We’ve teamed up with Taking Back Sunday on an exclusive white/blue splatter vinyl variant of their eighth album ‘152,’ as well as exclusive color vinyl reissues of ‘Where You Want To Be’ and Louder Now’–all available now in the BV shop.
Over 20 years since releasing their instant-classic debut LP Tell All Your Friends, Taking Back Sunday are still finding ways to reinvent themselves. Their eighth album 152 is not a nostalgia-inducing retread for the Emo Nite / When We Were Young crowd, and it’s not a continuation of the heartland rock and punk vibes of its predecessor Tidal Wave either. They made it with pop producer Tushar Apte, who they met through and first worked with on last year’s Steve Aoki collaboration “Just Us Two,” and Tushar helped the band create a record that embraces the current pop landscape but also sounds distinctly like Taking Back Sunday, which was a natural thing to do, considering how much current pop is influenced by TBS and their peers.
“[Tushar’s] whole approach was very different [than what we were used to] and I think that some of the biggest changes in the sound of the album had to do with what he brought to it,” guitarist/secondary vocalist John Nolan tells us. “We had written a lot of the songs before we both worked with him, and even kind of did very full demos of them, but then he would kind of sit with them and kind of strip things away and move things around. A lot of times we’d just be working with the stuff that we had already recorded but just kind of transforming it into something that we never would have thought to do. It was a whole different kind of approach and mindset.”
It was an approach that TBS got their first taste of while working on that Steve Aoki song. They were in the studio together, and drummer Mark O’Connell would be laying down some beats, Shaun Cooper would be trying out some basslines, and the band “started gradually realizing that Tushar was kind of taking sections of what they were doing and building a song out of it while everyone was still just working on these ideas, like without even really saying anything,” John says. “I actually asked him, like, ‘Are you building this into a song right now as we’re just kind of throwing ideas out?’ and he was just like, ‘Yeah.’ That was a completely foreign thing to us.”
The band found that the Steve Aoki collab was exactly the spark they needed to make 152 something they would be proud of, and the result is just a solid pop rock record, with rippers (“S’old”) and power ballads (“Amphetamine Smiles,” “I Am The Only One Who Knows You”) and plenty more in between. If any of it is nostalgia-inducing, it’s just that Adam Lazzara and John Nolan’s voices sound as fresh and unique as they did 20 years ago, but 152 never finds Taking Back Sunday looking backwards. It’s a record they could have only made today.
For a deeper dive into this album, John has spoke to us about 10 of the album’s biggest influences. Some of his picks may surprise you at first, but as he explains each one, the story of how they all impacted the direction of 152 really comes together. Read on for the list.
152 is out this week (10/27) via Fantasy Records, and you can hear it early during the online album listening party on Wednesday (10/25) at 7 PM ET. Pick up our exclusive white/blue splatter vinyl variant and our new exclusive color vinyl reissues of Where You Want To Be and Louder Now in the BV shop.
Pearl Jam
For someone in our position, there really aren’t too many other bands like that to kind of look up to as a model of something that we would like to do, you know? There are very few rock bands that have stayed around that long and also been consistently productive and creative–they’re not one of those bands that went away for ten years and then came back and went away, they’ve just kept going. I think, in a lot of ways, all of us had started to kind of look at different things about their band and about what they’ve done and what they’re doing as sort of… it’s a little bit of a guiding light, for lack of a better word.
You look around and there aren’t a whole lot of bands who have been doing it consistently for as long as we have, so when you see someone that’s been doing it for 15 years longer, that’s amazing and inspirational.
Queens of the Stone Age
The music that we’re drawn to can kind of be all over the place, and they’re one of those bands that if we were going to put something on and listen to it, you know everybody is going to be equally into it. I think we all have kind of the same appreciation for their music. And there’s definitely been a thing at least for me with their approach to guitar playing–the way that they use the super fuzzed-out guitars, the way they do guitar solos, the different ways that they can kind of mess with the guitar sounds with pedals and things like that. That’s definitely influenced me as a guitar player.
Steve Aoki
[Meeting him] really changed the course of our album. At the time that we were working on the song with Steve Aoki, we had started writing and demoing, and we knew we needed to find something to make this next album special and something that would be surprising, but we didn’t really know what to bring to it to get there. So then being introduced to Tushar at that session, and that whole approach to producing, that changed the course of the way the record ended up sounding.
We also, we had 12 to 14 hours in that studio on one day to get a song made from scratch, and we all just kind of jumped into it and we all kind of went right for what we knew we could do best. We all kind of snapped into action, basically, and it was a little bit of a reminder to all of us of what not just each of us is capable of, but what we’re capable of together when we all are playing to our strengths and bringing all that together. That was a very big boost of confidence, and even the songs we wrote after that, there was definitely a change. And a lot of it was just more like the mindset and the confidence that we brought out of that session.
Bob Seger
When Taking Back Sunday was starting, I’m not positive but I think everyone in the band would have sort of written his music off as, you know, lame old guy music or something. But I think it’s interesting, the older you get, like… there are these nuances in songs and in different artists and and there are so many things all of us have learned to appreciate and enjoy in music that we didn’t when we were younger. It’s like this reminder that your musical tastes and your musical interests are constantly evolving, and also that you have to be open to where they’re going to go and not close yourself off and just say, “Well I didn’t like this music when I was 25 and I’m not going to like it now, and that’s just the way it is.” I think that’s important as a music listener, but even more important as a songwriter. I think you have to be open to finding new things and new approaches to music.
I think I was maybe in a supermarket or something, and “Against the Wind” maybe came on–one of those songs–and it was that kind of moment where I just happened to kind of be paying attention to it as I’m walking around the supermarket, and then I’m like, “Holy shit, this song is amazing. How did I not realize this song was so good until right now?”
Steely Dan
It’s a very similar thing [to Bob Seger]. When I was in my thirties, I took some time and listened to them and kind of had some appreciation, but for some reason in the past two or three years, something really clicked with me and them. That’s one that most people I talk to, and most people in the band even, are still a little bit skeptical, and I understand that. But one of the things that made me want to put them on there was that their approach to lyric writing was the thing that really changed my mind about them. They’re one of these bands that when you hear the songs on the surface, they sound so slick and so nice and what he’s singing usually sounds nice, so half the time you don’t pay that much attention to the words or think much about them. And I’ve [since] realized there’s so much going on lyrically, and a lot of times they’re dealing with something either a lot darker or weirder or more ridiculous than you would imagine from hearing the song. It’s usually like something that’s a pretty weird juxtaposition to the setting of the music and the melodies and everything. That’s something that’s always been really intriguing to me as a songwriter; those songs that sound really happy and it’s not till maybe you’ve heard it a dozen times that you start to go like, “Oh, wait what was that that they said there? That sounded really weird or really dark.” That is very inspiring to me, whenever someone does that, that well.
They also have this really good ability to tell stories or do these kind of character studies of people in their songs, and that’s something that I don’t feel very good at as a songwriter. Generally, I am just writing from something that’s pretty close to my own point of view. But it’s something that’s really amazing to me when someone’s good at it, and it’s something I want to get better at.
BV: Is there a particular song on the new Taking Back Sunday album that kind of has that type of lyrical juxtaposition?
“I Am the Only One Who Knows You.” It doesn’t necessarily sound happy, but it has the quality of a romantic song or it seems like it could be some kind of a love song, but a lot of the lyrics from it were taken from a pretty different perspective than that. I wouldn’t want to get too into what different things were meant to be about, but it’s definitely something that sounds like much more of a love song on the surface than I think it is. And I also think someone would be justified in calling it a love song if they wanted to, but I think it works on a few different levels.
Post Malone
I think Adam was the first person in the band to really embrace Post Malone’s music. I was pretty skeptical for a while, and I think a lot of it was partially being skeptical of pop music and then also just seeing him and writing him off a little bit just based on his appearance. And then little by little… my kids were really into the Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse soundtrack, and his “Sunflower” song on that I think was the first time I was like, “Oh, there’s something good going on here.” It took me a while to keep kind of opening up to [his] other stuff, but the new album that he just put out, [Austin], I think is great, and the more I hear of him, the more I like. It’s similar almost to the Bob Seger and Steely Dan thing–putting yourself in a box of what is cool or worthwhile to listen to and what’s not, and not letting the person’s music speak for itself but just sort of making a judgment call that you’re just not gonna go for it no matter what.
At least for Adam and I, there’s definitely been an embrace of pop music that’s been happening in the past like five years, where for a long time neither of us would have hardly even known anything that was pop music anymore. I think for some reason, whatever the direction things have gone in, it’s been more naturally interesting to me. I don’t know if there’s been some sort of shift in what’s considered pop music that is just naturally more appealing to me, or if I’ve just been more open to it, but it’s definitely been something that’s changed some of our perspective.
“Meet Me At Our Spot” by The Anxiety (Willow Smith and Tyler Cole)
There’s stuff I think that I’m hearing [in pop music] where it’s like, oh this sounds like something that I would listen to. Like the Willow Smith song, that just happened to come on on the radio, and I had no idea what it was, but part of me thought it might like an indie rock song from the ’90s or something that I had never heard before. It was either something completely new or something that was like 25 years old or something. There’s definitely a sound and a sensibility to that song that I think is very in line with a lot of something that I listen to. And then I went home to find out what it was, and I was pretty surprised that it was something that mainstream, and that popular. And I think part of the reason I’m putting them in there is that I think that definitely changed some of our approach to writing the new album. It’s not like we were trying to sound like any of that stuff, but… we’ve always had a lot of pop sensibility, but I think there was a long time where our sense of pop sensibility was not in line with what was pop music anymore. So seeing that it had kind of come back around again, there was a little bit of like: oh, well, maybe we do have some place in the world of mainstream music, and not by changing our sound to meet that expectation. It’s kind of the other way around, where the sounds and the trends have come back around towards us a little bit.
Haim
That was another one where everybody in the band could agree on it, if somebody was gonna put it on. And also I think seeing a band be successful with a pop sensibility that we got and understood… that was one of the first bands I could think of like that. Shaun our bass player is the most into them, and I think he found some musical inspiration in some of their musical arrangements and some of their bass playing. And I’ve only seen videos of them playing live, I’ve never actually seen them in person–I believe Shaun has–but from what I’ve seen, [their live show] seems more rough around the edges or more like rock music than sometimes it does on the recordings, I think the recordings are a little more polished and clean. I always like that as well, when you kind of get a different experience from the live music than you do on the record.
Ringo Starr
I could have said The Beatles with this one, but it really is something particular to Ringo Starr’s playing. You can find examples of Mark doing drum fills that are just 100% from the Ringo Starr playbook, and I think that it’s something that that he’s wanted to do for a long time and there hadn’t really been much of a natural connection or natural way to work his style of drumming into our songs, but on this album I think there were a lot more natural points for it. “Amphetamine Smiles” is one I know that he definitely does some Ringo Starr type drum fills that I just really love. It’s also funny too because I think Ringo Starr kind of gets this bad reputation to some extent, because everybody else in The Beatles are these insanely talented songwriters and players and people kind of write him off. But it’s really actually kind of surprising, the more I pay attention to his playing and especially talking to Mark about it, what an amazing drummer he actually is. Some of those drum fills he does where they’re not impressive in the sense that he’s doing something crazy, but he’s doing something that is kind of a hook, something that you would just naturally kind of want to play along with or nod your head to, and then also a lot of it is not as simple to play as it sounds.
“Sailing” by Christopher Cross
That’s a song that Adam has been talking about for years and has a childhood connection to. He has these memories of his parents listening to it; it’s always had this special place in his heart. And the first times that he was ever talking about it and playing the song, I would always just kind of–I got where he was coming from and I appreciated it but also when I hear the song, I would just kind of be like, “That’s pretty funny,” like unintentionally funny. But it’s also one of those things like the Bob Seger thing of getting older and finding new appreciation for things.
On that song “I Am the Only One Who Knows You,” it’s not super close, but I would say that the guitar part that starts it off is in a pretty similar vein to that song, which we didn’t even totally realize until we were recording it. It was funny that after all these years of Adam and his connection to the song that it finally worked into our music somehow, and then also that we would ever have a song that you could even remotely connect to “Sailing” by Christopher Cross I thought was pretty funny and kind of amazing. There would have been another time where if we had recognized that connection, we might have just immediately been like, “Alright, we gotta change that up, that’s not gonna fly,” you know? And we just decided to embrace it, and once we embraced it, everybody was like, “This is great.”
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Taking Back Sunday play intimate album release shows at LA’s Lodge Room on 11/6, Nashville’s Eastside Bowl on 11/9, and NYC’s Bowery Ballroom on 11/13. They’re also doing in-store performances/signings in both Nashville (Grimey’s on 11/8) and Long Island (Looney Tunes on 11/12), and doing their annual holiday shows at Long Island’s Mulcahy’s Pub on 12/13 & 12/14 and NJ’s Starland Ballroom on 12/15 & 12/16.
Pick up our exclusive white/blue splatter vinyl variant of 152, along with the new color vinyl reissues of Where You Want To Be and Louder Now, in the BV shop. Here are mock-ups of all three:
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For more on Taking Back Sunday, listen to our podcast episode with John Nolan on Tell All Your Friends turning 20, the 2021 Straylight Run reunion shows, and more:
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