PropertyOfZack had a chance to sit down with Chris from Hostage Calm a few weeks ago after their show with The Bouncing Souls and it turned into a great interview. Chris and I discussed recent touring, their fantastic same sex marriage idea, new music, future touring, and more. Read up and enjoy!

The band just played with The Bouncing Souls for their discography show in New York City. How was it?
We opened the show, and it was definitely an honor to be playing with The Bouncing Souls. If you’ve had anything to do with punk in the last twenty years you like The Bouncing Souls, so it’s definitely an honor to play with them. It was really cool to play with Dave Hause as well, and we had a fun time. It was fun, but I’m expecting kids to really set it off later when The Bouncing Souls play honestly.

Before this Hostage Calm went out on a short run with Fireworks and Mixtapes and played a record release show with The Wonder Years as well. How was that tour and special show?
The Wonder Years release show was definitely the best show we ever played in Philly. That was just a fucking great show, it had a great atmosphere. We had a great time, and it was great seeing kids go off and having fun, and it’s in honor of a band that I think is doing a lot of great things right now. I fucking 100% loved that whole tour with Fireworks and Mixtapes; they were all great people, and the whole thing was one long joke. We were always fucking in character or joking around. Luke, who is always with us, posted his phone number on Twitter and Hellogoodbye reposted it or something, so he kept getting all these phone calls from people. We made good friends with Fireworks and Mixtapes. We’ve always joked that we had a future as a comedy rock band, but Ryan could probably make the greatest comedy rock band of all time.

As awesome as all this touring was for the band, what’s more exciting as of late has probably been you teaming up with AltPress for same sex marriage in New York a few weeks ago. When did you start talking to AP and Mike Shea about the idea?
It happened really fast. We saw that it was coming to a vote and it didn’t immediately hit our minds, but we saw that these senators were on the fence. We had this idea about what if they got a few hundred emails from people who were fans of us. We had that idea and then got in touch with AltPress and they were really stoked on it and made it happen fucking overnight. So we wrote the letter that got sent in, did a bunch of little preparatory things, and then we just posted it everywhere once it was up. Over 3,000 emails were sent to them, and I remember watching the actual senate debate of the bill, and each one of the senators said that they received thousands of emails that influenced their decision. There were all these sentences flashing on the screen that are things I had always wanted to hear my government say. So many politicians dance around these things, and to have these Republican senators come out and say it was awesome. They didn’t hundreds of thousands of emails, they said they got thousands. So all those people that raised their voices were heard. That’s one of the proudest things we’ve ever done with the band. It gave us a lot of confidence in how much our band could do in trying to help spark change. It made us think that a lot of wild ideas that we’ve had might be worth trying out. We thought we’d sell a few of our “I Support Same Sex Marriage” t-shirts, but it’s been our best selling t-shirt. So now kids are just walking around going to shows with this shirt and that’s the kind of proud, open-declaration of support for same sex marriage that we always wanted to see in punk.

Hostage Calm is obviously a highly socially aware band, which is the reason you even threw that together, but what do small victories for these mean to the band? Especially when you are involved in it in some way.
I think this is a highpoint. In an album like that you’re able to articulate all your thoughts in a poetic way, but we’ve done stuff in the past like benefits, but this just felt like people really standing up in the moment and showing an outpouring for support. It’s different than kids stage-diving at a show; it’s kids directly working for that exact change that they want to see in the world. They raised their voices in support of a movement across this country that was successful in helping change those senators mind and the vote. That’s something that we’ve always wanted to do with our band, but you just don’t know how.

Did you expect that many signatures?
We expected a few hundred. We knew people would stand up and support it because it’s a big part of our band, and if you’re a fan of our band you’d get that. Over three thousand was crazy.

Did you see a lot of great talk from people who weren’t necessarily fans or didn’t know about Hostage Calm before this?
In some ways it probably represented punk. People didn’t know our band, but it was a punk band standing up to this, and maybe that got them excited. I think that it being an AltPress thing made it so it was universal. I hope that they can learn more from the band. We definitely hoped it would break people into our lyrics, but I definitely fucking give much respect to them for doing that.  You don’t have to take an ethical stance as a magazine like that. You have readers that aren’t reading you because of political views and they might be turned off by that, and I think that’s really fucking admirable that they did that.

The band has a few shows in the next week or so with Senses Fail. Are you looking forward to opening up for them?
I think those are going to be awesome. We played with Senses Fail in New Hampshire and I could have never imagined a show going to well in New Hampshire. We’re really happy to be on tour with them, and I feel like their fans are really open-minded. They were all really nice to us too.

Following that, there aren’t really any dates going on. When can we expect to see a new tour announced?
There’s stuff that’s being discussed. We will be out again in the fall sometime in late-October. Details for that are being worked out, and we’ll be really stoked to announce it. There will be one-offs here and there that we haven’t planned yet.

Last time we spoke you mentioned2 a single would be released via Run For Cover this month. Is that still the plan?
The announcement should be soon. We’re releasing a b-side called “Donna Lee” from the self-titled sessions. It didn’t come out on the record, but it’s a song we all really like. I’m glad it’s getting its due release. We have a single coming out on the Run For Cover comp it.

The band has also done pre-production on twenty or so songs. Have more songs been demoed out since then?
We’ve been working on those songs and reviewing lyrics. We don’t expect to use all of them. At some point we’ll probably cut a bunch and rest on a final album when the time comes. We’ve worked more on those songs.

How would you say they’re sounding compared to the last record?
I think it’s better obviously, but I think people who like the self-titled record will like this record. It is different though. I think it’s going to have the excitement of self-titled, but I don’t think it’s going to be as mind-blowing of a change. People would be bummed if we made the same album because they’d expect us to grow.

Do you want to record this year?
I don’t know when we’ll record. We’re in a position that we’ll take any tour we can. We’ll record our album when we have down time, but we’re not going to take time off from playing shows.

After the fall do you guys just want to keep touring?
I think that we’ll stay pretty active. We took a little time off this summer, but I think we’ll do a national tour and all that.