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“This record has more of a band feeling and we’re calling it Move Along,” says Tyson Ritter, lead singer and bass player for the All-American Rejects, “because Nick and I came up with the basic DNA- the songs, and Mike and Chris helped us execute the parts with their distinctive style, and it all blends together to make it jump out at you.”
“I felt like if we were going to write something that we think is great, we had to do it now,” Ritter says, speaking about the full year he and the band took to craft the 12 songs that comprise their sophomore album. Speaking to the proverbial sophomore slump many artists fall prey to, Ritter continues, “Subconsciously, when we’re feeling pressure during the writing process, we tend to not speak about it and just focus on the songs.”
The All-American Rejects, were formed when Ritter, 21, and 23 year-old guitarist, co-songwriter Nick Wheeler, were teenagers in 1999. The pair left their Stillwater, Oklahoma homes and trekked to the Big Apple, to record what would be their debut platinum-selling record. They drove across the heartland to New York with less than $1000 between them, but armed with a notebook full of songs and big rock and roll dreams. “I felt like I was in a movie,” Ritter says, “Me and Nick drove to New York with all of our Christmas money. It was more than an adventure for kids from Stillwater.”
Ritter and Wheeler, who were subsequently joined by guitarist Mike Kennerty, 24, and drummer Chris Gaylor, 26, toured the world behind the chart-topping success of their debut single “Swing Swing,” initially released on Ohio independent label Doghouse Records in October 2002, followed by a release on major DreamWorks Records in February 2003. The Stillwater, OK quartet provided a much needed balm to the drag-ass, “poor, poor pitiful me” mood that refuses to let go of mainstream rock. “I think people confuse being happy with being shallow and having no substance,” says Wheeler.” But we can feel good and make other people feel good when we play our music. We like the way cock rock feels and the way it makes people feel good, and we try to have the same kind of feeling in our songs.”
With Move Along, Ritter and Wheeler spent 10 months writing in their makeshift writing rooms (Ritter: the beach. Wheeler: his tidy home studio) in Destin, Florida. “I used the Brian Wilson approach to songwriting,” Ritter says, “where you sit with your feet in the sand and guitar on your lap…except I was actually at the beach!”
Two crucial songs, “Dirty Little Secret,” a picture-perfect power-pop single, and “Stab My Back” were finished right before they went to Atlanta in October 2004, where they would rehearse with Kennerty and Gaylor and work out full band arrangements. “It was the Magic Hour,” remembers Ritter, “the last grains of sand in the hourglass…”
By December, the full band left for album pre-production in Burbank, CA, pausing only to return to Stillwater for the holidays. “Everybody at the label and management wanted us to have a terrible holiday so that we’d be absorbed in the album,” says Ritter, half joking. “We had a lot of pressure put on us. But we love it: it puts a fire under our asses to write better songs.” So the quartet returned to Burbank the day after Christmas, and were soon joined by producer Howard Benson (Hoobastank, My Chemical Romance, P.O.D), who Ritter calls “the candy-man. He suggests simplistic arrangement changes that rip the songs a new asshole.”
Compared to the relatively long songwriting genesis, Move Along was recorded in seven weeks, and was mixed by March by Chris Lord-Alge. They’ve been on the road on a headlining tour since then, playing a few new tunes including the album’s first single, “Dirty Little Secret” and the title anthem “Move Along” which their fans have been eating up. The two songs were also streamed early on both the band website www.theall-americanrejects.com and www.myspace.com.
The band’s seemingly long hiatus kept fans wondering, but when they listen to the All-American Rejects’ new album Move Along, they’ll know why…Ritter and the band took the time to craft 12 great pop/rock songs. “We were gone for a year and a half,” says Ritter. “We were petrified. But now we feel like everything happened on this record, but so much more.”
