PropertyOfZack spoke to Shaun Cooper of Taking Back Sunday just a few weeks ago towards the end of their summer headlining tour for a great interview. Shaun and I discussed touring with Thursday ten years later, how the band’s chemistry has grown since the original lineup was reinstated, reaction to the new album, and more. Read up and enjoy!

The bands first headlining tour in support of your new self-titled album is just a few days away from coming to a close. Can you discuss how the tour has been?
It’s been amazing. We left home on June 9^th so we’ve been out a long time and I feel like every night gets better than the one before it, really. We’re just really happy to be on tour with Thursday who are great friends of ours and are a phenomenal band. The Colour Revolt are amazing guys too along with The New Regime. It’s been a lot of fun and there have been a lot of hot sweaty shows. It feels like the old days and we’re just having a blast.

It must be a really interesting run of dates for you and John considering that Thursday is on the tour. By that I mean that Taking Back Sunday and Thursday were really breaking open when you left the band, and now you’re touring with them all this time later with two distinct different sounds. Is it just amazing how things can pick back up where they left off?
It’s so rewarding to be out with these guys. Adam says it every night on stage, he’s like, “We would not have had a record deal if it wasn’t for Thursday paving the road and doing their thing.” They really paved the way for us and it’s such a rewarding thing that we get to be on tour with them and get to watch them every night.

Geoff from Thursday recently said that he thinks its really great that the fans every night can respect both Thursday and Taking Back Sunday’s new music even though it’s so different from each other. Have the fans been really receptive to the entire tour package?
You can see kids starting to really respond to Colour Revolt too, who is a totally different from us and Thursday. There are a lot of die-hard Thursday and Taking Back Sunday fans, so when you have opening bands you don’t really know if the audience will respond or really even care because of all our history. I really feel like Colour Revolt are picking up a lot of momentum and it’s really great to see because we were really big fans of them before this tour. To see them picking up steam like they have has been such a cool thing.

How many new songs have you guys worked into the set list?
I think we’re playing five tonight for the first time. It’s been four for the bulk of the tour though. We’ve been playing 19-song sets and even 21-songs other nights. We’re playing a good set where we’re covering everything. It’s the most fun playing the new songs, but we want to make sure that everyone leaves the show happy. They paid a good amount of money for the ticket and we don’t want them leaving unhappy. We want them to hear all the songs that they want to hear.

You’ve been back in the band touring for over a year now, but you’ve only been playing new songs for the past three or so months. How has it been for you to get out there and share with fans what you worked so hard on?
We worked so hard on the record and spent so much time fine-tuning and writing the songs and making sure we had the best performances we could and did everything we wanted to. We’re so proud of that record. We were so cooped up writing and recording it for the better part of the year that to get on the road and to play shows is a reward in itself. Hearing kids sing along to it has been great. It feels like every song the next night is louder and louder. It feels amazing.

The band released the new self-titled album on June 28^th via Warner and it charted at within the top 20 on Billboard. Regardless of the actual amount of copies that the album sold, was it a great feeling to be up there?
We know that we’re rebuilding. We knew a lot of Taking Back Sunday fans didn’t respond that well to New Again, so we’re coming back from that now and we want to bust our asses. We love this band and we love what we’re doing, and we want to make that evident and give people the shows of their lives. We want to promote the hell out of this record and we’re ready to do work. We didn’t know what to expect, but for us this is only the beginning. We’re only going to get better and write better songs because we’re happy to be doing it together again.

So many people were excited when you and John rejoined the band, but it then sort of came into a split of fans getting excited for new music and fans getting hopefully for a reincarnation of Tell All Your Friends. Has that been difficult for you guys to handle at all?
People still go crazy for those songs and we’re happy to play them. If it weren’t for that record we wouldn’t be here. The response to the new songs has been so good. Although people hold that record with a special place in their heart, I think we’re starting to do that again with this record. We wrote it the exact same way of us hashing out ideas. I feel like the energy from Tell All Your Friends is evident on the self-titled record as well. The kids who get it really, really get it and they’ve been so passionate about it. We know that it’s the start. We’re going to start writing new songs and keep going from there. I think the people who expected Tell All Your Friends II are gone already. They’re not coming to shows and aren’t interested in the band anymore. All the people that are left are so passionate. We’re doing two shows in Detroit, two shows in Chicago, and we did four in LA. There is a wildly huge amount of people that care about what we’re doing and it’s an amazing thing.

The five of you guys have really only been working together for a year and a few months and are still taking everything one step at a time. Do you still find yourselves meshing together better as a band from month to month?
We played so few shows after John and I were back in the band to let people know we were back. Now we’re focusing on the touring and we’re a finely tuned machine. The first shows were a little shaky and we had a lot of days off so we could keep speed, but now we’ve got five shows in a row and I feel like we’re on now and we’re not going to go off. We know what we’re doing and I’m not afraid to get hit in the head by Adam’s mic anymore. I know where he’s gonna be and how far that mics gonna go. We’ve got that down to a science too. I think we’re starting to click.

You personally were all but saying goodbye to music after Straylight Run and were even getting ready to sell your gear. Has it been challenging at all to get completely thrown back in it, or are you more happy than anything?
I posted a blog about how I was retiring from music. I have a lot of friends in bands, but they all have bass players. No one looks for a bass player. Everyone has a good friend who’s a good guitar player that can get by on bass. What I do is a specific thing and there are only a certain amount of things I can do. I’m not a session dude; I need to be in a band with my friends who are making music. For me to make the sacrifices I need to be I need to be surrounded by the people that I love. We weren’t sure that this was going to work out, so we regrouped and sat down and hashed everything out and starting writing songs and realized it was working on all levels. For us to have seven years apart and to get back into it was a shocking thing and I don’t understand it, but I’m taking the ride.

There was a lot of talk within everyone from the band discussing that the current lineup was going to be an on-going test to see if things meshed, and if it didn’t, Taking Back Sunday would finally come to an end. Are things going as everyone hoped they would at this point?
There have been shows that have been rough. The crowd in Myrtle Beach was huge, but it’s a vacation town and a lot of people spent the whole day at the beach. So when they came to a show at 10PM they were a little tired. We had to work really, really hard to win that crowd over and we could see it by how they were acting to Colour Revolt and Thursday and we knew that it’d be a rough one. Everyone helps each other out. Everyone has their down days when they’re missing their family and friends and want to be home and not surrounded by twelve other dudes. We make light of the situation. I definitely have my off days where I’m feeling bad and not in the mood. I’ve had a cough for like three weeks since we’re in the same circulating air bus. There’s someone always there to pick me up and I know that they’re always there for me.

A music video was recently released for “Faith (When I Let You Down)” and it was certainly something no one quite expected. Was it fun shooting that, and have fans been into it?
Our good friend directed it and he did a Black Keys video and our video got postponed a week because he was working on Britney Spears’s latest video. He came up with a crazy concept and we were so excited about it. He sent the treatment and we thought it was incredible. He showed us shots of the cat costume and we freaked out. I thought it was going to be some thrift store cat costume. I knew it’d be really funny and a little dark. When we saw the first cut of the video we knew it was great. We were thrilled about it.

Following this tour you guys will be heading over to the UK with The New Regime and The Xcerts. Are you excited for the dates?
We were supposed to do the dates a while ago, but we had a scheduling conflict. I’ve never played any shows as big as Reading and Leeds in my life, so I’m really excited. The UK has always been good to this band and Straylight Run, so it’s a pleasure to go back.

When will we see more tour dates announced?
Things are starting to come together for September. It’s coming together now, but we’ll definitely have some more dates. We want to tour this thing into the ground. We’re having so much fun out here. I think we’re going to be busy until Christmas and then we may have a break. We want to tour until the wheels fall off and then we’ll write another record.

It’s so far out, but are you guys excited to continue to write together?
When we’re home we constantly miss each other, so after a few weeks home after the tour cycle we’ll go stir-crazy and we’ll want to write and get back into. That’s the kind of mentality we have. We can’t wait.