Interview

I was waiting around backstage the Vans Warped Tour Stop in Columbus and Andrea, the absolute nicest and most amazing press manager ever, asked if I wanted to talk to Thursday. I felt my heart skip a beat and I slowly agreed. Thursday is one of those bands who made me the person who I am today. “Full Collapse” is still one of my all time favorite records and “War All the Time” showed enormous amounts of growth. Now on the heels of releasing the far over due “A City By the Light Divided,” keyboardist Andrew Everding was nice enough to sit and talk about the present, the past and the future for these Long Island pioneers.

EP: So what made you guys want to do Warped this year?
Andrew: I don’t know. It was the first tour we got offered when we were writing still so we got on a long while ago. We had taken time off to write the record and our manager came to us and said, “Hey you guys should do Warped Tour this year. You will be the headliners and it will be really good.” Because of the last Warped Tour I did, I wasn’t sure I could do another one. It was a really rough tour. But I think we realized it would be really good for us to do it. I mean, I was psyched the first day because, I thought, wow, I didn’t know all of these bands were going to be here, like some old friends and stuff.
EP: Was it pretty nice to catch up with bands and people you don’t see very often?
Andrew: Yeah, Every Time I Die are really good friends of our and the Bouncing Souls we are pretty tight with. It is just nice to hang out with those people. It is usually cool. Everyone is usually super nice.

EP: There was talk while you were taking time off, that you were thinking about breaking up. What happened that made you guys want to get together and write this record?
Andrew: Well, it wasn’t every really like a break. The 2004 Warped Tour, when we left that tour, there was a lot of heavy set nature between everybody and it was a little bit difficult. We just realized on that tour that we never really stopped at all. Probably what would be healthiest for us is to take a little time and not do any Thursday stuff and let people establish their lives. But we also did a tour with the Cure. Like, we only did 2/3 of Warped and then cut off and did the Cure tour and that had a big influence because we could look and see, hey, there is a band that has been around since 1979 and they are still doing it. There were a few line-up changes of course but just to see there is longevity in music and now Thursday has only been together for eight years. So we decided to take two months off and it turned into four or five before we started writing. It was more like we wanted to wait to make sure everyone was in the right mindset. We didn’t want to force anything and we took our time writing.

EP: I had heard you had toyed with the idea of releasing two CDs in 2006. One with more of a Thursday sound and the other being a little more experimental along the lines of Godspeed! You Black Emperor. Is that still in the works?
Andrew: We just kind of realized that a lot of the double album releases by bands have a lot of filler in them. We just wanted to put out exactly what we wanted. The new record is kind of like a split CD because there is an instrumental track in the middle that kind of divides the two different halves. It was a smart decision to do that. We actually had enough to do one though. We had about 17 or 18 songs but we decided to put what we thought was the best on the record. The rest of the stuff we will probably end up releasing because we just listened to them the other day and they are really good. As far as the Godspeed stuff, we got more experimental and the producer we were working with encouraged it but the songs still sounded like Thursday songs but it was a natural evolution of the band.

EP: One thing that kind of bothered me was when “A City by the Light Divided” came out, it scanned a lot less than “War All the Time.” What do you attribute that to?
Andrew: There are probably a whole bunch of reasons. It is nothing we really try to look into. I mean, people tell us what is going on and stuff, but when “War All the Time” was released, there were more stores that sold CDs than when “A City by the Light Divided” came out. There are 1,400 less stores in the U.S. It is kind of weird because there is still plenty of attention at shows and shows are getting sold out and are crazy. But I think the core audience; the true Thursday fans went out and bought the record that week. But I think it will come back.
EP: I am not trying to be a downer right now or whatever.
Andrew: No, its fine. It is something we have to look at. You always have expectations to do what you want. It is not that we want to be millionaires or sell millions of records because we know we probably can’t do that. We just want to reach as many people as possible.

EP: What is going on with Thursday after this tour? Any big tours on the horizon?
Andrew: There is going to be an Australian tour. But I think we are going to the UK ten days after Warped is done. Plus there is a tour in the fall that isn’t confirmed…well, it is going to happen but we can’t say who it is with. It is a co-headlining tour, a BIG co-headlining tour in the fall.

EP: You were added to the band a little later. How smooth was that transition? How has writing been different for you between “War All the Time” and “A City by the Light Divided?”
Andrew: When I was in college, Geoff and I had a mutual friend where I went to school and I had met him a few times and I used to play drums in bands where I was from and I was just starting to mess around with keyboards. We just started talking and he and I got along really well. We had quite a bit in common and we see eye to eye on a lot of things. One day I just showed up at his house and he had asked if I wanted to join the band. I graduated, joined the band and have been doing it for four and ½ years. But this pass record, they said, we want you to write as much as you can. There was never a point where we would say, “Yes, this is when the keyboards come in.” Because, I did some stuff for “War All the Time” and I wasn’t on “Full Collapse” but I was touring for “Full Collapse.” But now it is a lot more like a writing partnership.

EP: Are there any guilty pleasure CDs you have? Anything where, if a friend comes over you turn it down?
Andrew: I don’t really have any. I used to think it wasn’t cool to listen to Pearl Jam, but at this point I really don’t care what anyone thinks about what I am listening to. But it is nothing like Brittany Spears or anything like that. But sometimes there is a song that comes on the radio and I think, this is really good, but it is usually someone who is really bad. But it is never any Nu-Metal shit or anything like that.

EP: How would you guys define success now as opposed to in the past?
Andrew: Well we have always tried to remain accessible after shows but it tough sometimes when you are playing a show for 3,000 people. But I think for us, we are going to put our heart and soul into the record but, in most senses, we are still a live band. It is weird how that evolves. We were talking the other day that about how…well…it is not like we got away from it, but we have to try even further to still have the same mentality that we always have had. But it can be tough to do that.
EP: Especially with a band of your popularity. It seems like your fan base has grown exponentially in the last few years.
Andrew: I think so. But our goal right now is just to get as many people as possible to hear us and try to get some people to hear us for the first time so we can show them what it is all about.