There are lots of new and exciting things happening in the world of rockers Taking Back Sunday. Their new album titled New Again drops June 2. They’re out on a new tour which is giving many of their fans their first glimpse at the newest member, guitarist and backing vocalist, Matthew Fazzi. And this is just the beginning of all the many surprises Taking Back Sunday has in store fans. Bethany chatted with Fazzi about the band and new album before their City Market show in KC. Check out the interview below:
Bethany, PopWreckoning: I know you’re newer to Taking Back Sunday. Have you played you ever played Kansas City before?
Matthew Fazzi, Taking Back Sunday: I want to say no. I don’t think so. Sometimes it is hard to remember, but I don’t think I have been.
PW: Well, you’ll have to be sure to check out the city after the show.
MF: Yeah! Do you have any suggestions?
PW: What do you like to do?
MF: I’m vegetarian, so if you know any vegetarian places that would be great. Parks, historical landmarks…
PW: We actually have the only World War I Memorial in, I think, all of North America. Definitely the only in the United States.
MF: Wow. How far is that?
PW: It is downtown a little bit. There are some museum stuff in the area and there’s a really nice view from up there. You’ll know it because it looks like a giant phallic statue.
MF: Haha, as they always do.
PW: Yeah, just a huge straight tower. There’s also a park around there, so it is kind of nice to walk around. Vegetarian food…I would go more toward the Westport area. There’s some bars in that area.
MF: Is this stuff we could get to on foot?
PW: Hm…On foot?
MF: Or something near here?
PW: You’d probably have to drive or take a cab to get to most of the cool places like the Memorial. On foot, you have the City Market area here or for a bit more of a trek, there is a new bar district that opened called the Power and Light.
MF: Sweet.
PW: Good place if you want to party after the show.
MF: Where would that be?
PW: It is Broadway, which is one of the streets around here and 14th. We’re about on 3rd.
MF: What was the district called again?
PW: The Power and Light district.
MF: Power and Light district?
PW: Yeah. It’s pretty well lit up, so you’ll see it. Good party area.
MF: Awesome.
PW: Yeah. Well, I guess we’ll get on with the interview portion. You guys are about to release a new album on June 2 and this is your first studio album with the band. What was the recording process like and was there any difficulty acclimating to working with the rest of the group?
MF: Not really. The adjustment for writing just organically happened. We got in a rehearsal spot and everyone had bits and pieces of ideas and we just kind of worked on anything. We didn’t really restrict anything and worked within the confines of what we thought Taking Back Sunday should be and not stretching out too far. We wiped the slate clean and tried some different musical styles.
PW: I heard you introduced some jazz influences to the group.
MF: Well, Matt [Rubano] is a huge jazz player and he is a sweet jazz bass player and went to school for jazz. So I liked to play a lot more jazz influenced, rich guitar chords, so that creates a lot of space for him to come in and play.
PW: Now this was actually the first time there was a bass solo on an album, right?
MF: Yeah. There is a lot of really great bass playing. There’s great playing from everyone and singing on the record. Everything is great, but Matt’s bass playing, I feel that it especially shows on this record. 
PW: On the old songs, what did you have to do to learn them and do you try to add your own flare to them?
MF: Yeah, I went through and I learned all the songs from the old records. I watched a lot of live videos to see if I could do anything different with it and eventually I learned them all to a point where it is just like I’m in autopilot mode and from there try out my own thing on either guitar parts or whatever. Like maybe if I didn’t like the guitar chords, I wouldn’t necessarily drastically change them, but make them a little more my style. The same worked for singing parts. Now that I’m a little more comfortable with the songs, I try to go out with the singing a little bit more when we play live.
PW: Did you contribute to some of the lyrics on this new album, too?
MF: No, that was all Adam [Lazzara]. Maybe I will in the future. I think in the past it was a more collaborative thing, but I think for the sake of this record it was a good thing for him to just take the reins on it.
PW: I heard that there were a lot of surprises on this record. Is that mostly just musical styles?
MF: I would say there are a lot of musical surprises and a lot of vocal surprises. We didn’t really concentrate too much on the dual singer thing as much as in the past, which probably won’t stick. I’m not sure how it will go for the next record. But exploring the vocal territory was something that we tried to do on this record in terms of having two backing vocals doing harmonies and trying to make it sound more rich in the background or have three part harmonies. There are even parts where Adam and I will sing unison on something. We try to just massage the vocals in a different sort of direction this time around. I’m not really sure where we’ll go from here. I think the dual vocal thing could end up coming back on the next record. We’ll just have to see.
PW: So what song are you the most excited for people to hear? Or what song do you relate to the most?
MF: I like a song called “Carpathia,†which has been out for a while. For songs that people haven’t heard, I think…there’s a song called “Lonely, Lonely†that I think is really cool. There’s a song called “Swing†that a lot of people have really been digging when we’ve played it. We have had these listening parties where kids come up and we bring about 20 on the bus and we let them listen to like four or five songs. “Swing†is one of those songs that we’ve been playing for them and they seem to really like that song.
PW: What is “Swing†about?
MF: I think that it is a relationship kind of song for Adam. It is really just an energized kind of rock song with a dancey bounce to it. People seem to like that song a lot, so I’ll be interested to see how they take to it on the album.
PW: I saw—I don’t remember where—but there was a “Winter Song†or something that was supposed to be a slow dance song, but I didn’t see it on the tracklisting.
MF: Yeah, that’s a song called “Winter Passing†and it didn’t end up fitting the vibe of the whole record so we had to make it a b-side. I think it’s going to come out…It will come out somewhere even as its own track, but it totally is like the last song of the 8th grade dance. What song would I liken it to? Like “Every Breath You Take†sort of. (Starts singing guitar notes). So just that kind of awkward, slow dancing music.
PW: Speaking of b-sides, I have heard reports about multiple things on a follow-up to New Again. Some said there would be just one album with a mix of rare material and another said there would be an acoustic album and a rarity album. What’s going on there?
MF: We talked about doing an acoustic reinterpretation of the record because like we did a b-side for the song called “Carpathia†and it is more of an electronic version of it and sounds way different, but it is a very different version of the song, so it still works. We’ve been talking about doing that and coming up with a way to do the record in that way and redo the songs with different instrumentations to make it sound like another new version of the record. A lot of bands will just do acoustic versions of the record, but it sounds like acoustic versions of the exact same song. If we were to do it, we want to do it in a new way and add more keyboards or something. Just something different so that it is its own thing. We talked about doing a covers EP where we each pick a song that have been a big influence on us as individual musicians.
PW: So what cover song would you pick?
MF: I don’t know. I hadn’t thought about it, yet. It’s hard to pick just one.
PW: Do you have like a top three artists you’d pick from?
MF: I would want to pick something—I don’t know. One of my favorite bands is Tears for Fears, so I’d pick a song by them, but not one of their hits. It would be an obscure song.
PW: Definitely, because if you did like “Mad World†everybody would question if you were influenced by the Gary Jules or the Tears for Fears version.
MF: Oh yeah, totally. There are sweet songs on that first album, The Hurting, that I think we could possibly do well. I mean we would only want to choose a song that we think we could do justice to.
PW: Yeah. I think that would be fun. You don’t hear very many Tears for Fears covers that aren’t “Mad World†or “Everybody Wants to Rule the World.â€
MF: Yeah! And they’re like second only to the Beatles in my musical world. They’re one of my favorite bands.
PW: Ok. Your album actually leaked a couple of days ago. Do you have any comment about that?
MF: Um, I think that sort of thing is just inevitable and you have to hope that people will like it enough to come and support the band in another way or even go out and buy the record. I’m stoked that it took this long to leak because some records will leak several months in advance and that is kind of a drag. I expected it and I’m glad that it didn’t happen until now. I wish it was, of course, even closer to the record, but in the last two weeks before an album comes out isn’t too bad. 
PW: That’s true. Currently, you have a video out for “Sink into Me†and you’re in something that is supposed to look like tar. What is that stuff that you guys actually play around in?
MF: Do you remember a Nickelodeon Gak?
PW: Yeah.
MF: It was like that stuff. The exact same thing, so it was really slimy.
PW: Ok. It looked too thick to be paint.
MF: Yeah, it is the exact same thing as Nickelodeon Gak, but it had black food coloring in it. When it came off on your skin, we had five…I think we had four or five of the same outfit for the video shoot so we could get covered in tar and we’d shower really quick and be clean again, but after a couple of showers, we all looked like walking bruises and our skin was just stained purple. Even for several weeks after—in my nails, just everything—we were all just stained.
PW: So not doing tar again.
MF: Probably not. It was a super long day, but the video turned out cool.
PW: So what do you think the next song to have a video would be?
MF: I think, people seem to be buzzing about a song called “Where My Mouth Is†and it is kind of a mid-tempo kind of ballad song, so I think that would be the next one. Then maybe we’ll follow by that song “Swing†that I was talking about earlier.
PW: Ok. Let’s see, I feel obligated to ask almost anything about “Capital M-E†and Fred [Mascherino], but I think you get over-asked that stuff, and you’ve already done a good job answering those questions. So let’s jump to this one: I saw that there were some mysterious tweets going on between Adam and Mikey Way of My Chemical Romance. Is there something going on for the fall with My Chem?
MF: You know, I think they’re in the middle of working on a record. We’d be down to tour with them, but I haven’t heard anything concrete or anything suggesting it.
PW: Earlier this month, I think Adam tweeted at Mikey, “Big plans for the fall. Got to talk to you about it†or something along those lines.
MF: That would be great, but as far as I know, they’re right in the middle of doing it and I think I heard they might put the record out this year. We’re always game to tour with them. That would be great.
PW: Ah, so I’m reading too much into these tweets.
MF: Maybe or maybe I’m not in the loop. I’m not sure which one it is.
PW: What is your favorite social media tool? I know you and Adam twitter a lot.
MF: Myspace maybe just because of the familiarity and that was the first thing I did. You put a lot of time into the first thing and it is hard to muster up the energy for a Facebook page or whatever. I kind of equally use them all now. I try to check Twitter and Facebook and Myspace all at the same time.
PW: For a last kind of fun question, a lot of Taking Back Sunday songs have been in superhero movies. So if you were a superhero, what would your power be and why?
MF: If I was a superhero…maybe…what would you pick?
PW: Haha, I’ve actually thought about this and when I say the power, it sounds lame and needs explaining. I would have the power to give people nosebleeds at command.
MF: Haha, what the?
PW: Well, if you think about it, and you’re fighting someone and you give them a nosebleed, they’re distracted by that. They immediately drop everything and grab their nose.
MF: Yeah. You could punch them a bunch, though.
PW: You could, but…
MF: Well, I guess you have to be able to get your fist in there.
PW: Yeah, but if you could control the flow, you could even make it so they bleed so much and either get dehydrated or pass out from loss of blood.
MF: Haha.
PW: It’s a lot of power.
MF: I like that. I like that you put a lot of thought in it. I guess, my default one would have to be…flying is pretty awesome. Maybe healing quickly though. Or regenerating.
PW: Like Wolverine-esque?
MF: Yeah. Well, actually, Gambit was pretty cool. That movie wasn’t that good, honestly. Gambit’s thing though where he used kinetic energy to charge things. Yeah, charge things. That’s pretty cool. I’ll go with that.
PW: Gambit’s charging powers?
MF: Yeah. Haha.
PW: Sounds good. I’ll catch you guys both acoustic and at the actual set later today.
Taking Back Sunday: website | myspace | @ city market
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