“The album came out in 2003, but it was a slow burn,” violin player and vocalist Sean Mackin tells me. “It was around the time of the Warped Tour in 2004 when the single Ocean Avenue really took off. We were just a bunch of kids who were hoping to tour and play song songs and just have some fun – to have a song so big that we were able to headline the Warped tour was unbelievable to us. We had no idea it would end up like this.”
This year marks the 10th anniversary of Ocean Avenue, and to mark the occasion, Yellowcard have decided to revisit the album, and re-record the whole thing acoustically. They’ll then be hitting the road for a series of shows, playing Ocean Avenue Acoustic in full. When I ask Mackin why they decided to do this, he tells me that they wanted to do something truly unique to thank fans for sticking by them.
“We figured that we could go out and do a tour where we play our songs, and everyone comes and sings along and has a good time, but we wanted to do something more than that,” he says. “We get a lot or requests for acoustic versions of our songs, and so we decided that this was the best way to say thank you to our fans, and also to bring everyone together for a really awesome night.”
A decade is a long time, and I ask Mackin if he and the rest of the band felt strange going back to revisit a collection of songs that they wrote as much younger men. Given the chance to reflect, though, he says that he wouldn’t have done anything differently.
“When I look back at Ocean Avenue, I think that it was truly a gift,” he says, “and I wouldn’t change any moment of it. There’s a song on the album called Believe, where we commemorate the heroes that gave their lives to protect people on 9/11. That song has a lot of meaning to us, it’s still one of my favourites, and its meaning touches people so far beyond what we imagined at the time. It has its own special place in our discography. We have our own special relationship with these songs, and it’s great to hear them come to life again in acoustic form.”
The violin is not the most obvious instrument to play in a punk band, and Mackin himself is grateful that he has been able to do it for so many years. He started playing the instrument at the age of five, at his mother’s insistence, but it wasn’t until much later that he began to love and appreciate the instrument.
“I grew up in Florida, and everything there is more about surfing and the beach and basketball and football and tennis,” he says. “It’s hard to be a young person there playing the violin when all your friends are doing all these other fun things outside and making fun of you. I took lessons, but at the time, I didn’t want to play because I didn’t want to be different – I just wanted to play basketball with my friends. My mom would hammer me about it and tell me how it was a gift and how I’d thank her one day, and she was absolutely right.”
When Mackin transferred to an arts-focussed high school, violin began to make more sense. “I played in orchestras through high school, and I did lessons, and I realised I was never going to be a prodigy, but I still worked hard at it. That was a really cool period in my life – I started writing songs, then I met some friends who shared similar taste in music, so we formed a band, and now we’re touring the world and putting out records and our lives are really amazing.”
Though Mackin’s classical days are behind him, he still draws on the lessons he learned about structure, melody and arrangement. “There are elements that people were using in classical music hundreds of years ago that Yellowcard and other bands are using today,” he says. “There’s really nothing new in music. I just want to write songs that we can be proud of, songs that our fans will want to play to their friends.”
The Ocean Avenue Acoustic tour will bring Yellowcard to Australia, and I ask Mackin if the band have any final word for fans in this part of the world. “It’s a long trip to Australia and it hasn’t always been easy for us to get down there,” he says, “but on our last couple of trips, we’ve had more and more fans each time come along to support us and love us. We can see that and we appreciate that, and we’ll make every effort to keep coming back for years to come. We’d really like to thank all our fans there from the bottom of our hearts, and we can’t wait to come back down and hang out.”
BY ALASDAIR DUNCAN
