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Nathan Henry of Sherwood

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    Frontman Nathan Henry discusses the return of Sherwood and their first record in seven years Some Things Never Leave You, along with the hard work of doing music on your own, the self-doubt and toughness of getting older, and how the experience of being in a band never fully goes away.

    So the album got sent to backers about a week ago now. Have you heard a response back yet?

    Yeah, so far just on Twitter and stuff, but so far it’s been a lot of positive, “Whoa, didn’t expect this. Loving it. Didn’t think it would be better, or a progression.” So far, yeah, we’ve gotten some great feedback, but we’re not looking for it as much, I guess. You always want to know what people think, but where we are in life, we’re like let’s make the best record we can. We’re going to do what we want to do, you know what I mean? I think that makes for great records, personally, that attitude. When you try too hard sometimes it’s obvious.

    It’s been a while since Sherwood has been active. During that time, you did the Begging Sea record, you’ve done a bunch of video work, and you have the Don’t Feed the Trolls podcast with Matt MacDonald from Classic Crime now. How do you like doing all these other projects and what else have you been up to?

    There’s been ups and downs. Sherwood was like my main love. I loved it, but it kind of ended in a weird way. I always felt like I didn’t know what that ending was, so it felt a little bit weird. It’s like I’ve swapped. My personal life was in shambles when I was in a band. My professional life was great, and then it swapped. My personal life became great and then my professional life was in a mess.

    I’ve just been doing all kinds of random stuff. I love and hate it. I love the freedom and the economy to do whatever I want in putting out records and doing other things, but then I’m hustling a lot to make ends meet. Staying creative is always a good thing, but sometimes I can get too much going at once, like right now.

    My ultimate dream is to be like a homesteader, have some land and live off the land and live very simply. I’m drawn to that, so I’m in the process of doing that right now. My wife and I bought some land, and I’m super busy outside every day. I don’t have a lot of time for the digital space of creativity as much. It’s crazy, but I love it. I love life when you have too much going on, as opposed to nothing going on.

    Are you still in the Nashville area?

    I just moved out of the city. I was for the last four or five years. I liked it. It was cool. In some sense, it kind of felt like a day off on tour, you know? All these band dudes hanging out on 10:30 on a Tuesday, and you’re like, “What the heck? What are we doing?” There’s a lot of that. I liked Nashville. It was just a little too reminiscent of the old days.

    One of the main things you’re keeping busy with these days is the podcast. How do you like doing that and how has that been going so far?

    Podcast is great. We’ve got a small core following so far. It’s enjoyable. We started off really editing heavily the episodes. We just had Marco Collins on this episode that just launched yesterday. He had some cool stories about Courtney Love and Kurt Cobain and all that stuff.

    We’re starting to get into some awesome guests and talking about stuff I never thought I’d be talking to people on a podcast about. As a music guy, it’s fun. The cool thing about a podcast is it forces you to be creative. You have a new show every week. You can’t spend two years in the studio, you know what I mean? So I like that.

    As far as Sherwood, like you were saying there wasn’t any closure when you ended. No final shows. I know you were trying to put together another album, but that never came to fruition. What was it like to be able to reopen that chapter again last year after never having that closure?

    I was saying earlier to someone that being in a band is sort of a curse because it never ends. Even if you’re a small obscure band on some indie label 10 years ago, there’s somebody that still loves your record. You’ll go somewhere and someone will be like, “Hey, were you in that band?” And you’re like, “Yeah.” So you can’t really ever get it out of your system. It kind of always haunts you.

    Sherwood had a decent amount of success. I’ll get Facebook messages, or Tweets or something, and I always thought Sherwood was done. I just felt like, well, that’s done. I’m not going to do that ever again. But it keeps coming back. I don’t know how I feel about it, honestly. I think I’m OK with it, because like I said my personal life feels totally more fulfilling than my professional life, which is the way I think life should be.

    I think your personal life should be the most important thing. Your professional endeavors are good and helpful, but they shouldn’t be your life. I think you’ll have a shit life if that’s what it is. I know a lot of people who choose that life, and I don’t envy that. I don’t want to say, “Oh, I’m better than you.” But in some senses, you’re lucky if you’re in a band. You get this crazy experience early on, and it’s hard to encompass what all that is.

    So, I don’t know how I feel about it. It has its ups and downs. I’m doing a lot for the band right now. I’m kind of one of the only forces in the process of pushing this along because everyone else is super busy and did their jobs. Now it’s me to do videos, interviews and such to get the word out. That’s weird. It used to be all of us, and now it’s just kind of me. That’s a different feeling.

    Is there anything you miss about being in a full-time band?

    Sure, selfishly I miss the attention. It was always fun to have people pay attention to what you’re up to, and traveling was great. I miss the camaraderie. I enjoy doing things in a group. It’s fun to bring your specific talents to other talents and see what happens. When I did my solo record and put it out, it felt like this is rewarding, but it’s not as fun.

    I miss all the good parts of being in a band. All the fun parts are definitely missed. I don’t miss the non-fun parts. If you’ve been in a band, you know what I’m talking about.

    What was the writing like for this record, with you and Dan being on opposite sides of the country now? What was that back and forth like?

    It was kind of like the Postal Service, mailing things. No, we just emailed ideas and demos. I would sing voice memos into my phone and send them to Dan. He would send large portions of demos back to me, and then I’d go, “These are cool. I don’t like these lyrics.” I’d scratch them out, rewrite stuff and send them back. Then he’d be like, “Cool, I like that.”

    We did a couple writing sessions where he came out. We almost did the record with Relient K. They were going to produce the record, but they’re one of those bands that does best when they’re working on their projects, I think. We’re all buddies and friends and we tried to work together, but they’re kind of doing their own thing. That almost happened. We wrote a couple songs with Matt Hoopes. It was sounding a little too like you would think it would sound, I guess.

    So we decided to scratch it all and just write songs that we like and not have to go for anything, and then the songs just kind of came together. We pulled a demo or two from the previous sessions back in 2009. We resurrected some old ideas and turned them into newer versions.

    What were some of the old songs?

    So the track “Believe” sounds like an older Sherwood song to me. That was a song Dan and I wrote with a guy in L.A. When we turned in our last record, we got the whole “Hey, there’s not enough singles on the record” thing. So we had to go write in L.A. with a bunch of people to try and get a single or whatever, because the previous record had a pretty good single that did really well. The label wanted a single, so we had some of those songs.

    Then “Back Home” was just a cool, vibey demo. It didn’t make the record because it wasn’t a single. I was like, “Dude, I’ve always enjoyed this song. It just needs another chorus.” So Dan and I tinkered around with it and got a chorus on it. That’s like our super vibey, six-minute, Death Cab-y song.

    So the record was just kind of you, Dan and Joe then?

    Yeah, it was, which is kind of historically how Sherwood has been. A lot of fans are like, “Oh, that’s not the whole band.” But it’s like, well, Dan is very prolific. He would write a lot, and then he and I would tinker around with stuff. Then Joe is a nuts and bolts musician. He would come in and write drum parts and play them perfectly. But for the most part, the lyrics in the songs were mostly Dan and I. Dave and Mike would bring ideas, but Dan was kind of a one-stop shop in some senses. I would do vocals and such and let him do his thing.

    It wasn’t too much of a departure, and I don’t think anyone will notice. Mike and Dave since then have their own band and have found their own voice and creative outlet, so it didn’t really make sense for them to come back to a tertiary role in a record. I mean, you can’t do a long distance record with five or six different opinions. You just can’t. It’s impossible. You’ll be rewriting and scratching out stuff and emailing forever.

    You decided for some reason to go with PledgeMusic over MySpace Records this time [laughs]. How did you like using that and funding it on your own?

    I don’t think there would have been a label that would have been interested, unless they heard all the demos and we were agreeing to go out on tour. I really feel like that was the only option we had. It’s good and bad. It’s great that you own the album, but the problem is it doesn’t really matter these days because people don’t support music as much. It’s better to not be in debt financially. Our last record I think had three times the budget, maybe four times the budget, that we raised.

    I appreciate record labels more now than I ever have, for sure. You don’t realize how much work they do. You don’t realize the opportunities they allot you as a band. You kind of take them for granted. You go, “Yeah, it’s our art. We own it. Eff the record label.” I understand that attitude, because a lot of times they do lame things, but at the same time trying to do it all yourself is not fun.

    It’s different. It’s like we just swapped all the things we didn’t like now we do like, and all the things we liked now we don’t like because now we’re doing those jobs. It’s a swap, but the fact is that we can come back seven years later and make a record that sounds better than any other record we’ve done, I think sonically, just from raising money from our fans. We got Matt Goldman to mix it, and we were able to record the drums in Stone Gossard’s studio in Seattle.

    Everything sounds great, in terms of sonically, and that’s awesome. You can’t do that without 20 or 30 thousand dollars, you know what I mean? We couldn’t go back to being a local band in that sense, trying to pay for it ourselves, so it’s been amazing to have the fan support for the record.

    Is everything going well with you partnering up with Bad Christian so far?

    Yeah, they’re like a co-opt, so it’s great. There was a post on Absolute Punk, I remember before you switched over, that we were making the record with them. People were like, “Are they a Christian band?” I kind of just laughed. Bands like Thrice and Brand New can have tons of spiritual references in their songs and no one cares. We’ve never been overtly spiritual or anything. Sorry, that’s not the question you asked, but I was just thinking about that and how it relates to your website.

    I don’t know. It’s cool because they’re on the front end of this progressive understanding of what a record label needs to be in 2016. They don’t own you. They’ll help you, and at any given moment if you don’t like it, then cool. You’re free to go. It’s not the caged bird, so to speak. The window is open and we can fly away at any time. I think that makes us want to stick around. We all want to work together to make it what it is, instead of fighting each other.

    I thought the marketing for this record has been pretty cool. You’ve used Back to the Future a lot, both last year with the “Back to the Sherwood” thing and then earlier this year with the Trump video that got millions of views. How has that side of things been like to do?

    [Laughs] Yeah, Sherwood’s always had a fun sense of humor. We’ve never taken ourselves too seriously. In some sense, we were a terrible band, because we would go out onstage at Warped Tour looking like hell. It looked like we had just rolled out of bed, which we did. We’d get onstage and play our hearts out, but we just looked like shit. I look at some of our old videos and I think we were a better sounding band than we were aesthetically across the board. We always made funny videos and made fun of ourselves.

    The videos and the marketing and the “Back to the Sherwood” video, it all goes inline with who wants to ask their fans for money? Nobody. I’m not going to make a video that’s like, “Give us your money. This is why we need you to help us do our hobby.” It’s totally lame. Just be honest, like hey, we’re making a record. If you want to help out, cool.

    I didn’t even want to say that. I wanted to do something that didn’t say money at all. That was my goal. I wanted to make a funny video that didn’t have anything to do with money. I think we pulled it off. Sometimes those videos can be very pointed about how you need money. You get more money, I guess, but yeah.

    The Trump video was totally just a fluke. I was making that to promote the podcast. I uploaded it to Sherwood’s Facebook and it took off. It got like 14 million plays or something. I was like, I should have had some kind of bumper at the end. Some kind of commercial or something [laughs]. But we got like 10 thousand page likes out of that video, so hopefully some of those people will buy the record. That would be cool.

    A Marty-Trump video doesn’t have any cross correlation or anything to do with our band, so it was just a fluke. A cheap Facebook promotion. I’m glad you saw that, though. Did you see that on Facebook going viral?

    Yeah, I saw you guys kept posting, “What is going on with this video?”

    OK, yeah. I actually had a couple friends text me, like my aunt who lives in Kansas just shared your Trump-Marty video. I’m like, “What?” So my friends’ family members were sharing that video. It had some crazy reach. That’s what Facebook is now. It’s just a big meme factory. People just post memes all day.

    Especially stuff about Donald Trump.

    Yeah, especially Trump. People love to hate on that guy. We don’t mind [laughs].

    The album title Some Things Never Leave You is a very apt one, coming this late in your career. How did you come up with it? Are there things that have stuck with you all this time?

    Some Things Never Leave You is a line from the first single we released, called “Bottle It Up.” It’s a song about nostalgia, about being a kid when your world is huge. You have these memories attached to this house, this backyard, this neighborhood, and then you have to leave it. Then you come back and have a conversation years later, like, “Hey, remember?” You just can’t bottle it up because this nostalgia pours out of you, so that’s the idea of that song.

    There’s a line towards of the end of the song that says, “They say some things never leave you.” In a weird way, that kind of encompasses Sherwood. It’s this big, 10-year bottle of stories. When we get together, even on text messages, it just kind of pours out. I don’t think that was the intention of the song. It just kind of turned into this nostalgia thing and it relates to Sherwood.

    In terms of things that haven’t left me, for Sherwood is the experience of it. Man, it’s weird. Being in band, it’s like it becomes your identity, and then you kind of leave it. Like I said earlier, it just keeps creeping back into your life.

    I remember we moved into this neighborhood. My wife and I bought a house, fixed it up, had some friends, and it was like six years later and my buddy comes over and says, “You never told me you were in a band.” I was like, “Yeah, you know.” He was like, “Dude, my wife was cleaning out her computer yesterday and she had a bunch of your songs on it.” I was like, “That’s cool.” He was like, “What!?” I was like, “Whatever, man.” You know what I mean? You have these weird experiences where it continues to come back up.

    What I would say is everyone else’s view of band people is always more inflated than what the actual band member feels at any given time. You feel like a big band when you step offstage and there’s all these fans, but then the next day you’re walking through a city and no one knows who you are. It’s this weird, everyone knows who I am and then nobody knows who I am.

    That never leaves you, because that messes with your mind. You start to feel like you’re more important than other people sometimes. When you sink back into normality and you’re an average Joe, you’re reminded of these times when you used to sign autographs and stuff.

    I would say the things that haven’t left me are also bad stuff, those times when I’m feeling sorry for myself like I’m not cool anymore. I have to tell myself that’s bullshit. That isn’t what’s important. Those people don’t know me, you know what I mean?

    Some Things Never Leave You, I want it to be a good thing, but sometimes it’s a bad thing. Sometimes it’s the trolls inside, speaking of trolls. But yeah, the good stuff – friends, hanging out, seeing cities, going to good restaurants, traveling the world – that stuff never leaves you.

    You wrote on Facebook that these are the most personal songs you’ve written to date and about how more honesty comes with being older. How did that factor into the record for you?

    Oh, man. Well, some songs are honest in themselves, like if the song is about something we try to be honest about what that is. I think a lot of the honesty in this record is the self-doubt and the toughness of getting older.

    Sometimes band guys retire early in life. I talk to a lot of my friends and you can tell they haven’t had the experiences that a lot of my friends in bands have had. Some of my conservative Christian friends, for example. I’m like, “Have you been to Japan? Have you been to an entire country where nobody knows any of the stuff you believe?”

    They’re like, “No.” And I’m like, “Dude, you’re so narrow minded about your experiences, about what you think the world should or shouldn’t believe. You have no life experiences to back up a lot of this stuff.” Versus band guys, who have been to 25 countries by the time they turn 30 years old and have had millions of conversations. Your life changes, and you don’t know how to explain all that.

    So, you sink back into normality for a couple years, and then all that stuff replays. You remember the times you were traveling and doing things, and then you start writing songs again based on the conclusions of your experiences. What falling in love and becoming a father means, you write songs like that. I’m a father to two children now, two boys, and that’s life changing. You feel a lot of this is real to me now.

    I think a lot of people write songs from perceived personal experience, but how can you write a song about love when you’re 19? You don’t know what love is. You may have had your heart broken by a girl you liked in high school or whatever, but you don’t know what love is.

    You bring a child into the world, and you’re like I would die for this kid. OK, I’m starting to understand the power of art, what it means to lose a child or why the news is so negative. Why that shooting yesterday was so terrible, because if I lost my child in that firestorm, I would be devastated. You can only get those things as you get older and you age and you really learn what it means. You bring that to the songwriting process, whereas before you just kind of have talked about it like you know what you’re talking about.

    You can trick people. People can believe you know what you’re talking about and believe those songs, but it’s rare to be young and have enough of that honesty to really bring it to the songwriting. Some bands, that’s not their thing. They’re just looking for catchy. On “Call Me Maybe,” Carly Rae Jepsen is not trying to say anything profound, so it works.

    Sherwood has always tried to be on the outside not as serious, but on the inside when you crack it open these guys actually put a lot of thought into this stuff. Maybe or maybe not that came through. I’m not sure. You can tell me. Is that how Sherwood feels to you?

    Yeah, I know people usually think of you as sunshine and summery songs, but on the last album you had some heavier moments, something like “Worn” or “No Better,” or even “Ground Beneath My Feet.” I don’t know if there’s anything on that level on this record, but it’s definitely not all sunshine and roses. There’s definitely some contemplative stuff on it.

    Yeah, on QU we were trying to do something different. That was the hardest record from start to finish. That’s the hardest part about readdressing Sherwood, is there’s this historical sound that fans like, but you grow up and don’t want to keep doing that, you know what I mean?

    It sounds like you could have made this two years after QU came out. It sounds like a pretty natural development from what you were doing stylistically on that record.

    Cool, and we did a lot of that intentionally. We didn’t try to come out with a weird record out of left field. We’re just a pop band. We’re not rewriting history with our music. I’m not going to say we’re going to write some obscure record that no one likes.

    I was a big fan of the Get Up Kids, and then they came out with this record after Something to Write Home About and it was totally different. I remember being bummed out of my mind, like what happened to this band? I get it, now that I’ve done it myself, so we’re trying to appease the fans. Well, you know what I’m saying. Songs like “The Unknown,” I could write an album of songs like that.

    Yeah, “The Unknown” is probably in my top five Sherwood songs and I think one of the best songs you’ve written.

    Yeah, I love that song. That’s my favorite Sherwood song by far. I listen to it and go if another band put this song out, I would listen to it on repeat. I remember when “Jesus Christ” by Brand New came out. Someone sent me the mp3. I think I was listening to it while Sherwood was writing A Different Light. I want to say it’s that old. We wrote that record at a beach house, and I remember walking up and down the beach, listening to that song, going, “Man, this song is doing something to me. I feel something going on, but I don’t know what it is.”

    I always wanted a song like that for Sherwood. I always wanted a song that puts you somewhere, almost like you float out of yourself for three or four minutes, you know? So that song is very personal, very heavy for me. That Brand New song is the best way I can describe it.

    I remember when that went up on the old site, a lot of people were like, “This sounds awesome.”

    Yeah, stuff that is just like feeling and is big and loud, kind of a throwback to a little bit of that emo. I just thought this is cool. This is fun. I can’t wait to play that song live. That’s going to be my favorite part of the set. Hopefully, fans come out.

    It seems like that was well received, so that gives me hope we can kind of go that route and people will love it. We won’t have to play bubblegum sunshine songs all the time. But that’s cool, too [laughs].

    How did you come up with the “brick” line?

    I think Dan came up with that line. I wrote most of the other lyrics of that song, and then he was like, “I want to put this line in there.” I was like, “OK, what line?” Then he said the line and I was like, “OK, that’s cool.”

    He’s deep into theology and reading about theology. I think that’s a very normative term in the sense of fundamentalism, building a brick wall of theology, or certainty rather. It doesn’t have to be religious. You build a wall of ideas, and unfortunately life doesn’t really work that way.

    If you take one brick out, if you say they discovered this thing and this didn’t happen, then your whole entire belief system falls apart. That’s the general understanding. It can be applied to fundamentalism or anything that you firmly believe. Then I think we kind of built the song around that concept. How do you write a song about this without sounding too lame or generic?

    My son just came into the room and is playing my guitar [laughs]. Speaking of awesome life experiences, before my kids didn’t come into interviews like Steph Curry or something. He just turned two, so he’s in that phase where he loves when I play the guitar, which is good because I need a lot of practice because I’m rusty.

    Do your kids like Sherwood songs?

    I have a five-month-old, so he’s too young to know, but my two-year-old is starting to like music. He loves me to play songs. He kind of twirls in a circle and dances and such. I have played the new record for him while we were hanging out, putting stickers on papers in the new room, but I don’t know if he knew it was me yet or not.

    He’s still very in his head. I think he’s got the artist’s brain. He thinks a lot. I can tell he’s thinking about stuff, the way he goes about things. I think he’s listening, but I haven’t gotten the feedback. He’s still real young, but it’s a cool moment.

    What about “Outside/In?” I know you just released that cool lyric video for it last week.

    Yeah, Dan will scratch out some rough lyrics and send them over. Then I’ll come up with some and go, “What’s that song about?” I rewrote the intro to that song lyrically. I was imagining my personal struggle every day is when I wake up how I feel dictates my day. If I feel shitty, or I feel out of touch with life or with people, I let that consume me.

    I’ve been realizing that’s just a bad way to live. We have so much choice in the way we feel and who we are in this world. We don’t have to be led around by our feelings. We can choose to have good days. We can choose to see through the darkness of the world if we want to. The only person in our way is ourselves. So that song is personal to me, even though Dan wrote a big part of it.

    I wake up with these demons in my head, and I can tell them to shut up or I can tell them OK, let’s hang out today. That line “The dark, it calls me a friend.” There’s times where I have these conversations with the darkest part of myself. Sometimes it’s too friendly. The conversations are too friendly. I think you have to know your demons in order to defeat them, but I also feel like you can get too friendly with your demons. That song is about people who struggle with mental stuff, anxiety or depression or whatever. Being your own worst enemy is the easiest way to describe that song. But a cool song, I think.

    Then the last one I’ll ask about is “New Year’s Eve,” because I feel like there’s a story behind that song. Did that come from real life? What did you draw from for that one?

    That’s cool because that’s what I wanted it to feel like. No, definitely not. It’s just a song. I envisioned that song to be a dark song, and then Dan forced me to bring it out of the darkness and make it a light song. Unfortunately, we’ll never know which one would have been more interesting, but the version we have is the version we have.

    It’s kind of right there in the middle, in between being light and dark.

    Yeah, that song made me tear up when I listened to the demo. I had this idea that at the end it’d be this couple who had met and had multiple New Year’s experiences together, and then at the end of their lives one of them died earlier than the other one. Going back to this place that had these great memories, the last line was going to be, “There I sit on New York’s Eve, with confetti flying through the air. It’s like the way I hoped it’d be, but I’ve never been less prepared. When the Apple fell, you weren’t there.”

    Sometimes those kinds of concepts are too forced. Dan was like, “Eh, I don’t know. That feels kind of forced. That feels kind of dark. I don’t feel like the song needs to go there.” I was like, “Yeah, maybe you’re right.” We definitely have these specific debates. Dan is very in his head a lot. He overthinks things and we’ll debate the dumbest stuff.

    I think it’s good a lot, but sometimes I’m just like, “Dude, let’s just let the song be the song. Let’s not have debates about every single word [laughs].” So sometimes I’ll let him win and sometimes he lets me win. That was one of those moments where I was like, “OK, we’ll just keep it light. That’s fine.”

    That makes songwriting sound so boring, but I tried to make it sound as much like a personal story as possible. But it didn’t happen to me, no. I didn’t have a New Year’s love story.

    So what is next for Sherwood? Are there going to be more tour dates after this run in July? Do you foresee possibly doing another record at some point?

    I think we are motivated by the reaction, I’m not going to lie. If a lot of people get behind it, if it does something, if it moves a little bit, if people post about it, if people want to talk about it and purchase it, that definitely motivates us to continue. But if it’s a struggle and we have to fight to get the word out and nobody cares.

    It’s not that we don’t care or feel like we didn’t make a good record, because I feel like we made a good record. I don’t think it’s bubblegum catchy poppy like it was. I think this record will be interesting in six or seven years. I think you can pop this record in and go, “That’s a good record. That’s cool. There’s different vibes. It’s not cheesy. It’s got a lot going on.”

    We’ll do more maybe if there’s more response. If it comes out and fizzles out, I mean, dude, it’s a lot of work to make a record. I don’t know if people realize that. It’s so much work. You’re making like a dollar an hour when you put in the time and energy into it. It’s almost pro bono.

    People are like, “You raised 50 thousand.” And it’s like, no. You’re talking emails and hours of flights, rehashing and demos, recording back and forth, promos, videos. You’re talking serious time invested. I think when fans don’t take it that serious, it’s hard for you to keep putting in that energy. So, there’s all that.

    I think if there was a great response, then it motivates us to do it again. That was fun. That was cool. We’re doing this West Coast tour. Some shows are selling better than others, so we’ll see. Some bands have a ton of nostalgia. When they come back, they’re just like boom and they’re back, and then there’s other bands who can’t come back because nobody cares, or there’s people who care but they’re too scattered out and too far in between. There’s like hardcore fans in random cities.

    We’re one of those bands that’s in the middle of the road. We’re never going to come back and sell out instantly or anything. We’re hoping this tour does well, and we’re going to gauge a lot of it on that.

    Are you going to be rehearsing in the same space beforehand, or is everyone just practicing on their own?

    We’re all tinkering with the songs, trying to remember. They way we used to write songs is with the same chords. I’m going back through them now and it’s like one long song, the way we wrote songs. I’m playing the bass lines, laughing to myself. At any given moment, I could play one of five notes. It’s almost too simple at times and I’m driving myself crazy.

    I think it’ll be fine. I just hope people have a good time and let loose and sing along. That’s where we’re at, to have fun.

     
  2. DearCory

    Regular

    Absolutely love this album. I got the release a few weeks ago, but kinda sat on it. I got my backer cd in the mail on Friday and fell in love. Really hitting me hard as we just bought a house, and my parents are in the midst of selling my childhood home.

    Glad to see The Unknown get talked about. I agree that it's one of their best (if not THE best) songs.



    "I always wanted a song that puts you somewhere, almost like you float out of yourself for three or four minutes, you know?"

    Trust me Nate, it did... it messed me up real good.
     
  3. CyberInferno

    Line below my username Supporter

    Good to know that my backer CD is sitting in my mailbox lol (been in the hospital with my wife since Thursday).

    I'm enjoying it too. It was a bit of a grower for me, as I'm more a fan of their upbeat stuff and there are a lot of mellow songs, but after a few spins it started to jive with me.
     
  4. heymynameisjoe

    when the days have no numbers Prestigious

    good interview. sherwood was one of my first shows with waking ashland back in 2005(?) and to see how much they've grown is really something. i'd love to hear the demos they worked on with relient k. but to address nate's hope that they'd write a song that lets you float outside yourself for three to four minutes, consider that accomplished sir. super pumped for the anaheim show!
     
  5. Matt Metzler

    Space Cadet Prestigious

    Great interview, Jonathan. You always have such insightful conversations with the musicians you interview and I'm so glad you're still doing it!

    I like this album a lot. It's a really nice follow-up to QU, which is one of my favorite albums ever, but they tried some new things on this one and I think it definitely paid off. "Outside/In" is the song I've been playing the most, and I love how heavy it gets toward the end.
     
  6. honkytonk

    Narcissism on narcotics

    Great interview! Big fan of these guys, still waiting on my backer CD but gonna give the digital copy a spin this week when the weather is right.
     
  7. Josh Chavez

    formerly cool

    This album really blew me away. To me it's the perfect mix of their old poppy sound and the more mature sound of QU. They sound at the top of their game musically and lyrically - and Nate's vocals sound better than ever. Going to be spinning this all summer. Can't wait to seem them on tour again next month too. I'm always gonna be rooting for these guys.
     
    heymynameisjoe and DearCory like this.
  8. RileyWitiw

    more like absolutepop.net Supporter

    If they wrote an album of songs like the Unknown, it would unquestionably be my AOTY. That being said, this might be my AOTY.
     
  9. benschuyler

    Regular Prestigious

    Really enjoyed this interview a lot. Was an honest look at what life is like for so many musicians from that era still making music.