with the Soundwave tour, I think it was what… 2011? How did Australian audiences take to the band?

 

That was… it was wild. That was such a crazy tour because we had been once before back in 2007, I believe, and you know, to come back, what, three or four years later and have… you know, the crowds were just huge at Soundwave; there’s so many people. And they’re really insane and also just that tour itself is just… there’s nothing else like it. It’s so much fun and we just had a great time so we’ve been itching to come back since then and we’re glad it’s happening.

 

Do you get much of a different vibe to your music from country to country? For instance, the Americans, the Australians, the Europeans: is there a different body of songs that they go for in each particular region?

 

Some of the time I might notice a couple of things like that. It’s kind of hard to say exactly but sometimes, yeah, I feel like maybe certain areas we go are more into, you know, one album as opposed to the other or vice versa or whatever. For the most part it’s pretty much the same everywhere. I think one thing that’s really cool about doing international stuff is that, you know, the seven years we’ve been in this band we’ve toured the US just dozens of times so we have people who have seen us over and over and over again and so whenever you go to Australia or, like you mentioned, Europe or Japan or anywhere that we go, sometimes there are people who may have been waiting to see us longer or, you know, just a little more excited maybe. And so it’s really cool. It’s a whole lot of fun.

Is it frustrating sometimes when you’re touring all these exotic faraway lands but you’re not able to jump off the juggernaut and just chill with the locals or go sightseeing for a day or two?

 

We always wish we could… as much fun as it is to do these things a lot of times we’re pretty busy and have these schedules we stick to and we can’t go off and do whatever we want, but we’re just having enough time that if we want to go see cool stuff everywhere we’ve been and get a chance to meet people there, hang out with a lot of people, experience other cultures and it’s pretty awesome. This time we don’t really have any days off which kind of is a bummer but on Soundwave – that’s like a day off anyway you know, kind of every other day, so we had a lot of time on that trip to take a look around and just hang out. So yeah, pretty cool.

 

You’ve had a really full on year of touring as well; you’ve been all over the place this year. So how’s band morale going? Are you getting a bit sick of the tour bus sort of side of things?

 

No, I mean we’re pretty used to staying pretty busy. We try to always work hard for this and push ourselves and so we’re pretty used to being on the road sort of most of the year. And we’re certainly glad when we get home and we’re having a little bit of a break right now and then after we go to Australia we have a few more weeks or a month or so at home. So it’s always nice to take a break whenever you can but, you know, we enjoy playing the record this the whole time so… yeah, we don’t get too sick of it. And you know, ever since we put out this new CD everyone has been really on track and it’s just a new life and energy in the album. We’re having a good time, yeah.

 

I read in a couple of interviews you said that the Mayday Parade album, you did it “your way” and that you’d found the “perfect formula” for making your albums. Do you find that your way is a little bit unconventional? You know, I read that you went to a beach house and just hung out for a month and wrote all the album and everything, or is there no real convention left nowadays when everything is digital and you can pretty much record anywhere?

 

Yeah, I mean it’s tough to say. The only real experience… I’ve never worked with other artists in the studio or anything. It’s hard to know how everyone else does it. But we’ve, more than anything, we’ve kind of just simplified it back to what it was in the beginning. You know, in the early days we would just get together and just kind of chill and jam and write songs, and that’s how we did things. And then we’d go record them. And then for our second album we tried to do the whole co-writing thing where you fly all around the country and you meet with these different people who really have no idea who you are or anything about your band. And you co-write these songs the way they want you to write and… you know. So it’s kind of this whole… this game thing that was way too complicated and the result is that you either put out one that the band doesn’t care about as much or believe in as much, and it’s not the album that they want to make, you know? So we’ve kind of just trashed all that and gone back to let’s just get together and chill and just write music that’s the kind of music you want to write, and then once we have enough we’ll go record it and that’s how we’ll do it. And that’s pretty simple and I think it works like that!

Yeah I think it worked for you, definitely, the third album just made more sense, you know, it was more true to your spirit.

 

Yeah, I think… yeah I agree as well. For sure.

 

So can we expect a new album from Mayday Parade in 2013?

 

Yeah, I think absolutely that there will be… I’m hoping by maybe late summer we’ll have… you know, we’ll have to kind of see how everything goes; we’re not exactly that. But I would think that late summer or fall is probably when the next one will be out. So, yeah; I just can’t wait.

 

So why make the third album self-titled?

 

Well I think it was kind of a combination of reasons but most of it was… part of it was on the second album the sound strayed from, you know, our usual way of doing things.  I feel with this newest album we kind of weren’t worried about who we are as a band, and what we want and what we don’t want. And this is who Mayday Parade is now. And also I just think it’s kind of cool!

 

That makes a lot of sense, man.  Thank you very much for your time.

 

Yeah, absolutely. Thank you.

Category: Interviews

About the Author ()

Editor, 100% ROCK MAGAZINE

Leave a Reply

Please verify you\'re a real person: * Time limit is exhausted. Please reload CAPTCHA.


banner ad
banner ad