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Yellow Fever
Yellowcard bounces back from disappointing sophomore album with
Paper Walls
By Alan Sculley
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Yellowcard performs at 7 p.m. March 25 at the Culture Room
in Fort Lauderdale. |
Musicians are notoriously creative when it comes to finding
reasons why an album that fails to live up to sales expectations
shouldn’t reflect poorly on a band or a solo artist’s career. With
the release of the new Yellowcard CD, Paper Walls, singer
Ryan Key finds himself discussing the disappointing sales of the
band’s previous CD, Lights and Sounds. That 2006 album
followed the group’s breakthrough 2003 album, Ocean Avenue,
which sold more than 2 million copies. Lights and Sounds
stalled at only 400,000.
Key stands firmly behind the album — as he should, considering it
was a strong enough musical effort — and credits Lights and
Sounds with being pivotal for the long-term future of
Yellowcard, which released a full-length CD, One for the Kids,
and an EP, The Underdog EP, before Ocean Avenue.
Sure, the band could put its best face on the setback, but Key
convincingly made the point that, in the big picture, Yellowcard’s
inability to match the success of Ocean Avenue might have
been the best thing that could have happened at the time.
“I think if we had sold another 2 million records, we would have
absolutely gone insane and broken up,” Ryan said, noting that no
one in Yellowcard considers Lights and Sounds a commercial
failure. “I don’t know if the band was ready to handle going
through what we went through with Ocean Avenue a second
time.”
Clearly, the huge success of that CD and the demands that
popularity put on Yellowcard did a number on the band (and that’s
not a reference to the 2 million copies sold).
As the band’s singer and frontman, no one felt the glare of
popularity more than Key, who found that the press and public
developed certain opinions about him that weren’t always accurate.
“That was what wore on me the most,” Key said. “I was expected to
be this certain person, and I didn’t really know even who I was.
And the problem with that is people begin to develop an opinion
that you’re not a nice person and that you’ve let it all go to
your head, when, really, what it is, I think, is you almost get
scared to come off of the bus. You just get inside yourself and
you kind of shut down. You get in your head too deep, and that’s
what I did.”
But the frontman obviously wasn’t the only one in the
Jacksonville-based band trying to find himself in the aftermath of
the success.
In working on Lights and Sounds, Key said he could sense
that some distance had developed between the band members. In
fact, the group — which also includes Sean Mackin (violin),
Longineu “LP” Parsons III (drums) and Peter Mosely
(bass/keyboards) — lost one of its members when it split with
guitarist Benjamin Harper before finishing the CD.
Because Lights and Sounds failed to catch on the
way Ocean Avenue
did, Yellowcard’s touring cycle was shortened. This actually
helped the group because it allowed for a much-needed break.
“When things started to slow down on that touring process, we had
a chance to really focus on where we wanted to go next and what
our purpose was in life really, not to get too deep on it,” Key
said.
The truth is, the deck was stacked against Lights and Sounds
from the beginning. For starters, the band took a creative gamble
by diverting from the up-tempo, violin-spiced guitar pop of
Ocean Avenue to tackle a more diverse, more classic (and less
emo) sound.
Then Key had vocal problems that sidetracked any momentum
Lights and Sounds had started to enjoy. In May 2006, he had
surgery to remove a cyst from his vocal cords, which brought an
early end to touring.
During the time off, the group members chose to blend the
strengths they saw in Ocean Avenue and Lights and Sounds
into the songs they wrote for Paper Walls.
“We did sort of return to focusing on certain melodic aspects,”
Key said. “I think that it had been a big focus of our band,
writing the three-and-a-half-minute-long kind of power pop/rock
songs with a really good hook and a strong melody. That’s really
what I think turned a lot of people on to
Ocean Avenue.
But I think we also took a lot of the edge that we sort of
sharpened with Lights and Sounds and mixed the two and made
more of a concentrated pop-rock record for Paper Walls.”
Yellowcard is introducing material from Paper Walls (as
well as songs from its earlier albums) on its current tour.
“We’re really playing a lot of new stuff,” he said. “Something we
really want to do with this tour is really come out confident and
strong with the new songs and let people know about Paper Walls.”
Catch the Yellowcard Acoustic Tour featuring The Spill Canvas
at
7 p.m.
March 25 at the Culture Room,
3045 N. Federal Highway,
Fort Lauderdale. Tickets are $19.99 and are available at
www.ticketmaster.com or by calling 954-564-1074. |
