By Cristina Carrazza--Regional Head, Midwest
The newest addition to Fueled By Ramen, The Swellers have already been making a name for themselves. After touring with Set Your Goals and Four Year Strong during the summer, the Michigan quartet is currently on the road with Paramore supporting their release “Ups and Downsizing.” Since then, The Swellers announced a tour with Less Than Jake and have been featured as one of MTV’s “Buzzworthy” Acts. I sat with the band before the stop of the brand new eyes tour in Chicago to find out more about this rising punk rock act.
Cristina: If you were going to describe The Swellers in a couple of words, what would you say?
Anto: Super Cool Dudes
Ryan: Badass
Jonathan: Super Badass Cool Dudes
Nick: The best thing I know
CC: So apparently these badass cool dudes play music, how would you characterize it?
JD: Melodic Rock
ND: They’re too loud! Yeah, a kid actually told us that.
JD: He was like “I’m only here for Paramore.” But apparently he enjoyed our set, but we were too loud.
ND: Pretty much to describe our band, we play punk rock that your mother would like.
JD: It’s like aspirations of Foo Fighters rock but…
ND: Aspirations?! That’s not the right word.
JD: What’s the word then? We aspire to be…
ND: Look, we’re not trying to be anything except awesome.
JD: I mean, down the road we’ll be super famous. Right now, we’re just pretty famous. But I think we have punk rock roots with catchy rock grooves. That didn’t rhyme.
CC: Your first major label release “Ups and Downsizing” was just released
ND: It’s like a square shape.
JD: It feels a little hard and the CD has little ridges
CC: Does it have a little hole in the middle?
JD: Yes!
CC: Well, how would you describe the noise the CD makes?
ND: the noise the CD makes…
RC: Wow, we’re going nowhere on this one
ND: You can make it loud or quiet. No, it sounds like we do live but a little bit more polished, and with a different guy playing bass.
AB: It sounds great.
ND: It sounds good though, I really like the CD. Anybody who knew [our previous record] “My Everest,” it’s a logical progression of what we should sound like if you’re not an annoying skate punk kid.
JD: “You’re not fast anymore,” well we still kind of are. “Oh” – that’s pretty much the response.
CC: Through the lyrics you guys have showcased a spectrum of emotions. For example there is “Dirt” which is a pretty crazy song and then there are songs like “Ups and Downsizing” which deals with the depression. Can you talk about your songwriting and how some of these songs came to be?
ND: Dirt is absolutely crazy.
JD: Nick and I write most of the lyrics. Pretty much, what happens is we always start with music first. The vibe of the music lets us know the type of emotion we’ll write about. We have different feelings to them. Like “Stars” has an acoustic ballad feel so we wrote lyrics to go with that. “Dirt” is just angry. It’s all based on personal experiences, whether or not it’s a vague message, there is something that happened to us personally and that is what they’re about. If something really bad happened to us, that’s usually where our best lyrics come from. You take the worst things in life and you can make them a good experience through a song. That’s what it’s about.
CC: Well, I’m assuming none of you have experienced “Dirt” yet…
ND: *laughs* For those that don’t know “Dirt” is a song about what I want done with my body when I die.
JD: I just want to be mummified.
AB: I’ll be frozen.
CC: You guys are currently on tour
ND: I miss my dog.
CC: Well this is the second tour you guys have done since being signed to Fueled By Ramen - the first being Set Your Goals and Four Year Strong. And now you are all on tour with Paramore.
ND: It’s been really cool. This is only the second day but we have a month to go and it’s gonna be so much fun.
JD: We’re going to do this tour and then we’re driving to LA all the way across the country to start another tour – so we’re doing two tours in a row for two months straight. We can’t announce the other tour yet [they are opening for Less Than Jake] but it should be a good winter.
CC: Apart from the expected recognition that comes from being signed have there been any particular differences you guys are noticing now?
AB: We’re playing in really awesome venues.
JD: The venues and the people that come. You can tell it’s a different type of crowd. But that has always been the case with us; we have different groups of people that come out. For the Paramore shows, obviously the Paramore crowd comes. But on the Gig Life tour people were just finding out about us. We started getting a lot of promotion, and that’s the best part. That’s the push we need.
CC: These are two different types of crowds two.
JD: Exactly. We’re exposing ourselves to a lot of different types of people. We can coexist with both Paramore crowds and more hardcore ones so I think that’s something really cool about our band.
RC: Anyone that wants to listen.
CC: Where do you guys The Swellers in a couple of years?
ND: We are going to tour on this record for two years and in the meantime we’ll be writing our next record. So in two years from now our next record will be out. Then it’s going to be huge. It’s going to be super awesome, we’ll tour with bands like Green Day and Blink 182. We’ll coheadline will Fall Out Boy.
JD: Well the world ends in 2012.
RC: Yeah we gotta hurry.
AB: Wow that’s only four years.
RC: In a couple of years I’ll be engaged to a playmate.
JD: You’re saying your girlfriend is going to be on playboy right?
ND: I’m going to be married to a celebrity girl that is seven years younger than me.
JD: I’m going to make a dog house. It’s going to be like discovery home for dogs. It’s going to be the size of a Sam’s Club. It’s going to be filled with hamster tubes for dogs to play with.
ND: In two years I’m going to become a dog. They’ll have surgery for that then.
CC: I usually end with something random but you have all done a good job making this as random as possible.
ND: 9/11 was an inside job.
JD: Michael Jackson was an inside job. If anyone wants to send me collared plaid shirts, I’m a medium.
ND: The Swellers wear medium shirts and medium shoes and medium hair.
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