INTERVIEW: JAYDEN SEELEY & INIGO DEL CARMEN of With Confidence, July 2016

100% Rock reviewer Mike Hubbard and his daughter recently had the opportunity to sit down with the up and coming Australian pop punk band With Confidence at the Auburn Hills, MI stop of the Van’s Warped Tour.  This was not only the band’s first appearance on Warped Tour, it was also their first tour in the US, and they had just released their first full length album, Better Weather.  Guitarist Inigo Del Carmen and vocalist/bassist Jayden Seeley were gracious enough to spend some time with them, discussing everything from their experiences on Warped to American politics to Pokemon Go.

MIKE: This is your guys’ first Warped Tour correct?

JAYDEN: Ya!

MIKE: How’s it been going?  Everything you ever dreamed it would be?

JAYDEN: Ya, I mean we’ve never toured the US before.  So we didn’t really know what to expect coming into it, but it’s been incredible.  The crowds have been coming out like, a few hundred kids at least.  Everyone’s been really welcoming, really friendly, singing all the lyrics.

MIKE: So in Australian, is Warped Tour a ‘thing’?  Do people hear about it and talk about it?

JAYDEN: It’s a thing that you hear it in passing, everyone would talk about wanting to fly over one time and go to a couple of Warped Tours, like just as a trip.  So to be actually able to play it, like the whole thing, is the weirdest!

MIKE: All right!  This year’s lineup seems to be a regular who’s who of pop punk, which is basically the genre you are, so it’s probably a pretty cool experience getting to hang out with some of the guys you listen to and follow and stuff.  Any bands in particular that you’ve spent some time with and had an influence on you?

JAYDEN: A lot of bands on this tour to be honest.  I’d say Yellowcard is one that I’ve listened to a lot of when I was growing up.  New Found Glory of course, even Good Charlotte, they’re on a few of these dates now as well.

INIGO: Sum 41

JAYDEN: Ya, all like incredible heritage bands in the genre.  We are very privileged to be here.

MIKE: Have you had the chance to hang with the guys, and get to know them a little bit?

JAYDEN: Here and there.  Warped is like the weirdest thing.  It’s such a communal vibe.  So like the other day for example, we walked on the bus and had like the ROAM guys there, the guitarist from Sum 41 just chillin’, and it’s like ‘I listened to your music growing up’.  It’s such a weird thing.  Like ‘How ya doing?  My name’s Jayden.’

INIGO: Catering’s the best thing as well.

MIKE: You get to meet everyone there?

INIGO: You meet new people every day.  You stand in line and talk to people around you, and I had lunch with guys from Tonight Alive every now and then.  Same as with ROAM and State Champs.  Everyone just kind of like mingles and enjoys each other’s company.  It’s a really good vibe.

MIKE: Built any new friendships?

JAYDEN: Definitely, with a whole bunch of bands.  There’s a whole bunch of bands that are on this tour that we played tours with back in Australian, so even coming into it we had like a lot of friends, and Warped’s kind of given us a chance to build those friendships even more.

MIKE: Very cool.  This is your first time touring the US.  Talk to me a little about what’s been your impression been of the States so far?

INIGO: It’s cool

JAYDEN: We’ve seen a lot of car parks.

INIGO: Apart from the car parks and shopping malls, we haven’t had that much time to roam about, but we did go to Manhattan.  We did go out in Nashville for a bit.

JAYDEN: We saw New Orleans.  Bourbon Street, that was wild!

INIGO: We spent a lot of time in LA, and I think we get some time off in Arizona now as well, as well as Portland before we fly out.  I really think it’s amazing.  I always wanted to go to New York so when we got to Manhattan I was like holy sh*t this is AMAZING!

JAYDEN: We hailed a cab in New York.

MIKE: Checked that off you bucket list?

INIGO:  Maybe that’s why Uber’s not a thing there, so everyone can hail a cab in New York.

MIKE: So besides hailing a cab, have there been any other cool experiences with your minimal downtime, that’s kind of stuck out?

INIGO: Bar BQ! Bar BQ in like Nashville, and like New Orleans is amazing!

MIKE: You don’t have that in Australia?

INIGO: Not as good.  Texas Bar BQ as well, is just amazing.

JAYDEN: The food here is just, you’ve got such a wide variety, where in Australia it’s just sort of McDonald’s.

INIGO:  We don’t even have Taco Bell.  We have Mad Mex.

MIKE: No Taco Bell.  You wouldn’t survive there Emily.

EMILY: No, that’s my favorite!

JAYDEN:  I haven’t tried it.

EMILY: You have to try it before you go.

INIGO: It’s so cheap.

JAYDEN: It’s on the bucket list!

MIKE: You guys are pretty well known in Australia.  You’ve done a lot of national tours, but this is your first time here.  How’s the reception been?  You say you’ve been getting a few hundred kids?

JAYDEN: Ya a few hundred kids consistently, which is like the weirdest feeling.

INIGO: We came from Australia.

JAYDEN: We’re on the other side of the world.  It’s insane.  People singing the lyrics, people are crowd surfing, doing their little surfer bits.  That’s the coolest thing to see!

MIKE: Having them sing your lyrics has got to be cool.

JAYDEN: (to Inigo) Have you been to the merch tent today?

INIGO: No.

JAYDEN: Someone made with beads, our album artwork just in beads.  It’s probably like a few hundred beads.

INIGO: That’s f*cking insane!

JAYDEN: That’s SO cool.  We get stuff like that all the time.  Which blows my mind, that people care enough about our band to do.

INIGO: I love the flesh art they did.  One of the fan girls did like tattoo art of all the lyrics.  That’s the sickest thing.  The fact that people are doing that across the world is insane!

MIKE: I read something online that described you guys as carrying the torch of Blink 182.  Have you heard that before?

INIGO: I think I read that.

MIKE: That’s some pretty big shoes to fill.  What do you think about getting that kind of label?

INIGO:  It’s creepy!

JAYDEN: I kind of feel that Blink 182 is one of our favorite bands, but I guess it’s a different day in a different age.  We will see where the band goes, but we’ll try our best!

MIKE: My daughter Emily is the one who first turned me on to you guys.

JAYDEN: Oh really!  Thank you!

EMILY: No problem!

JAYDEN: I love your shirt.  (She is wearing a The Wonder Years shirt)  We’ve toured with them.

EMILY: I actually made this.

INIGO: That’s insane!

JAYDEN: The tie dye?

EMILY: The tie dye and the picture.  We have a thing where you can like print it off and then put it on with like a heat press and everything.

JAYDEN: That’s so cool.

EMILY: I legit totally made it.

JAYDEN: That’s alright!

INIGO:  They are lovely dudes.

EMILY: They seem like it.

MIKE: I feel with a lot of pop punk, a lot of the stuff now, are almost emo-ish, at least the lyrics.  Emily was like ‘check these guys out!’  And I was like ‘that’s what I call pop punk.’  So you guys are kind of tying into Blink, that old school pop punk?

JAYDEN: Ya, I think we try to sort of bring that, it’s the stuff we listen to, we’re trying to bring the ‘90’s, early 2000’s happy pop punk sound back, but putting our own sort of spin on it.  That’s one thing we try to achieve.

INIGO: I hear a lot of that in “Voldemort.”  Whenever we play that it’s like this is Blink as…

JAYDEN: When I wrote that I was listening to the Blink discography.

MIKE: I love that song.  I just shared the video on my Facebook timeline.

JAYDEN: Oh!  Thank you very much.

 INIGO: Thank you!

JAYDEN: That was when we were in LA on Warped Tour.  When we did that.

MIKE: Didn’t that just come out yesterday?

INIGO:  Ya, that was a fun one!

MIKE: Ya, it looked like it! Speaking of Facebook, on your Facebook page, like everyone, you list what your influences are.  Some of them are what you would expect, like Blink and The Wonder Years, Mayday Parade.  You also list Kings of Leon.  That seems a little bit different.  What do you take from them and incorporate into your music?

JAYDEN: When we were writing our influences, it’s more of like natural influences, so like when we started out as a band those are the songs we would play.  We would play covers.  We would play Kings of Leon songs, we listened to a lot of The Strokes…

INIGO: We covered “Supersoaker,” “Use Somebody,” probably “Sex on Fire.”

JAYDEN: Their leads are real cool.

INIGO: He’s an interesting vocalist.  He’s got a tone in his voice, that’s what I like to incorporate, things that are just unique.  That’s what makes them different, and I think one of the reasons.

JAYDEN: I think leads-wise, that’s where we get that influence.  Ya I don’t know, they’re one of my favorite bands for sure.  They are also a very, very catchy band.  Their singles have very good pop melodies.

INIGO: That album Only By the Night, that’s just literally hit after hit after hit after hit for the entire album.  It’s just amazing, at least by my opinion.

MIKE: So you are touring across America, and you are getting little flavors of different parts, some variety and so on.  A couple of days ago you were in Cleveland.  Warped Tour wasn’t the craziest thing going on in Cleveland this week, it was actually the Republican National Convention.  I don’t know if you guys caught any of that, or follow American politics at all?

INIGO: A little bit.

JAYDEN: A little bit.  We see things here and there.  I did hear about that.

MIKE: So no opinions on us crazy Americans and our politics?

JAYDEN: I think there’s some problems going on with American politics and I’m very upset that Bernie Sanders couldn’t really, I guess he just drew the short straw, having the support you would expect someone who was going to win would have.

MIKE: He didn’t have the big banks in his pocket like his opponent.

INIGO: Ya, ya.

JAYDEN: I don’t know.  Now I guess it is sort of like the lesser of two evils.  What can you do?

MIKE: Going with the current events theme, have you guys been getting into the Pokemon Go stuff?

INIGO: Oh ya!

JAYDEN: I was just playing it this morning.  It’s good fun.  I think it’s actually one of the coolest things.  It’s a game that encourages you to go outside and like see new places.

INIGO: Explore!  Have an adventure.  Community.

JAYDEN:  As well as make friends.

MIKE: Ya, you can go out with friends, or meet new people.

JAYDEN: Exactly!  I’ve met people out on the street and like ‘do you play Pokemon Go?’ And they’re like ‘ya.’  ‘Oh, there’s a Snorlax, you go this way and…’

INIGO: I actually caught a Bulbasaur from my bed yesterday.  My god it’s the best morning I’ve ever had.

JAYDEN: Well that is the exact opposite of what I said.

INIGO: Exactly! It’s like ‘oh my god there must be more Pokemon around here.’  I remember the day it came out, I made at least ten new friends that day because we were all crowded around.  ‘Dude there’s Pokemon around here, let’s go find them all!’  Walking a circle around the entire venue at least eight times.  I really like it.  It’s so good.

MIKE: Keeping again with the current events stuff, besides being your first Warped Tour, June was a big month for you guys, your first full length came out.  How has the response been to that?

JAYDEN: Mostly really good.  It’s the same thing as coming to America the first time.  When you get your first album as a band, it’s like terrifying.

INIGO: It’s been an insane six months.  This year’s been ridiculous.  We’ve done our first international tour.  We’ve done our first album.  We’re doing a lot of firsts.  Our first time traveling in a band wagon.

MIKE: You just signed with Hopeless records in December.

JAYDEN: No, early January.  It’s been a crazy year.  The response to Better Weather has been better than we could have asked for.  But, that means we are already on to thinking about our next one, to be even bigger and better.

MIKE: Great!  Ya, the opening track, you mentioned Voldemort, besides the obvious Harry Potter reference, how did you come up with the name for that track?

JAYDEN: It’s an interesting answer.  There’s a bunch of themes on the album.  I guess the one I feel is most prevalent is the theme of mental illness.  Basically I wrote that song about my friend who suffers from severe depression and anxiety, and that song is basically just like a happy carefree ‘f*ck you’ to mental illness.  And I guess I use the analogy of Voldemort for that because I am a massive nerd, and if you’ve read or seen Harry Potter it’s like ‘the fear of the name only increases the fear of the thing itself’ and that’s about Voldemort.  So the idea is kind of like if more people talked about mental illness, saying like the name, it would be less stigmatizing.  So that’s where it came from.  It’s a bit of a deep one.  And I just like Harry Potter.

MIKE: And Better Weather being there’s hope.  It’s going to improve.

JAYDEN: Ya, that’s the thing.

MIKE: Very good.  So what’s next for you guys?  I see you have a UK tour coming up in December with a couple of the bands that are here, Real Friends and Knuckle Puck.

JAYDEN:  Ya, we’ve got that.  We’re going to the Philippines right after Warped Tour as well.  We have a tour locked in with Motion City Soundtrack in Australia, their very last tour.  That’s pretty cool.  We’re looking to do some headlining stuff in between, and we’re already looking for stuff for next year. We’re going to be very, very busy.

MIKE: Are you already looking to the next record, starting to do some writing?

JAYDEN: We’re always writing.  Our writing process on the road, for me, I’ll have these ideas and I’ll jot them down and record a little melody here and there.  I’ll have all these unfinished ideas floating.

INIGO: It’s hard to record anything.  I tried to record a guitar part the other day and I was just like surrounded by band wagons and all I can hear is bzzzzzzzzzz.

JAYDEN: As long as you get the idea down…

INIGO: Ya, exactly.  There was a venue like a couple of days ago that had this nice park.  You could hear the cicadas in the background.  It’s like ‘it’s real nice’! and then there’s bands out and you can hear them slightly booming in the background.  Enough!  At least I got the riff down.

MIKE: You need some away time to start piecing all the parts together.  Now you are off to Chicago tomorrow.

JAYDEN: I think so.  That will be real cool.

MIKE: Or you just wake up the next day and figure out where you are then.

JAYDEN:  Sometimes.  We have like a whiteboard that our tour manager fills out each day with the set time, press time, all that, and like the city name.

INIGO: If he can’t spell it he’ll just put like a question mark.

MIKE: Our first Warped Tour was there.

EMILY: Ya, it’s a good venue.

MIKE: That’s all I had.  Great to meet you.  We look forward to catching your set this afternoon!

JAYDEN: Thanks!  We’ll see you guys then!

INIGO: Thank you very much!

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Category: Interviews