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Thursday is approaching their 10th anniversary as a post hardcore band and they remain relevant, creative and in high demand.  Starting out in a basement in New Jersey, Thursday slowly built an underground and somewhat fanatical fan base through the late 90’s.  It was “Understanding In A Car Crash” from 2001’s highly successful “Full Collapse” and relentless touring through their 2003 release “War All The Time” that left the band physically and creatively spent.  Band members openly acknowledge that they were close to disbanding.  But after taking some well deserved time off to reflect, the band regrouped after several months to produce their latest record, “A City By The Light Divided.”

Musicpix talked with keyboard player/vocalist, Andrew Everding in his dressing room prior to Thursday’s performance at the LC Pavilion, Columbus, OH.  Andrew talks about how “A City By The Light Divided” is totally different than their prior releases, maturing as a band, and how they helped out My Chemical Romance, another basement band from New Jersey before they exploded out of the East Coast.
Listen in…

Musicpix:  Musicpix had the opportunity to cover Thursday from the stage at Warped Tour this summer so we got to tap into your live performance vibe and experience what you do from the stage.  So we’re looking forward to tonight’s show!

Let’s talk about your new album first…“A City By The Light Divided.”  “Counting 54321” draws from real-life events that the band had growing up and the video is a cinematic adventure on a train.  Are you involved in the storyboarding process when making a video and is there a visual connection to the musical inspiration?

Andrew:  That’s a good question for Geoff actually.  He tends to put a lot of personal reflections about stuff that has gone on…not necessarily about girls or love relationships… That song specifically comes from not being happy in the town that you grew up in and wanting to get out as quickly as possible.  When we do videos, we send out a call and receive treatments and that one was one of the first ones that we got from Artificial Army.  We were originally going to do two videos…a low-budget animated video and then we were going to do another video to connect it, but then we started seeing what the animation was about.  We usually go back and forth with ideas.  But for the most part, we trust the director.  It was our first storyline video but there are some performance elements to it.

Musicpix:  You’re the keyboard player and I understand that this album has more keyboard/synths on it than prior releases?

Andrew:  I’ve been with the band for four and half a years and we’ve gone through this gradual process of adding more keyboards.  When they hired me, I started playing with them after “Full Collapse” and “War All The Time,” I did some stuff.  But on this record, they said do whatever you want.  It wasn’t like I didn’t have freedoms, but the writing process before was just different.  Our producer was really interested in the idea creating atmosphere specifically with keyboards in the songs by coming up with sounds and pads that change the attitude and the orientation of the song.  The song “Sugar and The Sacrament” is a really powerful song that deals with religion and disbelief in the Catholic Church in some sense.  But there’s a whole sound in the beginning that took us a half day to create a mood with the frequencies of instruments.  You get this really lonely feeling when you hear the beginning of this song.

Musicpix: What was is it like writing in the wake of a very successful record…ala Full Collapse, an album that is often credited as being one of the most influential emo-hardcore albums of the 21st century?

Andrew:  I think that the biggest things are the audience and the fans.  Audiences fell in love with that because it was their first experience with this post hardcore emo thing.  It was at a time when Thursday was just figuring out how to work with each other in an infantile way.  We could keep writing that record over and over again but we’re a band that needs to evolve.  The hardest part of that is when kids come up and say “Full Collapse” is my favorite record but they don’t want to hear anything else. 

Thursday Concert Photos: Columbus 11/06 --- Warped Tour 2006

Musicpix: You talk about the need for the band to evolve.  The easy way out is to please your fans and meet their expectations.  How hard is it to offer something new and show what you’re capable of?

Andrew:  The hardest time for Thursday was with “War All The Time”…it was the first major label record and the first record after “Full Collapse.”  There was a lot of pressure from complete outside sources…the fans, the label, management but there wasn’t a lot of internal pressure.  But I think that the record was really important and it maintains a serious level of integrity.  With the latest record, we basically just told everybody to back off and give us space.  It took us about a year to write it, 8 weeks to record it and it has a much higher level of integrity.  Within band members?  Everybody in the band can listen to this record we just made.  It’s something that for the first time, that all six of us can agree on and we’re completely pleased.  When we write, there are a lot of disagreements when we’re trying to make music because everybody writes together.  It’s not about just bringing in a skeleton song to build upon… Being in a band and knowing these people, 24/7, 365 days of a year… you start to learn what and what not to say and still be able to hold your own.  That’s the hardest thing about being creative with other people.  I’ll write something and totally have this vision of how it should sound in my head.  But the second you step in a room with someone, you lose that.  You have this authenticity to what you write.  But when you write with other people you have to share that creativity, but you want to hold onto your ideas…

Musicpix:  It’s hard enough to do that with 1 person vs. 5 people!

Andrew:  Yeah, it’s a band though and we should all be different.  But there is a big central spiritual thing here.  We’ve always talked about it.  None of us are orientated around any specific religion but there is an element… something that happens when we’re writing and when we perform.

Musicpix:  Thursday was involved in the attempt to save CBGB’s/NY in 2005 but it was apart of ‘saving’ Thursday so to speak as well as producing your new record “A City By The Light Divided.”  Is the band whole and well?

Andrew:  Yeah, absolutely.  The biggest turbulent point was after touring “War All the Time.”  Not really a falling out, but we were in Australia and we were having some serious interpersonal problems.  But the band had been on this rollercoaster and hadn’t stopped.  Some of us talked about not doing it at that point.  We were on Warped and out with The Cure and the band kind of lit up a bit because here’s this band that has been together since the late 70’s and they’re an amazing band.  So we said when we get home, we’re going to take at least 2 months away from each other and start writing gradually.  Two months turned into five months.  We got home September 2004 and didn’t start writing until almost December.

MusicPix:  So just getting breathing room was the answer…not necessarily turning dysfunction into function? 

Andrew:  We know a lot of bands and we see a lot of things that go on behind the scenes.  Every band is a bit dysfunctional to some point.  It’s like a relationship with five other people.  We’re really tight as friends.  I know that I’ll be friends with these boys long after the band is over with.

Musicpix:  You have a lot of friends.   You are good friends with My Chemical Romance.  Will you be working with MCR again in the not so distant future?

Andrew:  There’s some stuff that we’re probably going to do …they are like our little brothers even though some of them are older than us. Geoff produced their first record and I remember him bringing songs into rehearsals and we were like huh?  They were all in bands and involved with Eyeball Records at the time.  Gerard did some art work for us…he used to do comic books and stuff.  I remember Geoff and I going to their rehearsals. Geoff helped them get their other guitar player, Frank.  He realized that in order to pull it off live, they needed another guitar player.  We did a lot of shows together…they opened for us for awhile and now they are the biggest thing ever which is awesome.  We’ll probably do something together in the future…probably along the touring lines.

Musicpix:  Thursday has enjoyed helping young bands.  Are there any we should be on the outlook for?

Andrew:   I don’t know how much we helped them because they were out there but there’s this band called “Me Without You” and they are incredible.  We put them on the Christmas shows.  They’re a Christian band and we normally don’t ‘like’ that, but it’s not preaching.  We brought them out on Christmas shows we did last year and then we took them out on tour.  I think they’re rad.  I don’t know how much we’re in a position to help people out.  It’s not that people are forgetting about Thursday…but this a big tour for us.  We did a similar tour with Thrice.  I don’t know.  Steve’s little brother has a band “World Broken” and we brought them out… they’ve been old friends of ours for a long time.  The band thing of helping each other out is gone away at this point.  It’s a little unfortunate…there are a lot of young bands that are really trying to become successful very fast and not really wanting to work hard and tour.  Given the current situation in music, and seeing bands like MCR get into the successful spotlight really quickly… bands see that and they want that.  And that leads to a lot of problems of recycling music.  They say ‘I want to do that. I want to be successful and make money and be on MTV and stuff.’ When you start recycling music, it doesn’t evolve too quickly…This record is completely different from what we’ve ever done and that is what’ss important to us now. 

Musicpix:  Part of the satisfaction is watching new bands evolve.  Being a veteran, are you ever satisfied with the place you’re at?

Andrew:   Yeah, I’m satisfied.  The way I think of is:  when I was 15 years old I wanted to just be in a band- let alone people who pay for it.  I try to never let go of that feeling.  I think it’s really essential to know where you came from.  If I was in a privileged household and had all this stuff at my finger tips, it would be awesome but you have to know what it’s like to work.  We all work very hard. We scrutinize every decision very hard. Even when it comes down to making T-shirts that we sell at our shows.  We all look at them.  We came from that level of wanting to do it by ourselves.  Thursday came out of a basement in New Jersey where you didn’t have to deal with promoters and you put shows on by yourself.  But yeah, I’m satisfied at this point.  We’re always striving to reach new people.  That’s our main goal basically.  We feel so strongly about what we do and about what we write, we want to get it out to as many people as possible without selling out.

Musicpix:  The higher you go up the musical ladder to so speak, the tougher the criticisms are. Do you read the press?  Do reviews affect you?

Andrew:   Yeah, you pay attention to that stuff.  It matters to you.  This record has gotten pretty good critical acclaim.  I don’t think the Rolling Stone has ever really liked Thursday and then we see them praise other stuff and we say “are you serious…you really like that whatever record?”…Rolling Stone is a corporation and there’s a lot of other stuff that goes into that.  But yeah, that critical stuff is hard sometimes when you work really hard and put your blood and sweat into it and someone writes something terrible on a piece of paper.  We write music that doesn’t accumulate that quickly….it takes time sometimes.  There are some really challenging songs in this record…musically and lyrically.  When we were playing “Signals Over The Air” song on the “War of The World” tour, kids didn’t respond to it that great.  But now, kids love that song.  We write music that takes a little time…kind of like fine wine.

Musicpix:  You’re a little bit of anomaly in the hardcore scene because you have something to say and many don’t…it’s purely about the emotion.  Has there ever been any thought to present the music in a form that’s more up front and more accessible?

Andrew:   It’s probably not what we’re going to do.  We write the music first.  Geoff is involved with that.  Geoff then gets inspired to what he hears and writes the lyrics afterward to the connection to the actual physical sound of the songs.  The “Sugar and The Sacrament?”  When we were demoing it, it was a mess.  It was two songs tied together with this terrible bridge and we got in the studio with Dave Fridmann and he said that he really liked it and the mood got set for that song.  Geoff went upstairs and wrote the lyrics.  We basically dedicated two days to finish the song.  Dave put up a rough mix and everybody got chills from that.  That’s the magic of what we do in some sense.  What I believe in anyway. I don’t think that Geoff would write more mainstream.  He’ll write about relationships but not about his own.  He writes about personal politics, sexual politics, things that happen in relationships between people.

Musicpix:  How about relationships…touring makes that pretty much impossible?

Andrew:   I’ve been in a relationship with someone for two and half years now but she’s understands because she tours as well.  But there are families now.  Geoff’s married…Tim’s married and just had a baby.  We’re all getting older.  We’re not 21 or 22 anymore for that matter.  That’s the tough thing.  When you’re in a band and you’re touring, development kind of stops.  Everything else evolves around you but when you come home, things are different.  Everybody is just starting their lives at this point…trying to be financially responsible and personally responsible.  But that’s the thing about Thursday.  We’re really committed to staying together.  We’re about to hit the ten year mark in a little bit and that’s awesome because the average life span of a band is about 5 years.  When you hit that point, you know there’s something going on here.  We’ll go out for a month and then we’ll take three or four weeks off to hold onto everything else that’s going on at home.

Musicpix:  Back to the new album.  Do you have any favorites?

Andrew:   Yeah… I am actually pleased with all of the record but I’m really pleased with “Sugar and The Sacrament.” I love it for the writing experience and how it came about and also “The Lovesong Writer”… playing that one live is really cool.  There’s a lot of softer stuff on the record.  There’s a B side that’s basically piano but we haven’t played that one yet.  I really like “The Other Side of The Crash”…kids get really excited about it and so do I.  You can tell it has the energy in it that we wrote.  It’s awesome since we came from this hardcore environment with all the screaming and the song “Autumn Leaves Revisited” that we’ve been playing on this tour is this tiny, quiet thing with this huge chorus that calms everybody down in the audience beforehand.  It’s difficult to do, but they get it.

Musicpix:  What about the screaming?  I understand that you were coached?

Andrew:   I do a lot of the screaming back up.  Steve and Tom used to do it but when I was tour, they said, you can try it.  I never lose my voice.  I’ve have used a vocal coach, Melissa Cross, who has done this DVD called ‘The Zen of Screaming’ thing…and yeah, it’s not my favorite thing in the world to do but I can get away with it because I won’t hurt my vocal chords because I know how to do it right.  It’s really weird experience…if you’d ask me to do it now, I couldn’t.  I have to be on stage and it comes out of me.  Everybody says, ‘you’re this really tiny guy and where does that come from?’  Geoff too, he’s on the top of his game.  He’s singing better than he ever has before.

MusicPix: What is the first musical instrument you played and at what age?

Andrew:   I started playing drums when I was 13.  I started playing guitar when I couldn’t play drums anymore because I went to college and there was no place to play them.  I picked up the guitar when I was around 18-19 and I didn’t pick up the piano until I was 20. 

MusicPix:  What artist/performer influenced you the most?

Andrew:   The Pixies actually.  I remember hearing them when I was 14 or 15.  I remember what car I was in, what it smelled like, what the temperature was, what I was wearing…it just blew my mind.  I said, ‘I want to do that’…it was the band that made me want to make music and to write music.  It just made sense.  It just had so much taste to it. The band that I saw that made we want to play live music was Radiohead. I said, ‘How does this happen?’

MusicPix:          If you weren’t in your current band, what band would you like to play in?
Andrew:   Depeche Mode probably…I don’t know. If I wasn’t in Thursday, I’d probably be trying to be in my own band, writing my own stuff.

MusicPix: What are your 3 ‘desert island’ albums?

Andrew:  Spiritualized- “Ladies and Gentleman-We’re Floating in Space”…  The Pixes- “Surfer Rosa” and Elliott Smith’s -“Roman Candle.”

MusicPix:  Who do you think is the most over-rated in the music industry?

Andrew:   I don’t know…I haven’t been paying too much attention.  Overall, I think everything has kind of lost its way.  I don’t really see that many things that are that vibrant.  It was cool to see Death Cab for Cutie and their success.  I’m very proud of the My Chemical Romance boys because I think that they really strive to have integrity and still be at the forefront of things…I’m not totally sure.

MusicPix: What’s your ‘perfect world?’

Andrew:   A house with a back yard with a dog…. and barbeque.

The Band:
Geoff Rickly-Vocals
Tom Keeley-Guitar, backing vocals
Steve Padulla-Guitar, backing vocals
Tim Payne-Bass
Tucker Rule-Drums
Andrew Everding-Keys, backing vocals

Discography

Waiting-1999
Full Collapse-2001
Five Stories Falling-2002
War All the Time-2003
A City by the Light Divided-2006

The Tour

11/18/06   Worchester, MA
11/20/06   Philadelphia, PA
11/21/06   New York, NY
11/22/06   Atlantic City, NJ

By

Gwyn Tyme w/ Steve Mitchell