PropertyOfZack interviewed Alan from Four Year Strong when the Warped Tour pulled into Long Island. Check out the interview to read up on Alan discussing Warped, their deluxe album release, and music video news, both good and bad! It’s a great read, don’t miss out.
For the record, could you state your name and role in Four Year Strong?
My name is Alan and I sing and play guitar in Four Year Strong
The Warped Tour is above half way over. Can you tell us about your time off and on the stage so far?
Off the stage is great. I’m outdoors all day. I get to hang out with some of my best friends all day, every day and eat good food. On the stage is amazing because the shows are incredible. It’s not fun that it’s so hot, but the shows are amazing, the kids who come out to Warped Tour are great.
What would you say is your favorite thing about Warped Tour?
Maybe the catering.
POZ: We’ve heard, we’ve heard.
How has fan reception been?
Great. Way better than we had hoped. We released this new record kind of recently and this is our second full US tour since it came out and it went even better than the last tour we did. It’s been out a little bit longer, growing on people.
The band released a deluxe version of Enemy Of The World right as Warped was starting. When exactly did you guys record the acoustic tracks for that album?
Pretty recently. I think we did it right before the tour.
Four Year Strong often does acoustic sets, but is it cool to finally have some real recorded acoustic tracks to play?
It was a lot of fun to do. I listen to a lot of acoustic kind of stuff. So it was really fun to put that creative life. To get the creative juices flowing on something else. It was a relief I guess. We were like “Screw it, we’re gonna do whatever we want with these.” We did tambourines, we even got a cello…stuff that we don’t normally do in Four Year Strong. It was lots of fun.
Enemy Of The World has only been out for 4 months, but the reception has been that it’s going to go down as one of the top pop-punk records of the year. How’s do you guys feel about that huge positive reaction?
It’s great. We love the new record. We put a lot of work into it and we’re really proud of what the outcome was, and the fact that the fans dig it, it’s amazing. I mean, if it is one of the best pop-punk records of the year that’d be perfect. That’s exactly what we hoped for.
Before Warped you traveled over to Britain for the Slam Dunk Festival as well as the Enemy Of The World Tour. Can you tell us a little bit about those?
The Slam Dunk Festival in England was amazing. It was one of the best festivals we’ve played, especially over seas. It was just so much fun, the shows were unbelievable. It was great. All of England, Scotland, and everything was amazing. Then we went over to Europe for the Enemy Of Europe Tour, which was awesome. There hasn’t been a single complaint. It wasn’t tons and tons of kids at the mainland Europe shows, but it was only our second time over there and our first time headlining, so we didn’t know what to expect so if anyone at all came out to the shows we we’re gonna be excited.
As time keeps moving forward how has your time with Universal/Motown been?
It’s been great. Nothing has really changed as far as the horror stories people hear about major labels. Some guy in a suit telling you what to do, changing who you are. It’s not like that at all. We’re still Four Year Strong doing things how we want to do it. We still make all the decisions. We just have an awesome team behind us helping us make them.
Pete Wentz recently did an interview with Alternative Press to strictly discuss Decaydance. He named Four Year Strong as one of the label’s second-generation bands, but that your live show reminds him of Fall Out Boy circa Take This To Your Grave. Can you tell us a little bit about your relationship with Pete and Decaydance and how much of a role they still play with you?
We love Pete. We’ve been friends for a long time. We started working with Decaydance because of friendship and we knew he was a guy that worked really hard for what he got and we knew he would do the same thing for us and I mean it just kind of took off from there. And we’re never gonna forget about that. We still work with them. We’ve never gotten rid of who’s worked with us. We’ve always just keep adding and adding. And everyone we work with we love and wouldn’t trade for the world.
The band recently shot a video for “Saturday” and from what we can tell it’s kind of a revolutionary war theme. Where did that idea come from?
It came from Josh Lyford’s brilliant mind, our keyboard player. We all wanted to do something kind of like that, but he came up with the whole idea. It was so much fun to make. Definitely the best video Four Year Strong has made.
When should we expect to see it released?
I haven’t even seen a final version yet, but it’s coming along. It’s happening, so hopefully really soon.
Is there any more info on the “Wasting Time” video or should fans sit back and not expect a release soon?
It is going to be released at some point. We kind of just got screwed over. The guy that was supposed to do a lot of the editing for it totally screwed us over and after not returning anyone’s phone calls for a month finally got back to us and said he needs three more months and $25,000 more dollars. And we’re like, we don’t have that kind of money and it totally screwed us over. Now it makes us look dumb because we did the video and all these advertisements for it. So it was a sticky mess, but we’re doing our best to get things moving and find someone else to finish it for us.
After Warped is over will we be seeing summer tour dates? When will they be announced?
We want to do a tour in the fall, a headlining tour. It’s still in the works. We don’t know what’s going on with that, but we’ll be definitely going out.
Are there any more plans to go back to Europe soon?
Uh, yeah, I think so. We really want to. Still in the works, but no solid plans yet.
And pushing into the winter, just more touring or do you have your hearts on something else?
Time off [Laughs]. Tour, tour, tour, tour, tour. I’m sure we’ll do more touring, we always tour. Even when we’re not touring we’re talking about planning touring, so I’m sure we’ll be out.
Thanks so much for your time, is there anything else you’d like to add?
Just to anyone who’s reading or hearing this, come to shows. Support music like this. It’s a great thing, so support it.
*This interview was conducted by Emily Coch
