The inaugural No Sleep Til Festival is in full swing in Australia, already taking over Auckland, New Zealand and obliterating Perth and Adelaide. People are still waiting on that surprise visit from Oprah, she’s got punk-lover written all over her right? Joining the tour in Adelaide are Florida’s own, A Day To Remember. Guitarist, Kevin Skaff, spoke to me from their hometown in Ocala while they were making their way to see The Social Network.
We discuss album leaks, random genre labels, the band’s latest album, and 5 way marriages and you can read the full interview here.
The band were merely weeks out from dropping their latest release, “What Separates Me From You” and to the surprise of many, the band included, the album had been kept in safe hands and had not yet surfaced on the internet. It would appear that this has become an expectation for fans and bands alike. “I think every CD I’ve ever been a part of has leaked at some point in time. It doesn’t make me angry because it’s become such a standard by now. You make a record, it’s obviously going to get leaked. It’s just the way of the world now and it’s something you have to get used to.”
There is no doubt that A Day To Remember have some of the weirdest (or at least highly fictional) genre labels that are kicking around the scene today. The amalgamation of metalcore and pop punk results in the likes of popmosh, or moshcore to name a few. What do they even mean? Their way of writing and the genre labels associated with the band are both things that come naturally from their influences. “I have no idea how it works, it just does. It’s just what happens when we all get in a room together and pick up an instrument. We just kind of start with real heavy stuff and somehow it just gets awesome melodies over it. It’s real weird. We’ll write a chorus then we’ll form a song around it and the outcome is usually pretty sweet.”
“It’s just the musical stylings that we mostly grew up on and that we most love. We like bands like Blink182 and New Found Glory obviously and heavy music like local hardcore bands. In Florida, there were bands like 7th Star and a few bands like Hatebreed that we all liked growing up. It didn’t make sense but it made complete sense.”
As for the genre labels, Kevin states “We get the weirdest labels. ‘Popmosh’ or whatever you want to call it, I don’t even know if that’s a real genre. Somebody made that up probably.”
“What Separates Me from You” was released only 18 months after the 2009 release, “Homesick”. The songs were there and it was just time for the band to come together and put more songs down on record. “It was just the end of the record cycle. That record was over and it was just time to put out new stuff. Especially these days, it’s just hard to be on peoples minds so you have to think of ways to do stuff and we thought it was time to do a record so that’s what we did. We had a ton of songs already. It wasn’t like ‘oh man, we’ve gotta make a new record, let’s do this’. We had the stuff so we recorded it.”
“I think by the time we actually recorded it, it was about the third time we had recorded the album. We were demoing and stuff with Andrew Wade already who came with us in June to Europe. By the time we recorded it we had known the songs for a while so it was easy just to go right through it.”
If you hadn’t heard of A Day To Remember before the release of Homesick then you certainly aren’t the only one. It almost seems that the band exploded in popularity over night but the band might not share that sentiment. They formed in 2003. However, with this new found recognition has come the opportunity to meet some people they would never have had the chance to otherwise. “We’ve got to meet like a bunch of people we wouldn’t have met a long time ago. It’s weird because they’ve been a band and touring for the past six or seven years. For the actual band members it’s been a long road but to the public it’s been ‘oh whose that band’. It’s almost like two different sides to the story but we’ve definitely got to meet a ton of people that we never thought we’d be able to meet. One example was that we were eating lunch and John Paul Jones from Led Zepplin sat down next to us.”
The band with their current line up is holding strong but not without the odd disagreement. “There’s always conflict. If there are two people involved in anything, there’s always conflicting ideas. We have really open communication so we’re really lucky like that. It’s like a five way marriage, thats what it is. It’s just too bad that we do so well having a relationship with guys.”
The band is kicking it round Australia right now and you’ll see the dates below or head on over to the ADTR website for other chances to catch them.
12/15/10 Adelaide, Australia at Adelaide Entertainment Centre NO SLEEP TIL FESTIVAL
12/17/10 Melbourne, Australia at Melbourne Showgrounds NO SLEEP TIL FESTIVAL
12/18/10 Sydney, Australia at Entertainment Quarter Hordern Pavilion NO SLEEP TIL FESTIVAL
12/19/10 Brisbane, Australia at RNA Showgrounds NO SLEEP TIL FESTIVAL w/
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