I was lucky enough to sit down with Soupy in The Wonder Year’s van on March 24th to discuss their latest release, their future touring plans, insight on Soupy’s writing, and his never ending quest to meet Mark Hoppus. Soupy was a great guy and every should give a big thanks to him and check out The Upsides if you still haven’t, it’s a great album on all counts. Enjoy the read!
To start things off, could you state your name and role in The Wonder Years?
Yes, my name is Daniel Jason Campbell, but more of the time you’ll hear me be called Soupy. And I sing in The Wonder Years.
Nick, you don’t want to say what’s up?
Nick: No, I have nothing. You know, I wrote The Upsides.
Soupy: Nick’s a pussy. Print that for me.
Nick: No, Matt Brasch is the pussy. I’m the buzz kill.
The Upsides was released two months ago, how has the reaction been?
Great. I’m sorry, I just got sent a really funny text, and that’s happening [People banging on the van]. I’ve really been stoked on it. It charted on Billboard, which is something, it’s cool cause it charted on Billboard and I called my grandma and I said, “It charted on Billboard!” And she said, “I know what that means!” Cause usually I’d be like, “Hey grandma I did this,” and she’s like, “I, I don’t understand.”
Did you expect to get such great reaction?
I mean I was hoping people would buy the record, but you never know. It’s 2010, people just download shit. People really came out and bought it and I’ve been getting a lot of letters and emails and messages and people at shows are coming up and telling us it really helped them in their lives, which is cool. I give a lot of hugs now, which is nice I guess. Everyone needs more hugs.
Tonight’s your last show with Crime In Stereo in New York City. How has the tour gone?
No, I would actually like to fight Crime In Stereo; they’re fucking dick heads. Print that. Just total assholes and I’m really glad we don’t have to spend anymore time with them [Laughs]. I should probably addend that to say that none of that is true. I really had a great time with them out on this tour. Just the sweetest dudes, totally, totally nice guys. The tour’s been a total blast. We got to play Harvest Of Hope Fest, we got to do a lot of fun shows at cool venues that we don’t usually get a chance to play, but Crime In Stereo got us in. Really excited to see what their hometown reaction is.
But you can print that Scott from Crime In Stereo is a pussy, and his car sucks.
Nick: He’s not very strong.
Soupy: He definitely doesn’t lift weights everyday.
Next month you guys are hitting the road with We Are The Union in the south and then in the Midwest and west coast for the Kimbo Wants A Pepsi Tour. Do you think that’ll help get out some exposure?
I hope so. We’re doing some things that we’re lucky to be able to do. Before this tour we never really got to support anyone. Crime In Stereo was our first support tour, so we’re hoping to play to some new kids. I really feel like they’re [Set Your Goals] playing in a lot of small venues for those dates and I really feel like there’s a good chance they’re going to sell out, which is exciting for me. And it’ll be great to go out with We Are The Union and Such Gold. Obviously Matt from We Are The Union played on our record and Devon from Such Gold actually played drums for us all fall, filled in for us. So it’s going to be great to just hang out with those guys for a week and get out to the west coast. I’m actually texting Matt from We Are The Union right now about how much I dislike him.
The Wonder Years are heading over to the UK for the Slam Dunk Festival in late May with names like NFG, Alk3, and Against Me! Should we be expecting the announcement of addition UK/European dates while you’re over there?
Yeah, you absolutely should. I would love to be able to announce them very soon, I’m meeting with someone tonight about figuring out the conformation on that but we’ll be doing the Slam Dunk Fest and some dates around that and then more dates. That was very confusing I’m sorry, I really haven’t been in a good mindset all day today, but what I’m trying to say is that; we’re doing the festival and then we’re doing other dates related to the festival, and then a third set of dates that aren’t related to the festival.
POZ: Are the third set of dates in America or over there?
Soupy: All in England. There won’t be any mainland Europe dates this time, but maybe by the end of the year. Cross my fingers.
Look at this old ass woman hanging out inline for the show. It’s probably a Christian mom being a little dickhead. I’m sorry [Laughs], next question please.
After May nothings really been set in stone besides your UK endeavors. Will we be seeing a summer tour announcement or will the band be taking some time off to relax after constant touring?
No, no time off, never time off. We don’t have anywhere to live, so time off is kind of futile. We’ll be on tour constantly, all over the US and maybe some other countries that we’ll be announcing somewhere around May 2nd or 3rd. What day is today? Where am I? Still March, right?
POZ: Yes, still March.
Soupy: Yeah, they won’t get announced till May and this’ll go up before then so I probably shouldn’t announce things. Okay, great.
So do you prefer being on the road ¾ of the year or would you rather…
Yeah, I mean, I like to go home and see my mom and like the ten friends that I have. And then I hang out with my dad for a few minutes and my grandma and then leave. There’s really not a whole lot for me back there, or for any of us really. It makes a lot more sense to stay on tour. We don’t have any homes really; I sleep on my dad’s couch, so.
Throughout The Upsides you mention countless states and countries from Tennessee to Leeds. Would you say the album almost represents a diary of your journey in the time between Get Stoked On It! and the recording of The Upsides?
There are some references that could be considered a journey between the two records, but for the most part it’s about a period of time when we weren’t doing Wonder Years as heavily and more when we were trying to finish everything else so we could do Wonder Years full time. For a while we flip-flopped and it was like, we would try to do both at once and it came to about a year where it was really going to be next to impossible to do Wonder Years as much and finish school on time so that we could finish school in time to do Wonder Years full time. So most of the record is about this kind of, when I stopped, we were still obviously in the band and writing the record, but stopped being a touring band and started being a normal person with a real job and real house with a girl that I was dating and finishing school. But really that whole time period was intermediary and something we had to do to get to the eventual goal of being on tour all of the time, so most of the record is a diary of my life while I was normal, or a civilian.
Do you consider the record to be a type of concept album with the repetition of “I’m not sad anymore” and the general idea of looking at the upsides of life?
It’s not a concept record in that it tells a story or could be made into a musical or anything like that, but it is a concept in the fact that there is an idea behind the record and that idea is moving forward. I like to say that the line “I’m not sad anymore” is less of a victory speech and more of a battle cry. It’s not me actually proclaiming that, but more of a goal that I had in mind and that I’m working towards everyday. Really, I found that a lot of the times when I would get down it was very easy to stay that way and very easy to say, “Okay, I’m depressed and that’s whatever. I fucking hate it.” But then I came to realize that it’s really never as bad as it seems and that the problems I was having, the things that were bumming me out were really very minute issues. And while they do suck, and of course you’re going to react to them negatively, staying mad about them is really futile and doesn’t make any progress and doesn’t help anything. A lot of people have it a lot worse. I’m not saying don’t be upset about your life when it’s upsetting, but you know, try to put it in context is kind of the point of the record. It’s a record about context.
I’m sure a few people were thrown off guard by “Hey Thanks” for the first time they heard it. What was the band’s reasoning to change things up like that towards the end of the record?
My dad bought me a ukulele for my birthday and I was learning to play it slowly and I was living with my girlfriend at the time and I had kind of written the chords, just messing around with it when we were laying in bed and just started singing it to her jokingly, joking around with her. Then I was like, “Oh, that was kinda cool.” And I developed it into a whole song but I never thought it would make the record, so I just didn’t really show anyone for a while. Everyone had moved into the house that she and I lived into together to write the record. We wrote it in the basement at that house in south Philly, and while we were there I was playing it one day and Casey really liked it and there was a lot of talk into turning into a full band song the whole way through, or speeding it up and taking it out of swing time, doing all sorts of different things with it. And then I didn’t want to do that, I liked it on the ukulele, I liked how it does. So it wasn’t on the record, and then it was gonna be on the record, and then it was gonna be a bonus track or a hidden track on the record. We argued about it for a while. And then we demoed it just to demo it and we sent them all to Vince Ratti who produced the record. He was just like, “You guys are dumb if you don’t put this song on the CD, this is great.” So, he came in and we were like, “Here’s the issue we have, it doesn’t really evolve much.” We tried to add full band at the end but we just couldn’t figure it out because it sounds stupid in swing time, cause the whole songs kinda in swing time and he was just like, “Why don’t you just cut to straight time then?” It was an epiphany. And we realized on that down beat we could cut to straight time when the trombone comes in and it just clicked. We played it once and we were like, “That’s it,” and we went and recorded it.
Including “Hey Thanks” there have a few guest appearances on the album, especially in “All My Friends Are In Bar Bands.” Could you elaborate a little on how you got everybody together to sing on “Bar Bands,” including Shane from Valencia and what the song means to you?
To get everyone onto it? A lot of phone calls and there were a couple people who were supposed to be on it who didn’t end up making it out or getting it done in time. But really, it was just like I sent everyone the song with me doing all the vocal parts and then sent them the file without me doing the vocal parts. And just said, “Anywhere you could record it, anybody that you can get it to me, just send me wav’s of your voice.” And so everyone went to a different place. Matty did it in Boston. Nick from Man Overboard did it as his own studio, Small Hill in Jersey. Shane actually went to Skyline, where we did the record, cause he’s friends with Vince and did it there. We were on tour this whole time so I was just calling people and sending emails, like, “Did you get it yet, did you get it yet?” Once we got them all I sent them all to Vince and he mixed it and made it sound great. As far as the idea behind it? It really came to this kind of conclusion where I was repeating this line at the end of the record, “I’m not sad anymore.” And I realized I didn’t want it to just be me. I just didn’t want it to just be me that was carrying the sentiment, I wanted it to be a community thing. Like, this is me and my friends and we’re all not going to just give up. I felt like it was being a trend to let yourself stay depressed, and there are plenty of good reasons to be depressed, but a lot of peoples reasons were kind of ridiculous and I wanted to kind of have this group sentiment saying, not, I’m not sad anymore, but we’re not sad anymore. That we, as a community, could defeat this kind of whole thing.
Get Stoked On It!, lyrically, is a much “lighter” album than The Upsides. Along with the release of Paper Boats, Or Some Poems I Wrote would you say it’s easier to communicate lyrically with every day issues compared to it was a few years back or have you just grown as a writer?
Nick, our new drummer, Matt, and I used to be in a different band. I wrote very serious, very somber lyrics for that. The Wonder Years was the spin-off of that band that we were doing on the side and as a joke. So when we wrote Get Stoked On It!, we just wrote jokes. There’s nothing on that record, well, there are maybe two songs or three songs on that record where I wrote something that mattered, but it was just like, “You know that’s a stupid idea? This. Let’s make it a song.” Then that became really difficult to tour on because it’s very hard to get on stage every night and sing a song about Kool-Aid. To just be like, “Oh, I’ve dedicated my entire life right now, everything. I’ve quit everything and I’m on tour full time so that I can sing these songs about Kool-Aid and Captain Crunch. It was just something that was plaguing me really bad and when we put out Get Stoked On It! we did a couple tours of the record and I was like, “I gotta quit, this sucks, I can’t be in this band.” But I also really wanted to put out a 7”; a goal for the band was that I wanted to do a 7”. And we started writing it and I was like, “I’m not gonna do those kind of lyrics anymore and we’ll see what happens.” The response was pretty positive so I just kind of stuck with that. I just wanted to write literally exactly what I think and feel. Just write it down and sing it. I’m not gonna try to hide it in some metaphoric sentiment. I’m not gonna make it sadder than it is. I’m not gonna make it funnier than it is. I’m not gonna try to separate, because I think that a lot of times I think life is sad and funny at the same time and there’s no reason that if I’m writing a sad song and there’s a funny line that comes up that I should take it out of the song, or a light hearted line. Because if I felt it, and I thought it, and I wrote it down, then obviously it was a real emotion and I’m not going to try to hide those real emotions. So that’s kind of how the lyrical style came about.
Paper Boats, Or Some Poems I Wrote is obviously a very personal thing that you and No Sleep Records released together. Was it difficult to release that to anyone who wanted to have it?
Paper Boats was neat in a lot of ways, and easy because I got three college credits for it. It worked out that my last semester of school I had to take eighteen credits to finish because in time. Two of them had to be senior seminars, and they just had to be all really high level classes because it was my last semester and this beautiful individual of a man named Stan McDonald, who actually writes under the name Stan Mir, is a poet and teacher at my school agreed to let me work with him as an independent study for my classes, where we would read and critique poetry and literature that was based around alternative culture and kind of the punk-rock community and poets that are respected in that community. And then he would read my work and decide what poetry it reminded him of and we would go back and forth and he would critique my work and we would put together this book. And then at the end of the semester in order to get credit for it, we would release the book. I convinced No Sleep to do it and that’s what we did. So, it was a great experience because I got to work with someone who I really trusted as a poet, who really knew his work, and who got to open me up to a lot of new poetry like Bruce Andrews and a lot of really great poets. He was one of the people that obviously influenced the writing of Upsides lyrically, because he was the person that said originally, “Why is this poem sad and this poem happy but they were the same day? You were feeling both of them, why did you separate them into two poems. Why don’t you just be honest?” So yeah, Stan was really helpful in that and because I was coming out with his help and his backing and I knew that I had to release it in order to finish college, it was just out, there it is. We did two or three hundred right away and they sold out before pre-orders were gone. We did another hundred for Europe; those were gone by the time we got back. And then we did another one with The Upsides, we did 150, those were gone in like a couple of days. But someone bootlegged and scanned it and it is online on a blog, you can find it if you want to read it.
Was college always something that you definitely wanted to finish before you committed to the band full time?
Some days I really wanted it done. Some days I was ready to just quit and head back on tour, but we had a lot of pressures from a lot of different people in our lives. Some of them wanted to stay home and go to college and some people wanted us to go on tour and I think everyone in the band did their best in order to appease all parties at all times. I’m glad that I finished school; I’m really excited to one day be done with this and start teaching. I was just talking to someone a minute ago that I really am excited to be influencing the lives of students and making a difference in bad neighborhoods and working in urban areas and trying to do my part to change the world and I needed a degree to do that and I have that degree, so.
To finish things up, in a year from now where would you like to see The Wonder Years?
I really would just like to hang out with Mark Hoppus. I say it in every interview. I don’t care where we are in a year from now, if I get to hang out with Mark Hoppus, just once, just one day, whatever. Everything else is fine.
POZ: I’d like to hang out with Mark Hoppus.
Soupy: Just once. So, if anyone knows Mark Hoppus…I say this literally at the end of every interview, please tell him I want to hang out with him. I really want to be your friend man.
