I would like to thank everyone who submitted questions and I tried to get as many questions as I could. I am sorry that it took so long to post this interview but I started school the day after the show and I've had almost no time to myself and because of this I haven't had time to upload any of the photos that I have from the show. Look for the photos soon, there will be something posted on the news section and the enter page. Thank you! Andrew of Thursday Online. INTERVIEW KEY BOLD = me / GR = Geoff Rickly / TK = Tom Keeley What does it feels like to be approaching the decade mark as a band? Did you ever expect the band to get this far? GR: No way, I think we thought a couple years. TK: Actually, I never saw an end in sight and I never really thought about it. All I ever heard was bands last for five years and your done and when we made it to five years I thought to myself, were doing better now than ever in every way. Were you guys in bands before or was Thursday your first band? TK: No, this was my first band. GR: It was my first band too. I use to put on shows before. Bands would always be playing at my house and staying there and they would become friends and you’d look forward to them coming around again and you’d get a call from one of them, “hey man, we broke up but I just wanted to say thanks for everything you did” and you’d be bummed out because you’d think, “oh man, they were such a good band. I thought their next record was gonna be great.” You’d see them live and you’d see something awesome about them even though their record wasn’t great. You’d know they had something in them and they’d brake up before they even put out the album out. TK: It was so weird how we started. It was for the sake of having fun and New Brunswick is such a cool little place for bands and our friends had bands. The only expectations were to have fun and try to write songs. GR: Yeah, let’s play some shows with our friends’ bands, that’d be cool. In our area the venues are weak and there is such a small amount of venues to play shows and we are sometimes forced to book halls on our own. GR: All we played were basements but it wasn’t because we couldn’t play clubs or there were no clubs. All the fun stuff is in the basements so why not do shows there. TK: Clubs were weird at that point. You could play a club but you could fit 200 people into a basement. GR: The way we thought about it, it just wasn’t punk rock to be in a club. In a basement the police could come or this could happy and it was just so much fun. It was where all our friends were so we didn’t have to accomplish anything because by playing a show with our friends we were having as exactly as much fun as we were hoping. It was weird to come from there where we had to aspirations or goals or dreams. We were just like, “This is great, let’s just keep doing this.” People were like, “You should go on tour, it’s awesome!” -- “Yeah, we have a lot of friends to call, it’d be awesome.” When we first started touring shows were terrible but we didn’t care because we got to see our friends so it didn’t matter. When the shows started getting better we were like, “holy shit! There’s people coming to these shows.” One day our friends’ band asked to go on tour and the first day of that tour we realized we had played to more people that night than we did the three months before that, put together. We were like, “this is weird…there are so many people here, 600 people here.” From there it kept getting weirder and weirder and it go to a point where you couldn’t tell if it was weird anymore. If that last thing could happen why couldn’t this happen? TK: It really started getting out of control. GR: Sure, there’s 1,000 here and now 5,000 and then we’re in front of 80,000. What’s the difference really? You look out and there are all these people. During WATT we couldn’t even tell what fun was anymore. It started to all become a blur basically. We were always so busy and we never had time to check and see what you were doing. While playing bigger shows and being on bigger stages we continued to play like we were in the basement and people started telling us that we needed to play differently. It’s been nice since ACBTLD has come out because we’ve scaled back shows and played some smaller venues. It’s funny because playing on smaller stages we realized how use to playing on bigger stages we have gotten to. It’s so good to play the smaller shows and have no barricade and just be able to grab people and be like, “Your going to come here and sing with me right now.” I think we’re going to try and figure out how to do smaller shows this year in between writing a new record. Are there plans for another album in the works anytime soon or a lot touring? TK: Both. GR: We want to do a little of both. After this tour we are going to Europe with MCR and then we are going to take a little breathier and start writing. Over the next year we want to put out some other stuff like an EP or B-sides or a DVD. We want to put out something low profile and do something tour around that. That will give us the chance to play some of the new songs live before we record them. TK: Our schedule started to get really regimented. Full Collapse was really casual and the scheduling was random and up in the air. We took however long it took to write the record. Recording the record took a couple weeks but touring for the record we toured for as long as we could. We toured for almost two years after that and after WATT the scheduling really started to get regimented. We had a month and a half to write the record and then we were given six months to record and then we are going to tour for three weeks, a week off here. After a while it started getting nuts because the scheduling was for on-time. There was no schedule for off-time. Sometimes we were given a week off but we had a show right in the middle. We never truly got to decompress and that cycle last for about two years. We went from tour years of touring for Full Collapse right into writing for WATT and then straight into touring so essentially it was almost four years of non-stop work.. With ACBTLD we decided to take as much time as we needed for everything. Whatever we needed to do to make the record happen, we were going to do. GR: We recorded ACBTLD the way we recorded Full Collapse. We went in with no expectations and we made the record the way we wanted to make it. One thing that made Full Collapse a more fulfilling record than WATT was that we did what we wanted. With WATT we were really self-conscious and we didn’t want to make the same record. We wanted to make this super loud and fast record. With WATT, I’m proud of it because it came out so crazy. It came out the way it had to come out because we were so intense about the way we wanted to record it. At the same time, we were like, “We did it…” but it wasn’t as fun as doing Full Collapse. You guys must have had the idea of being on Island Records in the back of your head while writing…. GF: It was weird when we were meeting the guys who signed Nirvana and they are telling you that your going to be the next Nirvana. You think to yourself, “You can’t just say that to someone…” – it was just weird. You guys were so big at a point with videos on MTV and MTV2 and all of a sudden you guys kind of just dropped out of the spotlight. GR: We talk off so much time after WATT. We just couldn’t handle that style anymore and we needed to take some time off and settle down again. We needed time to slow down and get underground again and then we felt comfortable making the record we wanted to because we knew that all of those people weren’t watching us. I’ve seen you guys two times since you put out the last record and it seems as though you are happier since putting that album out. You guys were having ‘fans’ come out to shows rather than your hardcore fans. GR: Totally. Now the people that come out to shows I would sit down and eat dinner with them. When we were on MTV we had people coming up to us and saying the most insane things I had ever heard because they random saw us on MTV and had real no appreciaton for what we were doing. We still tried to talk to everyone but it go to a point where we knew that this wasn’t what we wanted. We knew it was bigger but bigger isn’t always better and it wasn’t really what we were shooting for. It sounds like I don’t appreciate what I had but its just that we wanted fans who understood the music and what we wanted to do. It worked out well because you guys didn’t break up or fall apart after being on mtv like most bands do. GR: Everybody thought that’s what we were gonna do. They were like, “Well if they aren’t gonna go up anymore then they are just gonna break up, because that’s what bands do…” – We never felt cool for a minute so we aren’t going to feel less cool. That exposure was great but at the same time it was the biggest nightmare as well. Everyone wants to know, what's going on with his United Nations band? GR: We were supposed to record before we started this tour but my grandmother died on the last few days of the Rise Against tour so I needed to go home and deal with family stuff. We have a solid lineup and we have seven or eight songs written. We’re gonna write a few more and put the record out later this year. It’s going to take a little more planning because everyone is so busy. We lost a big block of time that we could have worked on it and the Glassjaw tour was so last minute and that also took away from time that we could have spent on it. Do you have to get inspired to write? If you don't feel inspired but you want to write, do you use any techniques to assist with that? (and get yourself writing again) GR: If you aren’t feeling it, theres no way to force it but there are things I use when I am inspired. When you aren’t inspired and you want to write one thing you can do is work on your tools. Go through and organize the millions of song titles that you have that you feel are interesting. Sometimes a cool phrase will hit you on some level and you won’t even know why. You have to ask yourself why the title or phrase hits you and you try to think about that and take notes on what the song could be about. You really have to look for deeper connections as well and how it effects you as a person. Sometimes I go see movies by myself because sometimes the smallest things set you off. A lighting technique in a movie can make you think and go, “Wow, that was really pretty how it just changed like that…” and relate it to how your whole world can change when someone tells you something. You can think about and relate the two things together and go home and write that experience down. When you mentioned use song titled as inspiration it clicked in my head that you can sometimes see that with your songs….Jet Black New Year is one of them. GR: With that song, the title came first. They were writing and it was so frustrated sounding and chaotic. I always loved the phrase, Jet Black and the ways it can be used and the way people use it. There was another title, The Periodic Table of Tenements and also Blue Prints for a Collapsing World. I wanted the titled to be dense and I just knew that there was a connection between the song, the title and me. Soon all of the pieces started going together quickly and I was taking things from my life that was so frustrating and chaotic. With I Am The Killer the rest of the guy really didn’t agree with the title at first. They questioned me about if I really wanted to tell that story. I knew the topic really scared the shit out of me but I felt like I should. I felt so nervous to begin with and after they told me that I shouldn’t and that maybe I shouldn’t let people know that much about my life I knew that sometimes that is where the greatest art comes from. I am the killer is my favorite song and I don’t feel it would be the same song with a different title or different lyrical content. GR: I agree. When we finish something and we know its right, we never think about it in a different way. TK: As the song was getting close to being done it really started to click with all of us. We realized that what he was writing about, was what he needed to write about. He can’t hold back unless he decides to. Now it’s less of a process and he knows that he doesn’t have to be safe and shy away from something because of the topic. He needs to just go for it. GR: With Sugar In The Sacrament I was like, “I don’t want to go there…” and the guy as well as our producer were like, “You aren’t going far enough…” – I felt like I was going to far because I was talking about growing up as a catholic and I had this guilt about things I was saying and I questioned if I should be saying the things I was and your not even supposed to use god’s name. Our producer Dave told me, “You’re an adult and you need to say, what you need to say and say what you believe and what you think of the world.” He told me I didn’t always have to be right or strong and he let me know that it was ok to be confused. With that support it got really intense. It was like being on a diving board and looking down. The person behind you is like, “You gotta go. We can’t go back down…” When/if your time in Thursday draws to a close, what do you hope/what do you see yourself doing in the future? GR: We are still trying to figure that out actually… TK: It’s at a point where it doesn’t really matter. You think about it and sometimes it terrifies you. You can make plans but a lot of the time they aren’t going to work out as you plan. I want to stay in music and I hope that for everyone else in the band, if that’s what they want to do. I’m sure you had parents and other adults tell you that you weren’t going to have a future because you were in a band and you skipped college or left school early…. TK: You figure it out and figure it out as you go along. If we tried to figure out this band to this day it probably would have destroyed it. You can make plans but you can’t anticipate too much. GR: It’s funny because when I was a kid I thought about bands that were big and how they sell a shit ton of records. I thought they were loaded and they wouldn’t have to worry about what they were doing with their life because they had money. When we started getting big I thought that we weren’t even going to have to worry about what we were gonna do later because we’re gonna be so rich. I wasn’t banking on that but I thought that was the way he was going to be. In 2003 when we sold a ton of records and sold out shows I didn’t make more than my parents had ever made at work. I thought bands at this level were loaded. When I was a kid I thought Snapcase was loaded because I saw them at the Wetlands and singing all the words. I figured they were so rich. After seeing you guys with a bus on tour, people must think you guys are loaded… GR: You don’t realize that by having the bus theres a chance that after a 5 week tour you might go home with $2,000 each. After being away from family and not being home for 5 weeks you only end up making as much as a minimum wage job. It doesn’t really make sense to any of you but it takes so much to do this and its such an expensive lifestyle. It’s funny because when people call us sellouts we laugh because if we wanted to sell out we’d go back to doing what we were before this because my college job paid more than this. If you could sit next to anyone on an airplane, who would it be? TK: It’s already happened to me. I’ve sat next to Huey Lewis. I never would have in a million years thought I’d get to sit next to him. I’d also want to sit next to one of the Baldwin brothers because they are so out of left field. GR: A plane is such a strange place. Like would I get the courage to talk to them if it was the one person I’d want to talk to? TK: Hughie Lewis is a mouth breather. I’d want to sit next to Johnathan Wessin, the author. I think it’d be really interesting to talk to him. I really look up to him and he’s such an amazing artists. He has essay collections which is basically him talking about things. I’d be like, “Yeah, the in flight movie…what do you think about that? Go! Give me 500 words!” If you were down to your last 5 dollars, what would you spend it on? TK: I’ve been there many times… GR: It’s usually Dunkin Donuts… TK: Yeah, some sort of coffee drink. Options in the past have been freetos and pepperoni. TK: Usually when your in a bine and have little money you usually go for the doller menu or something that is so gross that it makes you not want to eat again for a while. GR: The double apple pie for a dollar is pretty gross. You ask yourself why you just ate two apple pies or why they sell two apple pies for a dollar. With five dollars I could by 10 apple pies. TK: Ramen noodles. GR: Yeah, we use to do that. Eating Ramen Noodles in the van sucks because your moving and trying not to spill the hot water all of yourself. TK: When we wrote ACBTLD I fed myself for a long time on 99 cent spaghetti. A bag of spaghetti is almost four days worth of dinners. GR: Remember when I told you about pan fried ramen noodles? TK: Oh yeah, Geoff taught me how to cook ramen noodles the gourmet way. GR: You learn a lot of ways to cook them when your broke. TK: Broke ass punk soul food. GR: Totally…. Does Andrew Everding really exist or is he just a robot hologram? TK: He celebrates existing and being a robot at the same time. GR: Andrew’s pretty much the best hologram-robot ever. He’s so helpful. TK: He’s really the soul of this band. At first he was just another set of ears and a different perspective. Was there a reason you guys didn’t make him an official member sooner? GR: The reason was because we were super solid and we didn’t want to bring him in right away and fuck up a good situation. TK: We didn’t think that about him… GR: Maybe we can bring him a long and see how he is and tour with him for a while. While writing WATT we really wanted to see if he could even write with us and at that time we still weren’t sure. TK: We didn’t give him that much room writing wise… GR: He was like, “I love doing this and I want to do this but I don’t want to be the guy who screws it up.” TK: It’s funny because I don’t really think there was ever a chance he would have screwed us up. It was really just in our head and the fear of change. GR: He still keeps a little bit of an outside mentality and when we are being stupid or fighting he’ll put things into perspective for us. He’s really been the glue that keeps us together. Creatively he helps out to, especially when we go down a road we’ve already been down before. On the new record when we gave him freedom he gave Tucker and Tim a lot of ideas and helped the process. TK: With Andrew and writing, the things that happen would have happened before he came in but the idea of the keyboard gives it all a different feel. It’s a new way of writing music and the excitement is there of writing with someone new. Him writing full on is something that we wanted to go with because the fear wasn’t there anymore. He had a new voice and it was something that we really wanted to use. GR: Are you a computer or a human? AE: I’m a computer! GR: Kid! I’m a computer, stop all the downloading!