With the album released in October, Mayday Parade enjoyed a Christmas break in the middle of what would have been at any other time of the year, the height of the album touring cycle. “This is the third album in a row that we’ve put out around the first week of October so we’re used to this kind of routine,” front man Derek Sanders says. “For each album we do the massive Fall tour to support it and then we take off for the holidays and then we hit it hard again early in the next year.”
Do they notice a change between the initial tour and the audience’s response to the album after the holidays? Has the audience become more familiar with the new material by then? “I think you’ve nailed it,” he says. “When we do the first tour it’s very cool and exciting and a lot of the new stuff that we play gets a good response, but because it’s so new it just isn’t as familiar to the audience. It feels great to come back after the break and see how the response has changed to the new songs as people have had time to really get to know the music.”
The genre that Mayday Parade exists within, by its very nature, means that by album number three critics are howling disdainfully that their new material is merely a rearrangement of their back catalogue while their audience salivates at the very same thought. What music critics claim is hardcore’s ultimate creative failing is, to the genre’s audience, its greatest asset – reliability. So how does a band stay creatively fulfilled while adhering to the expectations of your audience? “It can be tough,” he says. “You can spend a tonne of time analysing it and thinking about it but really, we try to not spend a lot of time thinking about our music too much. We simply try to satisfy ourselves by writing music that we like and we want to listen to, we try and push ourselves with each album by trying to make what we do at least better and that’s about it. We really try not to worry about it too much other than that. We try to be genuine because we believe that is the thing that people can really notice.”
For a band like Mayday Parade, the band bucket list is pretty well complete. That’s not to say they’re close to giving up this game of melodies, just that there’s less mountains left to climb. Or maybe the mountains have just gotten bigger? “At this point we have accomplished so much that we set out to do – and even more – we’re all just happy to maintain,” he says. “If we can keep things going like this then we’ll be so happy with that. Musically we just want to keep gradually changing things up and growing our sound and ourselves. I wanna be a band like Brand New who’ve been around long enough to have such a hard core fan base that they’re able to creatively do whatever they want and their audience will just go along for the ride. We don’t want to alienate people who like us for what we’ve done, so for us it’s just a gradual process at this stage.”
BY KRISSI WEISS
