Interview with Alex Gaskarth from All Time Low
October, 2011
As a staff member and future editor and chief of Loomings magazine, I had the pleasure of being able to interview Alex Gaskarth from All Time Low after their show at the Paramount Theater in Huntington, New York in 2011.
“We know you got your name from the lyrics of the song ‘Head on collision’ By ‘New Found Glory’ so how much of an influence was that band on you’re musical style and who are some other chief influences.”
“They were a pretty big influence on us at the time but when we first started the band we were really all about the pop punk scene and bands like ‘New Found Glory’, ‘Green Day’, ‘Blink 182’, they’re sort of like the stapled stands that encouraged us to start playing music as a group and they all just brought us together and all had an equal responsibility to making All Time Low.”
“What is your inspiration to writing your music?”
“Uh, life, it comes from everywhere. We are constantly on tour, we’re constantly traveling, we’re constantly seeing things that a lot of people don’t get to see and it puts a lot of issues in the world, from common issues like relationships and things like that in a whole different perspective and it kind of allows you to draw influences from a lot of different places so you know it becomes a little bit easier, the more you travel the more you do the more you learn to kind of gather influence from a lot of different places but also convey it through song in a way that’s relatable to everybody and um, yeah real life everyday experiences are the factor kind of roll into music.”
“It seems like a lot of the audience at last night’s gig were that real illusive ‘young crowd’ that a lot of the bands seem desperate to attract and you have a lot of luck with that. So after almost 10 years as a band how do you continue to stay cool and current to the high school and college crowd?”
“I think a big part of it is with, I mean, we are all sort of the same age that at least with college, I mean, we’re all 23 I guess by now we would just be out of college so I think it’s a matter of just having the same kind of outlook, we all relate we relate to our fans, our fans relate to us, I think we made an effort to really build a strong community around the band and to really nurture that community. Every time we play a show I see familiar faces that have come to shows multiple times and that just the kind of that is to come, we have this die heart committed fan page and it’s a very cool understanding that we all have.”
“Last night at the Paramount, I noticed you didn’t play as many songs from your new album ‘Dirty Work’ as you did with your other albums. Do you think your fans appreciate your older work better? How do you create your set list for each show?”
“I think a big part of it now is that we have a lot of songs! We were making the set list for this tour and the problem we kept running in to was that- obviously we don’t wanna come out and play 30 songs and have everyone sleeping by the end of everything because that just a lot of songs to listen to from a pop-punk band and we aren’t quite at the level where people wanna come watch us play for two and a half hours. So one of the things is that we are playing an hour and a half set, which is a pretty long set for us, and a big part of that is figuring out what songs need to be in the set, what people definitely wanna hear the thing our fans are a big part of this band and kind of trying to find that balance between our old material and our new material, and making sure we touch on everything that people want to hear and see live. We’re playing a decent amount of songs from the new record I think we are playing four or five, so it’s a good chunk of the set but we break it up with a lot of older songs as well.”
“Do you still enjoy playing the older stuff like you used to? Is there still that same energy?”
“Absolutely, I think one thing that we were talking about we recently on this set on this tour, we took out a song that we played literally on every tour ever called ‘Jaesey Rae’ it’s from our EP years back, and we took it out of the set because well frankly we’re sick of playing it -laughs-. And hey, we love this song, that song will never die out for us it’s definitely something we will bring back but we do try and keep it fresh there are kind of those songs that you sort of have to play. The ones that have had the most success the ones that people want to hear, but at the same time we mix it up and we bury the set and we’re playing some songs that we haven’t played in a while. So it’s cool, it doesn’t really get old.”
“So here is something I noticed, now I’m gonna throw this out there, if you go to a Foo Fighters gig, you will always see fans throwing packs of Mentos at the stage, you guys seem to have it a bit better cause at your gigs particularly last night, chicks were throwing their bras at the stage so are you aware of this tradition? How did it get started?”
“-laughs- That’s a really good question um, it’s from a weird joke that happened and it just kind of caught on. I can’t remember what show it was but a few years back we were playing a show and a few people threw their bras on stage, naturally I guess just took em’ off there and threw em’ up. And we kind of act like idiots on stage and we really don’t want to be taken too seriously, but I think we made some comment about it, and ever since then it became this weird tradition like we noticed more and more on that tour people just kept doing it, and it sort of became this viral tradition that that’s what you do at an ‘All Time Low’ show. So now, it’s hilarious because we have people coming who bring extra bras and they write us messages on them and stuff like that, so it’s so bizarre but it’s pretty funny and it’s kind of, it’s a funny little tribute to I guess the old school death punk days.”
“Yeah I had the question down as ‘do you encourage this’ but I feel that’s a stupid question, I can’t think of anyone who wouldn’t so…”
-laughs- “I mean it’s harmless fun so we do encourage it.”
“So last night you gave the audience a choice to pick between ‘Therapy’ and ‘Remembering Sunday’ and they seemed to be really enthusiastic about ‘Therapy’. Why do you think the fans at that particular show felt so strongly about that song?”
“Um, that’s a good question, we commented on it after the show when we were talking amongst ourselves about the show. It was interesting because the show before that, “Remembering Sunday” was the one everyone wanted to hear, so I think it just depends on the crowd and whose there but ‘Therap’ has actually become a really relatable song for a lot of people and a song that we get requests to play live. I think that because it’s a song that I know we were dealing with some real issues that were going on in my life and you know the obvious solution isn’t always the best solution so that song is kind of indicatively I think people kind of relate to it very well and I put that song out there very honestly and very openly and I think people kind of feel that. Yeah it’s become more of a popular song.”
“I mean do you still connect to it, do you still feel the same emotion you do when you play it? How do you get to that place?”
“Yeah I think a big part of it is remembering where you were when you wrote it, it’s kind of like when you hear one of your favorite songs and it kind of takes you back to that moment that you attribute that song to. It’s sort of similar in that sense when you perform one of your songs, it takes you back to what you were feeling when you wrote it and why you wrote it and, yeah you do occasionally get caught up in the moment, and I think that’s what makes a live performance that much cooler, that’s why a live performance is amazing because you actually get to go see the artist perform work that means something to them. And I think that’s the beauty of the live show.”
“So if you look back, it seems in the older days, in the 60’s, 70’s bands really seemed to like an air of mystery around their rock stars like Morrison and all that, but now we are moving into an age of transparency, you’re a very veracious and frequent tweeter so how important do you think social media is in constant contact with the fans, how important do you think that is to a bands success?”
“You know these days I feel it is pretty crucial, I don’t really subscribe to the idea that there needs to be any mystery around artists anymore. I think everything is assessable at this point so for me it seems like you can establish a much better connection and relationship with your fans by just putting yourself out there. I think you shouldn’t be totally transparent just because that stuffs really inappropriate and just not cool on so many levels but things like Twitter and mediums you can control what goes out and what people see, it’s a really great way to reach out and connect. If I wanna find out what people want to hear on a certain tour I can do that, if I wanna find out what people are listening to at the moment I can do that. It’s cool, it gives it a great way to kind of stay in touch.”
“You’ve played with a lot of really popular acts like ‘Simple Plan’, ‘Boys Like Girls’, ‘Plain White Tees’ are there any acts, new or old that you would really want to play with some day?”
“Yeah, a big one for us right now would probably be the “Foo Fighters”. We did a couple of sets with them in Europe with them but it would be absolutely amazing to do like a full fledged tour with them. As far as new bands though there’s a band ‘We Are The In-Crowd’ that we are good friends with that we love touring with. A band we have never toured with but would like too are ‘The Swellers’, they have a pop-punk kind of feels like early 2000’s pop-punk bands and they are doing it right and they are really really talented really good dudes and I would love to tour with them.”
“So one last question but it’s a bit of a toughie that I like asking because I’m interested to know. If there is one song out there that you wish you could have written, like what’s the one song you listen to and go ‘damn, I wish I could have wrote that.”
“Man, that’s such a tough question because there’s so many songs I wish I had written but I guess if I had to narrow it down right now to one I would say maybe ‘Thriller’.”
“Oh, you mean the Michael Jackson ‘Thriller’?”
“Yeah I mean it’s such a perfectly constructed pop song. The puns behind the song are so weird and out there that it’s just, sometimes I think about considering what popular music is now and like what you’re hearing on the radio now, it’s amazing to me that people have the capacity to appreciate a pop song that had like a really cool theme and unique lyrics rather than just ‘hey let’s go to the club and get fucked up’. So to me, that pop song is perfection.”
