The Wonder Years

We at Review Rinse Repeat have always been huge supporters of The Wonder Years and we know we are not alone. Earlier this year, The Upsides took the world by storm and has captivated audiences all across the world. On their tour with Streetlight Manifesto, we had the honor of sitting down with frontman Soupy Campbell to talk about The Upsides, the band’s signing to Hopeless, the return of Mike Kennedy and some exciting news.

Jerry@RRR: Welcome to the Anaheim, home of the happiest place on earth! How're you feeling today?

Soupy Campbell: I’m feeling fantastic! Happy, which is indicative of the experience we’re supposed to be having here.

Jerry@RRR: You’re on tour with Streetlight Manifesto. How has that been so far?

Soupy Campbell: It’s been great. I really like Streetlight. It’s cool to watch them every night. Their encore in particular is like my favorite Streetlight songs and my favorite covers they do. It’s like they pack it right in there together so it’s really really nice for me to be able to catch that. Everyone’s been super nice to us. We knew going in that crowds were going to be a little hard for us because it’s a lot of ska and us. Dan Potthast opens up and he plays acoustic, but he’s also the singer of MU330 so he’s like a ska legend. The Supervillians are kind of reggae-ska laid back kind of thing and Streetlight is Streetlight, so some nights it’s a lot of winning over audiences—or at least attempting to—and some nights it’s a lot of our kids, but any night I have fun so that kind of works out.

Jerry@RRR: Earlier this year we caught up with you via email just past the release of your critically acclaimed full-length, The Upsides. How have the past few months been?

Soupy Campbell: I can say the past few months have been the most fun of my life. We’ve done Crime In Stereo, which was awesome. You could say it was a treat to watch them every night; they’re one of the most talented bands playing music and their new record I Was Trying To Describe You To Someone kills. We got to play their record release shows and it was an honor. We did some dates with We Are The Union and Such Gold which was great because they are good friends. Devan from Such Gold used to play drums for us; he filled in for about 6 months. We did The “Kimbo Wants A Pepsi Tour” with Set Your Goals, Comeback Kid and This Time Next Year. That was our first support tour like serious, tour managed, we have to be there at a certain time, we have to sound check at a certain time so it was a new world for us. I can’t have asked for an easier transition. The guys of Set Your Goals and Comeback Kid made it so nice and easy for us. And then, we did Slam Dunk in the UK. I can say unabashedly the days of Slam Dunk were the two best days I’ve been alive for. It was like almost every friend in a band played and it was like this gigantic hang out session—tons of funny stories. We did Four Year Strong and Fireworks in Europe right afterwards—also a ton of fun. Kyle from Fireworks celebrated his birthday in front of the Louvre in Paris. We sang “Happy Birthday” to him at midnight and then we took pictures with the Eiffel Tower with the whole tour. We came back and we’re here on tour with Streetlight and it’s been great. So, everything has been awesome. I’m really having a good time.

Jerry@RRR: What inspired and fueled The Upsides?

Soupy Campbell: What fueled it was Dunkin’ Donuts coffee, freeze pops, for the other guys a lot of Paps, a lot of ACME cookies—they sell these bins of cookies—and I guess the air conditioning that was in my room, which is was a nice little chamber while the rest of the house was really hot. We wrote that in the house I lived in with my ex-girlfriend and our room was the only air-conditioned one in the house. So, at night, it was so hot that all the guys in the band would sleep on our floor. What inspired it was—musically— Motion City Soundtrack, New Found Glory,  The Starting Line, The Hold Steady, Thursday and Latterman. Conceptually, it was inspired a series of cathartic events that lead me to realize that if what I were to consider problems were the biggest issues of my life, I was living a great life.

Jerry@RRR: When we last spoke with you, you had mentioned that it was an unreal feeling that so many people (both critics and fans alike) praised the album as pop-punk greatness. Since some time has passed since the release of the album, what are your thoughts now?

Soupy Campbell: It’s still surreal every day. Since then, we’ve obviously signed with Hopeless Records, who put out some of my favorite releases of all time. We worked with Dave Shapiro who books MXPX. We worked with some awesome management now. It feels like we’re a part of something. And still, everyday it’s unreal. Even when we’re having a bad day, I’m willing to sit there and think that this is my job now. I do this every single day and I’m so lucky.

Jerry@RRR: How did the signing to Hopeless come about?

Soupy Campbell: We had talked to them before. They’d heard our songs and liked what we did. They didn’t think we were ready maybe before or they didn’t know if we were going to make the next record—the record that needed to be made. I don’t know. The first time we talked to them there was hesitation and obviously we didn’t sign. And when they started hearing the songs from The Upsides and started seeing the marketing and the hype for the record, they e-mailed us back and said they wanted to check us out live, see what clicked and everything clicked. I love Hopeless. That’s not say I don’t love No Sleep [Records]. We’re staying at the No Sleep offices tonight. Chris [Hansen] is hanging out with us all night; he’s at our merch table. No Sleep was Chris. Before last month, there was no office. It was him and his laptop. He worked tirelessly. No Sleep isn’t just a name. It’s a mantra and a reality. Hopeless has a staff, which is unbelievable. For different things, I get different e-mails. When it’s related to masters of the new songs, it’s coming from Brian. When it’s related to marketing, it’s coming from Ian. When it’s related to sales, it’s coming from Eric. It’s nice to know that there’s a whole team of people that are working for us. So I’m extremely excited about it.

Jerry@RRR: How was the transition from No Sleep To Hopeless?

Soupy Campbell: It bordered on seamless. Everyone at Hopeless has a ton of respect for No Sleep and what they’re doing. I think every label kind of does. Everyone that I talk to in the “industry” will say that No Sleep is doing everything right. In couple of years, they’re going to be on top. I believe that with all my heart. I think because of that mutual respect that No Sleep has for Hopeless and that Hopeless has for No Sleep, the transition went really easy. Chris was hanging out the day we signed. We all went to I-Hop together. It was just really easy to take care of. We still talk to Chris as much as we still talk to everyone at Hopeless. If everything goes to plan, the next time we do a record Chris will still be doing the vinyl release of it. We’ll still have to No Sleep which is great.

Jerry@RRR: When you wrote The Upsides, did you expect all of this success?

Soupy Campbell: I don’t think we expected anything. We said to ourselves a couple of times is, “The only thing we can do right now is make what we feel is the best record we can possibly make” and hopefully people have the same taste as we do. This reminds me of a conversation I had with the guitar player of Energy. I was like, “Aw man The Get Up Kids. The Hold Steady.” He said, “One of my favorite bands is Energy. That probably sounds conceited but I write the songs so why wouldn’t I write the exact songs I want to hear?” I guess that’s kind of the same idea. We wrote the songs that we thought were the best we could write and were exactly what we wanted to hear and we hope you liked it. [To other members of The Wonder Years] You guys want to come and do the interview? Come say hi. We’re doing an interview with Review Rinse Repeat.

[Quick interruption as Casey, Matt and Kennedy talk about the fun things to do at Anaheim’s Downtown Disney]

Soupy Campbell: I don’t remember what I was saying. It was probably something like, “We put a lot into The Upsides and we didn’t expect any success, but we’re glad that it happened.”

Jerry@RRR: Do you feel that with bands like Set Your Goals, Four Year Strong, Fireworks, and yourselves, that pop-punk is making a resurgence?

Soupy Campbell: Man. I don’t know. To me, it never died. New Found Glory has always been carrying the torch so “resurgence” is a weird word to use. I would say that its popularity is growing. The genre is making a serious push right now and I’m proud of all my friends being a part of that.

Jerry@RRR: Wouldn’t you say that the genre’s standards have been convoluted over the years with all the neon, focus on the pop, etc?

Soupy Campbell: Convoluted is a weird word as well. Convoluted really has this negative connotation. I try to say that everyone has the artistic license to make whatever music they want to make. Just because I don’t like it, doesn’t mean that it’s bad or ruining anything. The only time that I see a band where it really upsets me that they’re doing what they’re doing is when they’re doing things that I feel are homophobic, sexist, objectifying women in some way or anything like that. Things like that bum me out. You can make whatever music you want to make. People will talk shit on those bands, but I’ve come to find that a lot of them are very nice people. Breathe Carolina? Great guys. The Millionaires? Amazing girls, really nice people to hang out with. Humble and totally not what people make them out to be based solely on their music. And so, maybe it’s not the music I would listen to or not the music I would make or the feel or aesthetic I would push—it certainly took over and made big push and is still killing—but it’s what it is. Everyone can do whatever they want and we’re just going to keep doing us.

Jerry@RRR: With Hopeless, you are going to re-release The Upsides. What is going to be different about it?

Soupy Campbell: There’s going to be new artwork involved that takes influence from the original artwork but is entirely different and beautifully done. I couldn’t be more excited about how it turned out. I think it’s unbelievable. There’s going to be four new tracks. Two of them are songs that are on The Upsides but have been changed drastically. I think this has been a concern with some people that we are going to play the new versions live, but these are just to explore the ideas of the song and kind of go deeper into it and let you guys hear something new. And then, there are two new songs that are going to be on the release. There’s also going to be a lot of really cool what I would consider to be innovative pre-orders that I think I’ve never seen done before that we are going to do.

Jerry@RRR: Mike Kennedy has recently rejoined the band. How did that come about?

Soupy Campbell: We knew Kennedy was quitting on October 14 or something like that. He flew out to LA with us to a photoshoot for The Upsides. He was in school while we were on tour—Devan Bentley from Such Gold was filling in—flew out and told us he had to leave the band. He got accepted into a really good grad school. He got accepted into a really good internship. He was moving to DC and he was going to do that. We announced that he was leaving at the end of December maybe. By January 4^th, he had been in DC for about a week and he had called me and said, “I can’t do this. I have to come back to the band. Can I please come back to the band? I miss you guys.” We’re all weirdos. We’re weird people to talk to. We’re weird people to hang out with and we really only make sense to each other. I think it was hard for him to realize that we were going to be doing the same thing and he was going to be apart from all of that in a world where he felt like he didn’t really fit in as much. I can empathize with that feeling because when he told us he was quitting I was like, “Well, the band is over. We can’t do it without Kennedy.” For a while, probably up until mid-November, we were all on the Ghostbust tour with the knowledge in our head that we would probably never do a tour again and might not even release The Upsides. There were serious talks of that. I started thinking about what I was going to do. I guess I was going to start teaching but like I don’t know I’m a weirdo. I don’t fit in with anybody. It was going to be a hard thing to do. And so, he told us he was coming back. Nick—who was playing drums at the time—graciously agreed to move to keyboards and guitars and we reworked the songs to have him in them and we’ve been playing as a six piece.

Jerry@RRR: How do the new songs sound with keyboards?

Soupy Campbell: I don’t think there’s a huge difference as far as that goes. I mean we showed the new songs to some other people and they’re like, “Oh. There’s a keyboard part there.” It’s not like it affects the style of the song or anything. It’s just that sometimes there’s a little extra something. There’s a different sound we can work with, a different tone. So, at some points where we can hold out a guitar chord, we’re like maybe we can throw it on the Rhodes and see how it sounds there. I guess it’s trying to expand what we can do a little bit.

Jerry@RRR: Also, you will be releasing a compilation of rarities and a remastered version of Get Stoked On It! How does it compare to the original album?

Soupy Campbell: Well, it’s all remixed and remastered, so it sounds a bajillion percent better. When we recorded the record, we had to record it, mix it and have it mastered in twelve days…no maybe it was fourteen days. Either way, it was a short expense time that we didn’t feel like we could do it in and we rushed the whole thing. Matt Buckley, who recorded the record, had to plow through the mixing. He only had like a day to do it. Now, it’s been taken care of, given attention to and remixed and remastered. It’s going to feature both seven-inch releases on No Sleep Won’t Be Pathetic Forever and the two songs we recorded for Distances. It’s going to feature the Christmas Song and a couple of B-sides, one of which I don’t think anyone has heard before that we never got to finish it. We had to go in and do the last touches on that song. It’s going to be called Six Dudes From The Keystone State. It’s going to have new artwork. I think it’s going to be really cool. It’s going to be bigger, probably some expanded booklet and content. Things like that. Maybe some pictures of us from the earlier days in the band.

Jerry@RRR: How does it feel playing songs from Get Stoked On It! when it is so different in terms of content than songs from The Upsides?

Soupy Campbell: We don’t really do a lot of songs from Get Stoked On It! Mostly because Nick had to learn them on drums and now has had to learn them on guitars and keyboards plus a slew of other songs. It made more sense for him to learn more Upsides songs. So, we do “Keystone State Dudecore” and we do “When Keeping It Real Goes Wrong”. There have been talks about doing a couple more, but that’s pretty much it. It’s pretty easy to mix those into the set because the content isn’t totally different than from The Upsides on those songs. We don’t do the kind of sillier songs as often now, especially because we’re doing support tours. We have short sets and we prefer to play the songs on the newer record. It’s not super weird. It kind of works out.

Jerry@RRR: Tell us a crazy tour story.

Soupy Campbell: I always have a fallback one that I do for these interviews. At least let me think of one, that I don’t usually say because that’s always the one I use. See a lot of them don’t sound crazy as they were at the time like cliff jumping in Reno. It’s like yeah plenty of people cliff jump. But for me, at the time, it was wild. We went to a waterpark in Boise, Idaho. We’re not that weird looking but compared to people in Boise we were like fucking…and also who goes to waterparks? Adults with their children. So for like seven twenty-two to twenty-four year old dudes to roll up, we got a lot of weird looks. Our tour manager John has his ears gauged two and a half inches and like Pokemon tattoos, so that got us some weird stares. The old fallback story for people who haven’t heard it before is that we were driving once and the Straight Talk Express pulled up next to us—which is John McCain’s tour bus that he was using right before the election when he was campaigning—and Kennedy showed him his balls. We hung Kennedy’s testicles outside the window, honked the horn and stayed next to them to make sure that they got a good view. It’s good that we can single handedly take credit for the downfall of John McCain.

Jerry@RRR: What are your plans for after the Streetlight Tour?

Soupy Campbell: New Found Glory tour dude! I’ve never been more excited to be on any tour ever ever ever! New Found Glory and Lemuria, I’m so pumped! Then, Australia which is also mind-numbing so we’re really excited about that. Then, a fall tour and then we’re going to write a record.

Jerry@RRR: At the end of 2010, where are you going to be?

Soupy Campbell: Hopefully, we’ll be at home writing a record. That’s what I want to do with our last month of 2010. And then in early 2011, I want to record that record and want to have it out by the summer. As far where we’ve grown since last year, I was just talking to our agent about this. This time last year—I think we were in Europe— we didn’t have a booking agent or a manager. We only had Chris and No Sleep. No one backed us. We kind of just did it ourselves. We would sell a couple of records a week. Things have greatly increased in every sense. So, I’m very happy and proud and thankful for that.

Jerry@RRR: The revolving theme of The Upsides is about staying positive. Obviously, this is not an easy task. What is your advice to those who may be struggling?

Soupy Campbell: My advice to those struggling is to say that…there was a couple of things I would do when I was upset. One was to contextualize my problems. I was having a bad day because let’s say I got a flat tire on my bike and so I had to take a subway. If you don’t have exact change, they won’t give you change so I had to give them a five and I didn’t get any change back so I lost three dollars. I had to take the subway back and then you know people are harassing me. I finally got back to my house and it was raining and then I didn’t have the key so I had to walk and carry my bike six blocks…shit like that. Terrible day. You’re upset and things aren’t going your way. I don’t know man I don’t live in Uganda. No one’s shooting at me. I don’t have AIDS. I have food to eat and people who love me. I try to think in the grand scheme of things. My problems are barely problems and should celebrate the great life I have and the people I have around me. And then also, I’ve had some serious bouts with depression—I’m sure most of us have. Personal problems. I think one of the big things that helped me out last time was I…my ex and I broke up and I realized that I was going to have a terrible couple of months because of that, at least one to two months where it’s painful to get out of bed. You know what I mean? I’m sure everyone’s been there where you wake up at the beginning of the day and you just like, “Fuck man. I don’t want to do this. I just don’t.” And when you’re down in that, it’s awful. It seems neverending. Even with the knowledge that I knew I was going to get better, it was still hard. Then, I started thinking about the timeline. And if you think about the timeline as that timeline as a month and a half or even the next six months, you’re like, “Wow a huge chuck of this is going to be spent very depressed and that’s a very depressing thought.” But when you stretch out the timeline to look at your entire life—the seventy to eighty years you’ll hopefully live—that month seems so inconsequential. “Wow I spent one month upset? Fuck. Whatever. There’s a whole other life I can live that will be great.” So I know that my brain chemistry is going to work in a way that the chemicals will be balanced in such a way that for the next couple of weeks, the next couple of months, maybe even the next year, I’m going to be depressed and there’s nothing I can do to fight that, except for try to surround myself with happy people, try to exercise more, try to get a better sleep schedule. There are things you can do but the knowledge is that at some point you can’t battle it and it’s going to win, but to a certain degree. It’s not going to totally win. But to a certain degree, you’re going to be sad. But when you think about that timeline in the context of your whole life, it seems a little more manageable. I would suggest thinking about it that way. Also, I’m not a therapist. I’m not a psychologist. I’ve never taken any classes on this. I don’t write advice columns. So if this is bad advice, I’m very sorry. Disclaimer: Don’t kill yourself because of something I said. Please. I can’t take that lawsuit. [Laughs]

Jerry@RRR: That’s all I have for you today. I’d like to personally thank you for everything you and the guys are doing right now. I believe that you make really great music. I can guarantee that on our End Of The Year list, your album is going to be very high up there.

Soupy Campbell: I appreciate that. We worked very hard on it. We work very hard every day. We have the best job ever. We really got lucky. It is the best job ever but it’s still a lot more work than I imagined it being and we’re always ready for the challenge.

Jerry@RRR: Is there anything else you’d like to add? Closing thoughts?

Soupy Campbell: Such Gold has got a seven inch coming out. Late Nite Wars just put something out. Man Overboard just put something out. Transit has got a new record coming out soon. Check out the new Living With Lions video. Support all these bands. They work really hard and they are all really good people.

The Upsides will be re-released later on this year. While we anxiously wait, go out and support the band by seeing them on tour with New Found Glory. Check out our previous interview with the band here and check out our review for the album here.