PropertyOfZack had the opportunity to interview Matt McGinley from Gym Class Heroes just a week or two ago, and it turned into a great discussion. Matt and I discussed how it was breaking back into touring via Warped Tour, the type of record The Papercut Chronicles II is turning out to be, the direction the band wants to head in three years after their last release, and so much more. Read up and enjoy, it’s a great conversation! 

For the record, could you state your name and role in Gym Class Heroes?
I’m Matt McGinley, and I play the drums in Gym Class Heroes.

Gym Class Heroes have been out on Warped Tour for a few weeks now and have about one more week left. Can you describe the dates?
It’s been awesome. This is our fifth year being a part of it in some capacity. The first time was probably in 2005, and we played a little tiny small stage that was truly a tent off in the corner of the festival. It’s been a really cool progression for us to transition from being a little side attraction to being a main stage headliner. This year’s been similar to the last few. We’ve had a really good crowd, we take infrequent showers, and have barbeques every night. It’s been awesome.

It’s been quite some time since Gym Class really did a tour, and this is a pretty great way to jump back into things. How has it been just getting your feet wet again?
Absolutely. It’s a pretty gnarly tour to use to dive back into it. Like you mentioned, we took a little time off, so we went balls deep into it. It’s been cool. A lot of people describe Warped Tour as a boot camp, and I think that’s an incredibly appropriate comparison. I think in a way all of the tours that we have coming up this fall seem like a piece of cake compared to this. It’s exciting to consider what we have going on in the fall and being able to resume a somewhat familiar lifestyle on the road. I’m looking forward to coming back to all these cities and being able to go get something to eat and hang around. Warped Tour isn’t like that, but we really try to make the most of it. It would be very easy to sit back and relax all day and go on stage for a half hour and then go back to our bus. We really try to make the most of it by doing one or two signings a day where we can interact with our fans and all the kids who come out to Warped Tour. We do a lot of acoustic performances where we’ll play completely different material than we’ll play in our live set too. Warped Tour, in terms of a working standpoint, is really what you want to make of it. If you’re the type of band that’s content to sit back and play then that’s cool, but for us, we take the same approach that we took six years ago when we were on the tour for the first time. We just try to grind it out and take every opportunity that is offered or available.

Have you seen an extra amount of excitement from fans because it has been a minute since you guys have toured?We’re definitely seeing familiar faces fro people who have been coming out to the shows since we started touring. It’s also crazy to see how the audiences have changed. Travis polls the audience about how many people were seeing Gym Class for the first time and it’s astounding to see how many people are just being exposed to our band. We put a lot of miles in over the years and have had success on the radio and I think that’s made us really available to people, but it’s astounding to see how many more people are out there that are just being exposed to us. That’s super exciting because we pride ourselves on putting on a really compelling live show. It’s great to know that there are still new fans being made every day.

How has “Stereo Hearts” been going over live?
It’s been going great. We moved it around the set list quite a bit to see where it was getting the biggest response. We wound up closing with it because it’s a great song to hold off on. We’ve found a lot of ways to really crank the song up a notch and to elevate the energy. We’ve also been doing it acoustically, which is really fun. We’re trying to take the approach of working out more thoughtful acoustic arrangements as opposed to just sitting behind guitars and playing drums with brushes and reinterpreting the same exact parts. We’ve taken the time to make things flow a little more.

The new record is called The Papercut Chronicles II, which obviously has fans extremely excited, but the song doesn’t necessarily sound totally like one would expect it to as a continuation of Papercut. Will the remaining songs have that same vibe?
I think “Stereo Hearts” is the ugly duckling amongst the rest of Papercut Chronicles II, but even when people buy the new record we sort of developed an entirely different identity to that song to make it blend better amongst the darker tones and eeriness.

The band has also been playing another new song on Warped Tour. How has that been going over?
It’s exciting because that’s a song that’s on the new album, but we wrote it close to two years ago. It’s weird to have a song that you’re so familiar with and suddenly get to turn people on to it. It’s exciting to play that every day. I feel like that’s an important song to sum up the album too. That was the first song that we wrote. I feel like a lot of the darkness and the moodiness of that song set the tone for a lot of the other songs.

The album is supposed to be out in September, but can we expect that it’s been pushed back to October just because everything has yet to be completed?
It’s one of those things where it will be out when it’s finished. We haven’t been rushing to stamp a release date on it. We want to make sure what we’re putting out is our absolute best and we’re not just settling for something because some guy behind a desk told us we had to have our album deadline met by a certain date. I think it’s one of those things where we’re trying to make sure that we’re all the way satisfied. By ensuring that we’re satisfied, that’s going to make sure our fans are stoked with the album. When we decided to write this album we set the bar pretty high for where our standards were. I think if anything that’s why it’s taken a little time because we want to make sure this album lives up to the idea that people might have.

Can you discuss what there’s left to do as far as tracking goes?
Travis has been doing some recording while we’re on Warped Tour. There’s a studio bus that travels around with the tour called the John Lennon Studio Project. It’s one of the sickest recording studios ever just crammed into a little bus. It’s pretty impressive. He’s been doing vocals on the road, so that’s allowed us to be productive while on tour. It’s difficult sometimes because we want to be on tour playing for kids, but it inhibits our studio creativity, but having access like that has been a pretty humongous luxury.

How many total songs are going to be on the record?
We wrote over 30 tracks for the album. We’re making sure we harvest the right ones for the final cut. We want to make sure that everything feels appropriate to the concept of the album. It could be as many as 18 and as few as 11. Whatever makes for the most cohesive album sonically is what it’ll end up being.

When can we expect to hear another new song?
I’m not sure. “Stereo Hearts” is doing really good things for us, so we’re trying to push that and we hope that’ll put us in a good position for the fall with the album release. Some of the new stuff that we’ve been playing live is available on YouTube, which is not ideal, but it gives kids an idea of where we’re headed.

A lot of the music scene has sort of changed since 2008. What direction is the band hoping to head in now? On one hand you’re in the top ten on iTunes, but on the other Papercut is sort of an album that has a feeling to be for the fans.
Musically, we’re revisiting a lot of stuff. We’re trying to capture that moody/dark vibe. There are a lot of little elements from the original Papercut that we bring back for Papercut II, and we hint at it, but then take it another place. We have a song called “Kid Nothing Vs. The Echo Factor” on Papercut, and on the new album we essentially have the sequel to that song. The song starts off where the original song left off, but then it goes somewhere new. I think with doing a sequel album it allows us to touch on a lot of things that we wanted to. Lyrically, Travis does much the same by revisiting topics. It’s been fun and it’s been an interesting album to make. It’s been really good to focus our writing. Sometimes we just jam and see what comes out, but with this album we knew what we wanted.