Interview with Matt Rubano of Taking Back Sunday
Taking Back Sunday has had a pretty great year so far– releasing a well-received new album, New Again, and opening up for newly reunited Blink 182. I was able to sit down and have a talk with Matt Rubano, TBS’s bassist about touring, the new album, and… jazz music? Click the jump to read the full interview!
For our readers who may not know you, would you mind stating your name and position in the band?
My name is Matt Rubano and I play the bass guitar and sing a tiny little bit.
Your new album, New Again, came out back in June. How has the feedback been?
Really good! We’re on tour right now with Blink 182 and Weezer, and before that we went over to the UK and Europe and we were noticing that some of the reactions to the songs off of New Again have actually been more intense than those for some of the older songs we play. But before that we did a six week tour of the states. Kind of an album release tour, and it went really well. With the nature of the internet, people are like, hip to your record before it even comes out, so that’s somewhat advantageous. We were able to go on tour and start playing the new songs, and people have already heard them and they’re excited to hear them live, so with a fan base like ours it’s really a kind of cool thing.
Do you have any stories of these “intense reactions”? Did any fans go really crazy, or did anything generally funny happen out on tour?
The funny thing is, well, it’s not so much of an intense reaction… but when you first start to play a new song live and you haven’t recorded it yet and people are sort of pretending to sing along. Like, you know, when we play a song for the first time ever and it’s never been performed or recorded and there are kids in the front row like [moves mouth as if to pretend he’s singing], and you just know that there’s no possible way they could know the song. But I guess it’s flattering, nonetheless, because they want to be a part of it… But an actual reaction was that a lot of people during the December tour that we did were coming to numerous shows on the tour, so we’d see people maybe four nights in a row, and by the second or third night they’d actually know the song just from hearing it, so that was really exciting for us.
How did you get involved with such a huge tour with Blink 182 and Weezer?
We toured with Blink once before on their last tour before the hiatus or their little split up moment… Being invited to that, too, was a huge trip for us, so having another invitation to go out on the road with them was really nice and really exciting. The shows have been super fun. They’re all sold out. They’re all massive 15 to 20 thousand person venues. We just played Jones Beach [Long Island, NY] a couple of nights ago, which is huge. It’s great! It’s really awesome getting to be on tour with two bands that are such huge hit machines. You know, it’s like, once Weezer goes on it’s like listening to the radio for the rest of the night because it’s all songs that you’ve heard… Between Weezer and Blink’s sets, it’s songs that you’ve heard millions of times. It’s really an experience, and it’s fun for us, also. These are bands that when we were much much younger, really influenced us. To be walking down the hallways and through the dressing rooms with them is just a trip.
So, touring with Weezer, what to do you think of their matching outfits?
[Laughs] It looks like they’re going for the unity vibe! They have this big, gold backdrop that just says “Weezer” on it and night after night they’ve been rocking these different kind of jumpsuits… jogging suits… weird kind of things. But it’s always uniform which is pretty sweet! Way to have a tight look!
Is it any different for you to be playing huge shows, like the shows on the Bink tour, as opposed to smaller club shows that you guys usually play?
I mean, you have to focus yourself a little bit differently. You know, we try to give the same amount of effort to every performance, which sounds a little cheesy, but it’s true. We don’t go into a small show any less excited than any one of those shows, but you kind of have to project a little bit more to everyone instead of just the people who are like, right there. But we’ve been lucky enough over the years that we’ve had enough varied experiences in both types of shows – from playing clubs and theaters, to playing huge arenas, and stadiums, and festivals as big as 50, 60, 70 thousand, so yeah, they’re different in that way, but not in regards to how you would approach it.
Why did you guys decide to throw in this date [Bay Stage headlining show, Long Island, NY], considering you’ve already had a really busy summer?
We haven’t played Long Island in a long time. We also felt and we were noticing that a lot of people who wanted to come see us weren’t able to get into the Blink shows because they sold out really quickly. So, for us to be playing our hometown with Blink and to have a lot of our audience not be able to get tickets… we didn’t want to ditch people and shut people out. It turned out that the Blink tour is off today, and we resume again with them tomorrow, so we just figured while we’re still on the east coast we would do it.
You’re new single is going to be “Where My Mouth Is”, right? Do you have any plans to release a video for it any time soon, or any idea about when it will be sent to radio?
Yeah, we’re going to do both. We’re still working on a [video] treatment right now, but we’re probably gonna shoot the video around the end of September, maybe. Hopefully that song takes over the world. I have really high hopes for that song because it’s a song that’s kind of a landmark for us, and it’s something that I’d like to see people respond to.
Well, for your last video, “Sink Into Me”, there was sort of a more literal concept with the band and the fans sinking into black slime. Who came up with that idea?
When we set out to do videos and stuff, sometimes, Adam [Lazzara; vocalist] especially, wants to always do stuff that’s really dirty. When we started talking to Travis Kopach, who directed the video, it was kind of like this group decision that the idea had fit the song and that it would be cool to actually be sinking into the stage. It was a fun video, but yeah, I’ll never work with that stuff again.
What’s your favorite song from New Again to play live?
I really like playing “Lonely, Lonely”, and now that the single-pressure sort of thing has worn off, I really like playing “Sink Into Me”. Also, of course, I love playing “Where My Mouth Is” because it’s sort of a more dynamic moment in the set. There’s no other moment like that. It’s a really ballad-like, slow kind of song, as opposed to everything else which is much faster.
One of the opening bands tonight is Envy on the Coast. You guys seem to play with them pretty often! How did that friendship come about?
I guess [the friendship formed] from being fellow Long Islanders and from just playing our first show with them… I mean, one of the cool things about being in bands and getting to put tours together is that you get to pick who you’re going to tour with. You always want to be doing it with people that you musically want to endorse, as well as guys that are friends of yours and fun to be around. We did a tour with them in December, and then when it came time for us to go out with Anberlin again for the release of the record, we just figured why not? Let’s bring Envy again. We even tried to take them over to Europe the last time we went, but they were making their record… We love their band, musically and personally, so we try to give our opening spots to bands that we think people should know and we think are pretty cool, also.
Well, aside from Envy on the Coast, what other bands do you really enjoy at the moment?
I’ve been listening to Dead Weather, which is a band with Jack White [The White Stripes/The Raconteurs]. I really like his music. I also listen to this Japanese band called Toe. It’s instrumental music. I listen to a lot of really different things. I’m currently trying to get my hands on music from this band called Them Crooked Vultures, which is a project including Dave Grohl [Foo Fighters/Nirvana], Josh Homme [Queens of the Stone Age], and John Paul Jones [Led Zeppelin], but I don’t think it’s been recorded or released yet… It’s funny, though, because when I’m on tour and around a lot of loud music all the time I really value quiet time, so throwing on some headphones and listening to music when I’m home is something I do all the time, but sometimes out here I need some peace and quiet just to balance out the intensity of the music and the volume.
Is it true that you’re a big fan of hip hop, or did your appreciation for hip hop grow at all after recording with Lauryn Hill?
I mean, I’m very selective with what I like when it comes to hip-hop. My music background centers a lot around jazz, r&b, and motown, so hip-hop was kind of a natural evolution for me growing up on Long Island where there’s Public Enemy, Busta Rhymes… there’s so many artists from Long Island, the Bronx, Queens, Brooklyn… all over New York.
Not in Staten Island, of course! [laughter] [Staten Island is the hometown of MoshToThis.]
Well, Staten Island has Wu Tang! I mean, New York as a whole is really the birth place of a lot of hip-hop, and started that whole east coast-west coast argument… But yeah, I don’t really like a lot of the more recent stuff. I mean, I’m not down with [laughs] – I’m not really finding myself gravitating towards singing about whips, and jewelry, and clubs and shit like that. It’s not really reality, though.
You mentioned you’re into jazz! What’s the deal with the jazz group you’re part of, Schleigho?
Schleigho is an instrumental quartet that I was in years and years ago. Sometimes I still play shows with them and, I mean, it’s a much smaller thing, but it was something that I did sort of after music school, and it’s kind of hard to describe unless you have a reference point. It’s kind of hard to get unless you have an interest very, very, very heavy improv and like instrumental work. But they’re all really great guys and they’re really fun guys to play with.
On a similar note, but geared more towards Taking Back Sunday… How has the band changed since Matt Fazzi joined the band? What differences did he bring to the table during the writing of the new album, and how has his influence changed or shaped the band?
Well, Matt brought a lot of really great things to the band. Particularly his open-mindedness and what he’s like as a person. He’s really become one of my closest and best friends in such a short time. He’s really a monster of a musician, and he’s a great person, so having someone like that bring their energy to the band really changes things and gets a reaction from everyone and everything else.
Well, his prior band, Facing New York, is extremely different from Taking Back Sunday in terms of sound. Has his work with Facing New York, or has bits and pieces of their style carried over to Taking Back Sunday at all?
I mean, it gives us a little bit of confidence to do some really new or adventurous kinds of things… Like, we tried a lot of different time signatures or vocal harmonies that we previously had kind of shied away from. Facing New York is actually much more compatible with something like Schleigho, so that gives Matt and I a bit of a common ground, and we kind of approach things the same way, but we’re not trying to turn Taking Back Sunday into that. Taking Back Sunday is still a song writing first kind of thing…but yeah, I’ve never been happier than I’ve been since we’ve had Matt in the band.
What’s in store for Taking Back Sunday for the rest of the year?
Well, we’re going to be touring a lot. Basically for the rest of the summer and hopefully for the rest of 2009. We’re going to Australia, Hawaii, and a bunch of places that we’ve never been before. That’s a big goal for us. We want to try to get to a bunch of new countries and stuff. We’ve even talked about trying to do an acoustic tour, so that might go down at some point…
On that note, is there anything else you’d like to add or say to your fans about the rest of the year for you guys, or just on behalf of the band in general?
We’re just so happy to be playing music. It’s my whole life. Thank you for making that possible.
