Yellowcard

Yellowcard

After receiving a great reception on the All Time Low tour, we were eager to catch up with Yellowcard to find out how they felt the tour was going and when fans can expect the band to return to the UK. Not forgetting weird tour experiences (they certainly have one!), touring the world and recording their latest record.

Entering the dressing room and seeing All Time Low bassist Zac Merrick chilling out on his laptop, it felt like we had been invited into to the guys ‘chill out’ area.

It seems we were right as during the interview members of Young Guns and All Time Low were walking about the room, making the atmosphere even more relaxed and as we stretched out on the comfy leather sofa’s it felt like we were relaxing at home talking to Yellowcard violinist Sean Mackin.

How’s the reception for you been on this tour so far?

Sean: It’s been wonderful, we haven’t played over here in way too long and so our fans are supporting us and you know we have the new record coming out, so there’s a lot of excitement there! Of course, All Time Low and their fans have been wonderful so it’s a great opportunity for us to play in front of all these people.

Which has been your favourite date (this tour)?

Sean: Dublin was a favourite of mine! I’d never been to Ireland and the minute we showed up, hung out with our friends and Zac (All Time Low) and we went out that night, we went out the next night; it was really nice!

Any stories from the tour you’d like to spill?

Sean: Nothing too debaucherous! The other night we all went out to a club, it had really terrible music playing and I mean it was a bar, but they had like strobe lights! It was crazy and we were out until the wee hours in the morning and I just recovered yesterday, I went to bed early! It was a nice day off.

From your new album ‘When You’re Through Thinking Say Yes’ which is your favourite track?

Sean: I love them all, they are like my little babies! Later on in the record we have a song called ‘See Me Smiling’ which recounts the past ten years. We lost a good friend about ten years ago and we wrote a song earlier called ‘View From Heaven’ and this one kind of recalls what the past ten years were like lyrically he’s still with us, but musically it highlights the best of our band. I also really like the next song we will be releasing ‘Hang You Up’ from the album and it’s a little bit of a turn for us and it has nice little violin solo; it’s a nice change of pace for the record!

The band obviously were on hiatus from 2008-2010, do you believe that this has made the band stronger?

Sean: Absolutely! I mean there was a couple of misfortunes for us; the music industry was up and down, our record label went out of business and it was a really crazy time! When you travel 350 days out of the year, as a person and as an artist you sacrifice your relationships with your loved ones and your family, so it was really nice to take a step back and focus on that and find out what was important to us and then we got a call like ‘Hey you’ve taken a little time of now do you want to do a record’ and the timing was perfect and it had a really renewing, rejuvenating effect and it’s made us closer and stronger!

Was the writing and recording process different for the new album to previous records?

Sean: Yeah! It was much shorter, that’s the biggest thing. I think it was good as we did a couple of things differently this time. We all live in different parts of the country, in the United States, so we were emailing and flying over to see each other. You had that anxious feeling flying over to see your friends and hanging out and putting songs together and then we got together with Neal Avron who is an absolute powerhouse and is the world’s top producer just now and it was just an honour for him to be part of our band. We ripped all of our recordings with him. He’s just a great person, he knows all of us, he gets all of our best performances; it’s really really cool!

We’ve now got a fan question, what NHL teams, if any, do you support?

Sean: NHL is a Ryan Mendez question! He’s a huge Detroit Red Wings fan. I’m more of a giant fan of American football and over here we’ve been watching the Champions Cup a little bit, but I don’t really pledge allegiance. I don’t wanna p*ss anyone off or be a pretender if you will, but I’m a big Denver Bronco’s fan! You can print that for sure!

And another fan question, what has been your weirdest tour experience to-date?

Sean: We got kicked off a train in Russia! I mean all the gangster and like mobster stuff in Russia is real and so we were held at the airport when we landed for like 3 and a half hours. When we were leaving on the train, the customs guys came up to us and was like ‘Hey, you guys can’t be on here because you have commercial equipment’ and we were like ‘well these are our personal instruments?’, but you know they said at the airport customs we were allowed to come in through airplane and leave through train and he said ‘absolutely not this is only for personal’ and I mean all we had is our suitcases and our instruments! They kicked off us in the middle of Russia and we had to take a taxi and it’s one of those things it’s like you read the tourist pamphlets ‘Do not get in a strange taxi’s in Russia because they will strip you naked, beat you and steal all your stuff’ [Laughter] We were like ‘we will never make it to Finland, they are gonna steal our gear!’ I mean luckily there was enough of us where we felt strength in numbers and we ultimately got there, but it was like 5 hours of just ridiculousness and that made us stronger too! [Laughter]

You’ve mentioned that you were planning a UK tour of your own, when can fans expect this to happen?

Sean: We’re just moving the puzzle pieces around right now. We’d love to just tour with All Time Low for the next couple of years but they’re busy and all booked up! We really need to get down to Australia and New Zealand as well. We’ve neglected them and we’d like to get to South East Asia, so right now we are finding out which dates we can move around and also the festivals at the summertime, they play a major factor. If we play the festivals, we probably won’t be back until the end of the year – but we’ve already sort of announced that we will be back this year, so I’d hate to disappoint. Some way, somehow we are coming back this year!!

One response to “Yellowcard”

  1. […] read our full interview with violinist and backing singer Sean Mackin, click here […]

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