Tempe, Arizona is scorching hot, and trying to hide from the sun feels impossible.
Luckily, there’s a shady spot beside a few artist trailers behind Inning’s Festival’s Right Field stage to wait for Oklahoma-raised pop-punk darlings All-American Rejects to come chat before their set. There’s been lots of focus on nostalgia during the two-day fest that takes place during Major League Baseball’s spring training. The line-up is a who’s who of early aughts hitmakers like The Killers and Fall Out Boy. Attendees are all dressed in their favorite team’s jersey or a band tee that could be considered vintage, even though they likely bought it new.
In fact, the obsession with looking back starts before we even step foot on the festival grounds. The night before, All-American Rejects invites fans to Phoenix’s Carry On, a retro plane-themed bar with seats that vibrate and flight attendants who serve cocktails as visuals of clouds play across realistic windows (later the band jokes if “you could get the staff to sign an NDA, you can really do some fun stuff in there”).
At one point — ignoring the seatbelt sign — front-man Tyson Ritter stops by our seats and a guest briefs him on just how impactful the band’s first album, their self-titled 2002 release, meant to them. It’s the same sentiment you can feel and hear as they take the stage during the festival — with the crowd screaming back the words of “Move Along,” “Swing Swing,” and “Dirty Little Secret.”
The band — comprised of Ritter, lead guitarist and backing vocalist Nick Wheeler, rhythm guitarist and backing vocalist Mike Kennerty, and drummer Chris Gaylor — just started touring again last year for the first time in over a decade. Dressed in their Baseball Uniform, with the word “Rejects” emblazoned in red and black across their chest, you’d think they’d never stopped. Sure, it’s been years and everything is different, but for one weekend in Tempe, it felt like nothing had changed.
One of the conversations we were having last night [at Carry On] was about how so many of us burned your debut album on Napster. I want to take this time to admit that … and to apologize.
Tyson Ritter: We know how it goes, we don’t make money off records.
Were you aware that a lot of people were getting into your music that way?
Nick Wheeler: I think so. I mean, senior year of highschool, which would of been around ’99 or 2000 I got Napster I was ripping music. The way young people now are finding music on Spotify, that’s how we were finding music back then. It was part of our culture. Of course, kids are gonna put us on burnt CDs. That’s what we did, so it’s an honor. Will probably find them at some point, break their legs or something. [Laughs]
If you find them… Let’s fast forward to now. The most recent music you released was a cover of [Harvey Danger’s 1997 hit] “Flagpole Sitta.”
Nick: I probably ripped that on Napster.
We all did. Why did you want to release that song?
Tyson: Why not? But also we needed an excuse to see if we could do the studio thing together. We haven’t put [out music] when it comes to All-American Rejects in over a decade and that’s scary. We grew up in front of the record button since I was 15 and Nick was 17. We all recorded music in our early teens. You know… you’re a writer, what did you write when you were 17?
Things I don’t want to talk about.
Ritter: See? You change. Then, there was this wide [span of time] since our last record [2012’s Kids In The Street], which wasn’t exactly a label success, but it was an expressive success for us. There was a moment when we were [touring] in Mobile, Alabama and I was like, “We can’t fucking do this anymore.” I’m good at saying the things that Nick doesn’t express.
Wheeler: Yeah. Maybe we’re thinking the same thing, he’s always the first one to say it.
Ritter: We’ve always been a hive mind. The four of us have been together for this massive chunk of time. You need time to take a break to see if you care about it the same way and if it’s the same thing to you. There are a lot of our contemporaries who have walked into making it an enterprise as opposed to making it art. I know it sounds funny. I’m the guy who wrote the lyrics to “Dirty Little Secret.” So, people don’t consider us an art form, but I’m an older guy, and Nick and I have locked back into the room of writing, going, “If it’s gonna be different, it’s probably not gonna be comfortable.”
Getting to where we are today of putting [music] down, which is what we’re doing, has taken a lot of fireside chats. A lot of mending fences. That’s exciting. I think I said in an interview, people don’t really want a new All-American Rejects record. People want their time capsule and want to jump into it and feel like they smell CK One and it makes them feel young. But the question I pose is, “What if we can say something now? What if we can actually resonate?”
Wheeler: People say they want new music from certain bands, but they don’t necessarily want stuff that sounds exactly like the stuff we already gave them and nostalgic feels… they already have that. If we’re going to do something, we’re going to do something different that hopefully resonates with them, as well as a new audience.
Can we talk about what you’re working on? I know you might not be able to tell us all the details, but what’s the process like? What’s the expectation like?
Wheeler: It’s not like riding a bike. The music part will always be part of our DNA. The thing that has been interesting to navigate has been putting out music independently. We came out before Instagram, before YouTube. Then we stepped back 10 years ago and look what happened since then. There are so many platforms we have to learn to utilize because that’s where people find music and art.
Ritter: For me, I don’t consider any of that bullshit. I’m starting this process in my own little sphere now, which is a little different to how we use to approach it. Nick and I used to sit in the same room, and our process was like cultivating in a laboratory and anything you accidentally create is pure. But when you go back in and try to put the lab coats back on and make sure all the beakers are in place, you realize you’re building a product. I had to ask, “What the fuck do I have to say now that I’m 40?” And I know your audience doesn’t care to read shit by old men, [laughs] but I think as an artist it’s like, What do you feel? I’m not singing about heartache as a teenager. I’m happily married. What’s wrong with the world? Well, fucking everything.
We’ve always been good at being a tongue bursting through the cheek to kid you into melancholic fun. We were always the black sheep in Emo because we were fun. Now there’s a song we’re writing, but it’s about a war on a playground because I think, how can we look at ourselves as humans at our ugliest? Put it through the lens of a child. That seems like the only time we care anymore or have empathy — if it’s something pure getting hurt. We’re going through big themes here. As families age, things get fucking weird and bad, so there are songs I’ve penned about my mom that are super heavy for me. I can’t look back on anything in our catalog — except the record nobody gave a shit about — and say this is coming from a really heavy place inside of me. So, bringing that to Nick and cultivating it with the band is what makes it new and keeps us stoked.
If we’re going to do something, we’re going to do something different that hopefully resonates with them, as well as a new audience.
Photography: Courtesy of C3/ Innings Festival