All-American Rejects interview

Three and a half whirlwind years after the release of their sophomore album Move Along, a stretch of time in which “the phone didn’t really stop ringing,” the All-American Rejects are releasing their new album When The World Comes Down today. Founding guitarist Nick Wheeler couldn’t wait to tell me all about the process of creating the album, a process which led the band all across America, what he thinks about the arrival of pro sports in his native Oklahoma, and how the band ended up with its own justin.tv channel…

Move Along was such a successful record for you and catapulted you guys into the mainstream. What’s the ride been like since then? Have you had a chance to stop and breathe?



Not really. I mean we’re not a band to try to capitalize on any kind of success, or in this case we didn’t want to just make Move Along again. We actually wanted to mature and grow as a band, much like we did between the first and second album. Only that time we actually have time to slow down and create, you know? This time, like I always say, the phone didn’t really stop ringing. Over the last two years, aside from writing and recording the new record, we were going out and playing more shows, and some offers we couldn’t refuse came in. And we also got to do some really cool things, like we did five shows with Bon Jovi, two of those were at Madison Square Garden. So it’s been pretty insane, but I think we removed ourselves enough every once in awhile to actually get our heads back on straight and just create something real from deep down, you know, we had to find it. It took awhile, but we finally did man, and we’re fucking proud as hell of this new album.

With the last record you had the songs basically finished before you went into the studio, but this time it was a different story.

We used to go into the studio with notes, you know what I mean? We were over-prepared. All the songs were done, etc. This time around, yeah man, we can’t stay in one place for more than two weeks. So we were ready to get going. It was like, alright, we gotta start thinking about making the record. It was scary but at the same time we were kind of excited to be able to create a little bit on the spot. We certainly had an album’s worth of songs, and we started recording the ones that we liked the best, and most of them made the record. But there was a couple that came about in the studio. One was a song that we had written like two or three years ago, probably three years ago, and we actually never really finished it, kind of shelved it, and we revisited it and it ended up being one of the best songs on the record, it’s the last song, it’s called When The Wind Blows. And there’s another song called Breakin’ that after about four or five months of recording we kind of went nuts, alright, now we’ve gotta get out of here and write a couple more songs. We’re not gonna do it working twelve hours a day, tracking all these other songs. So Tyson and I got on a bus, we had a show in Connecticut and a show in Seattle, and they were two weeks apart, so Tyson and I got on a bus and every night the driver drove us eight hours and dropped us off in Town X. We saw everything from Mount Rushmore to Sandusky, Ohio. So like I said, we got to remove ourselves and just kind of buckle down and really try to be creative.

At one point you were in a cabin in Georgia, then a house in Florida, then an apartment behind the Roxy here in Los Angeles. Were you purposely trying to change up environments?

Yeah, we can’t really stay in one spot for two weeks anymore or we get restless. We love waking up in a new city every day. That’s what we do for a living. It’s great, you know? It’s exciting, and no place really feels like home right now. I mean we go back to Oklahoma and it’s great cause we’ve got a bunch of family and friends, but it’s really hard to just get back to where we were when we started, when we were really hungry. So because we had the means this time, the bigger budget, being on a bigger label, we took advantage and we removed ourselves from everything and everybody, whether it was up in the mountains and the woods in Georgia, or whether it was in some random condo in Vancouver. We were able to do that and just really kind of build a little prison around ourselves where we had nothing to do but stress out about creating. And something about that really brought some cool things.

The first single Gives You Hell is instantly catchy. Was that the clear-cut first single all along?

No, you know we’ve never really been one to pick our first single. We didn’t pick Swing Swing, we didn’t pick Dirty Little Secret. It’s kind of one of those things where we have all these babies and you have to pick a favorite. It’s really hard to pick your favorite child, you know?



That song, Gives You Hell, came about in Vancouver actually, just out of the blue. I was kind of working on the music for one of the other songs, and Tyson was like “Hey, I think I’ve got something funny.” And I was like alright, so we put a verse and a chorus and wow, that’s fucking different. This could be fun. So there we were, half a day later we had already recorded the song in demo version. It was one of those things where it’s quirky, it’s weird, I don’t know if it should be the first single, but everybody at the label and management was like freaking out about it, like oh my God, I think somebody even said that we wrote the songs of our careers. We were like alright, cool, you guys were right on the first two records, so let’s give her a go.

If you had to pick one of the other songs as the first single, which one would you have picked?


I don’t know, that’s a tough one. There’s a song called Damn, Girl that we’re all really excited about. We had a song in a movie, I Wanna was the name of the song, that could have been a good contender for a first single. We’ve played it on the road a couple times and everybody on our crew loved it.



You’re already one of the most famous bands ever from Oklahoma. How do you get treated when you go back to Stillwater?

For awhile there was a little bit of, I don’t know, weirdness just going home, and I didn’t have many friends growing up and being in high school, so like all of the sudden people were treating me a little differently and it was kind of weird. But now it’s been long enough to where I realized the other day when I was at home, I could have gone to college here twice and graduated twice, Stillwater’s a little college town so half the population is rotated every four years. So it’s rotated twice since I’ve been home. So it’s not weird anymore. It’s really nice. It feels good to go home. And actually we just went to Muskogee, Oklahoma, which is the site of the Oklahoma Music Hall of Fame, and they inducted us. So it feels really good going home now, for sure.

You just got the basketball team from Seattle. There aren’t a lot of pro teams in Oklahoma. Does that have you stoked?

It’s really cool. man. I mean, when the Hornets had to relocate after Katrina and they went up to Oklahoma City for I think two seasons or something, dude, everybody was freaking out. They had like the best attendance they had had in years, moving to Oklahoma City. And then when they moved back everybody was bummed and their attendance was really crappy back down in New Orleans, etc., so yeah getting a pro team in Oklahoma, everybody’s really excited about it. I think they’ll do just fine.



It’s kind of funny, on our DVD that we did for the last record, the Tournado, in the documentary me and Chris actually went to a SuperSonics game. We got to sit on the sidelines and we got SuperSonics jerseys with our names on them. So I have those displayed in my house in Oklahoma. I thought it was pretty funny.

I saw some of that on your justin.tv channel. I’ve got some friends who have channels on there, I know how invasive and up close and personal that can be. How did that work out?

I forget how it came about. There’s this guy at the label, Matt, who’s just really in tune with this new technology, and he was showing us all these things we could do, one of which was justin.tv and now the Kite Player that we have on our home page. It started just in the studio, we got to show kids what we do every day. And it was pretty cool seeing kids respond with saying shit like “Wow, I didn’t realize what a process this is, no wonder making an album takes so damn long.” Stuff like that. So it’s like yeah, see, don’t get pissed when we go away for two years.



But it was really cool. We got to show them everything from actual tracking to, you know, Tyson making breakfast upstairs. It kind of lets people in, but you only let them in as much as you want to, and you can still kind of have some some mystique and have a personal life.