Taking Back Sunday showed up at Warped Tour in Montréal this weekend wearing matching brown suits, arguably not the most punk-rock way to prepare for a day of sun, sweat and thousands of fans. The look was deliberate, though. As the band worked on their latest record, so did a visual world built from mood boards and images collected along the way.
"We had a lot of mood boards," frontman Adam Lazzara reveals. "I've been collecting stuff for a while, just as the record was taking shape."
The actual shopping trip was considerably less elaborate. "We were like, okay, we're all going to go to the store together, we're going to get suits," he says. "And then we didn't even go and really shop around too much. We found these at the first store, and we were like, ‘Okay, they're good.’"
After spending much of their career trying to avoid dressing like they had "real jobs," the band has apparently come around. "We hustled so hard so we wouldn't have to wear them," says bassist Shaun Cooper. "And then it became more comfortable to wear them than sweating through jeans every night."
That is the kind of perspective that comes with nearly three decades in a band. Taking Back Sunday have grown from young musicians chasing the next show into adults trying to reconcile touring with marriages, children and lives that exist outside the road. "We're still trying to figure the balance out," they admit, one of them joking that their child thought they worked at the airport because they were there so frequently. "We weren't too good with balance for a long time."
Once upon a time, the band's instructions to their agent were simple: "We don't care if we're home. Keep us working. Keep us out, we want it." These days, they try not to book anything longer than four or five weeks.
The contrast is particularly striking considering that, in 2003, they toured with Saves the Day for three months. When they reunite with Saves the Day this fall, alongside Thrice, they will be approaching the road from a very different place in life.
Warped Tour itself provides an even longer timeline. Guitarist John Nolan's first experience with the festival came in 1995, when he was still in eighth grade. He remembers seeing Sublime, L7 and Quicksand, buying a No Use for a Name hat and discovering Fat Music for Fat People Volume 2 for three dollars.
"It was just a core memory," he adds. "It was the summer after eighth grade before I started high school, and it was just such a great time with all my friends there sweating it out in the parking lot."
Now, the people who once inspired Taking Back Sunday are part of the band's own history, while the festival they once experienced as fans has become something they can return to as veterans. "It's amazing," Lazzara says. "Like John and Sean were just saying about having these core memories, so it’s amazing to be able to say that you got to be a little part of that story too."
For them, Warped Tour represented something that was difficult to find before the internet made music discovery effortless. "They were bringing this music that you could only find out if you were in a record store or had a zine from another city," Nolan says. "Like, no internet, and they were bringing this whole culture, this whole community to these off-the-beaten-path places."
That sense of community is still what they see when they look out from the stage. Their audience now includes people separated by decades, but the gap disappears once the music starts. "There's people from all different chapters of life, ranging like a huge age gap for like 30, 40 years," they say. "But all getting lost at the same time to the same thing."
It is a fitting idea for a band that has spent so long refusing to become static. Asked how they have managed to survive when so many of their peers have broken up or moved on, they point first to stubbornness.
"We're all pretty stubborn," Cooper jokes. Then comes the more serious answer: they still have somewhere to go.
"We all have a kind of an idea of how we want the band to evolve," they explain. ‘’Whether it's wearing suits now, or where the sound is going to go or how we're going to shape the songs and the direction and continue to grow and evolve. The three of us have a kind of shared vision in that. And when we can bounce ideas off each other, that keeps exciting and fresh.’’
That might be the secret. Taking Back Sunday have been doing this long enough to know exactly what it takes to keep a band alive, but not long enough to lose the feeling that made them want to do it in the first place.
As Lazzara puts it: "I wanted to do this for as long as I can remember. And I'm able to. So I’ll keep doing it, by any means necessary."
