Celebrating the 20th anniversary of their debut album while working on their eighth studio release, having three certified gold records and a place in the Long Island Music Hall of Fame under their belts, Taking Back Sunday are at the sweet spot in their career where they can look back to their humble beginnings and forward to a future of their own choosing.
Looking back to the start, the early 2000s saw the band making a name for themselves long before social media.
“I was the internet geek and would be like ‘we gotta get a website, we can put our tour dates up there’,” bass player Shaun Cooper reminisces. “Communication was few and far between and we just would play shows anywhere we could. That was most important to us. We had an old-school mailing list that we’d set up at the shows, and we’d sell our CDs for $5 for five songs, a buck a song. We had Steve Jobs beat on that idea! We built a grassroots following. If we met somebody on the road or someone gave us a place to stay for the night, we’d give them our demo to thank them, and that’s how we spread the word: one show at a time.”
Not many bands can say their first album is what launched them into becoming one of the mid-2000s biggest bands, and for Cooper, it still doesn’t quite feel real.
“[Tell All Your Friends] came out in March (2002). I figured by September that would be it for Taking Back Sunday,” he says. “We didn’t know what we were doing. We put our heart and soul into everything we did, we really believed in it. And that was super fun. I’ll never forget that time, and here I am still talking about it. It’s pretty incredible and entirely unexpected.”
It’s always been important the band didn’t get stuck in that era though.
“We wanted to avoid that nostalgia for as long as we could. We were so afraid of being lumped in as this band that only wrote good songs 20 years ago,” he reflects. “But we put out the Tidal Wave record in 2016, and people seemed to really respond to that one. So we felt like we had set ourselves up really nicely to do the nostalgia thing, we could go revisit [the older records]. For Tell All Your Friends, we did the re-issue, and we weren’t going to tour on it. But now we’re ready.”
Damn straight they’re ready, ready to play the biggest nostalgia trip the world’s middle-aged pop-punk and emo kids could ever dream of: When We Were Young Fest.
“I can’t wait,” Cooper admits. “There are so many friends that we’re gonna see. It’s just wonderful to see all these people doing great things and thriving, and the world is ready for rock music again.”
Taking Back Sunday are looking to the future just as much as they’re reminiscing on the past, with studio album number eight.
“Of course, everyone’s gonna say the same thing, but I think we’re writing the best songs of our career,” Cooper says. “It’s going to be another leap forward when this next album comes out. We did [latest single, “Just Us Two”] with Steve Aoki, which kind of gives a hint at where the sound may be going.
There’ll be no mistaking whose album it is though: “It’s all from us. It’s all from our hearts and the combination of influences we all have, and I feel like the production makes it sound like a more modernized version of Taking Back Sunday.”
And while he can’t say much about the new record, one thing is definitely on the cards in the band’s near future: playing shows.
“We have so many ideas that we have to pin down what’s actually going to make the record so it’s not quite there yet,” Cooper teases. “I think the next couple of years are going to be packed with touring and getting back around the world as often as we can. I think we’re going to keep going for a very long time.”
Revisit the video for “Cute Without the ‘E’ (Cut From the Team)” here:
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Photo courtesy of Natalie Escobedo
