Four Year Strong

Four Year Strong are one of the leading bands in the emerging pop-punk meets hardcore style of music. Taking cues from New Found Glory, the band merges pop-punk harmonies with hardcore breakdown for an energetic style of music that is, most importantly, fun.

A week after they released their major label debut, Enemy of the World, the band was in Edmonton with Every Time I Die and Polar Bear Club in the middle of a two week Canadian tour. I tracked down Dan O’Connor and Josh Lyford of the band and had a little chat about what they’ve been up to and we talked about the aforementioned major label debut, their nineties cover album and the philosophy behind making music.

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Bobby: Starting with the basics, you guys are almost two weeks into this tour with Polar Bear Club and Every Time I Die, how’s that going so far? Any memorable moments from it?

Dan: It’s going great. This is one of the funner tours that we’ve done. Every band on this tour – Trapped Under Ice, Polar Bear Club and Every Time I Die – are awesome guys, really fun to hang out with.

Josh: It’s been what, two and a half weeks about?

Dan: No, we’re under two weeks.

Josh: Under two weeks? Wow, that’s insane. It’s a pretty brief tour anyways, so I think we were lucky that everybody got along right away; kind of made it easier.

Bobby: Yeah, most Canadian tours do end up being shorter than the American ones just because there’s not as many cities to hit.

Josh: Makes sense.

Dan: Can you think of any memorable moments?

Josh: Memorable moments? Let me think… anytime I’m on the spot with a memorable moment…

Dan: Well, one time on this tour – it’s not really a huge thing – but the other day we were driving from, I can’t remember, somewhere in Canada to somewhere in Canada and we were driving on the highway and all of a sudden the tire on our trailer just flew off into the woods.

Josh: Oh yeah.

Dan:  Our trailer just imploded pretty much. So we had to stop wherever we were; we had to wake up in the morning and get a tire and get a new router put on and all this stuff and then head to the show. We were super late, like we pulled up to the venue and we were supposed to go on in three minutes.

Josh: It was Polar Bear Club’s last song.

Dan: Yeah, they were in the middle of their last song. So we just jumped out, we grabbed our guitars and we used all of Polar Bear’s stuff. We played the show, it was an awesome show, but that was a pretty hectic day.

Bobby: But you got there in time.

Dan: We got there. It worked out, show went well.

Josh: We saw eagles; we saw three eagles total on this tour.

Dan: Bald eagles right?

Josh: Yeah. Three bald eagles; two fighting each other which was unfortunate. It was like freedom and liberty battling right in the air in front of us. Another one that was just soaring majestically, it was pretty sweet.

Bobby: You guys were also one of the first bands to announce that you guys will be playing the entire Warped Tour this year, are you excited for that?

Dan: Yeah.

Josh: It’s gonna be awesome.

Bobby: This is your second time on the tour?

Dan: Yep, I was going to say that this is the first time doing the whole thing but actually we’re missing the last week of it. But we pretty much do the whole thing. Last time we pretty much only did half of it I think, right?

Josh: Yeah.

Dan: We’re excited to be able to do it, especially from the beginning. Because that was always a bummer. We did the second half last time so we kind of hopped into the middle of a tour where everyone was already in full swing.

Josh: Everyone was already buddies.

Dan: But now we get to start from day one. We have a lot of friends on that tour, so it’s going to be a really, really fun time.

Bobby: I read one time that when you were in Philadelphia, you guys had to improvise an acoustic set because somebody pulled a fire alarm. So now do you always have an acoustic set ready in the background just in case?

Josh: Not really. We do have acoustic guitars with us.

Dan: That was kind of…  the fire alarm got pulled and then the fire department showed up to turn the fire alarm off but then they realized there were too many kids inside the venue so they shut the show down. We had only played maybe four songs, so we felt really, really bad for all these kids so we talked to one of the promoters and he said there was this park a couple blocks away. So we just brought all the kids down to the park and we played this random acoustic show. Kids were really stoked on it. We’re still going to make up a show for those kids. We pretty much always have acoustic guitars but we’ve never had to do an emergency acoustic set before. That was the first time.

Josh: That was sweet. With the fire alarm getting pulled though, last time we had played there previously, someone had sprayed a fire extinguisher all over everyone. It was the same thing where we all had to evacuate the building. Although that time they let us play again. We feel like every time we play Philadelphia we’re cursed.

Bobby: It’s always something with fire.

Dan: Especially the smaller venues like that.

Josh: It’s too bad too because Philly’s great, the show’s always awesome aside from the carnage.

Bobby: You guys recently released a nineties covers album called Explains It All. On one of the covers, a Smashing Pumpkins cover of Bullet With Butterfly Wings, you had Keith from Every Time I Die come out and play on it. Now that you guys are touring together, do you ever bust that song out live?

Dan: We haven’t played it yet because the band hasn’t been able to really learn it yet.  Because we released Explains It All and then we just went on tour and then right after we got off tour for that we started to work on a next album so then we focused on that. Then when we went on this tour, we kind of just focused on learning new songs from the new album; so we haven’t had too long to learn too many songs from Explains It All. We know a good amount of them, but that was one of the ones that we never really got to learn for live. Eventually we’ll get it. Maybe we can try and get it down for the summer because they’re on Warped Tour as well. So maybe we can get it down for this summer.

Bobby: Nice, do a good collaboration. A little guest appearance for Warped Tour’s always fun.

Dan: Yeah, definitely.

Bobby: In an interview you (Josh) did with PunkNews, you said that you guys had a lot of unreleased stuff, particularly from the Explains It All sessions. Do you have any plans to do anything with these b-sides?

Josh: I think it’s always been in the back of our heads that we could someday do a b-side thing; I don’t think it’s anytime in the super near future. Actually, not really because we just did that vinyl that had a song from Enemy of the World on it and a b-side.

Dan: Yeah, we just put out a seven inch with a b-side on it. I mean, once we get maybe one more album and we get three or four albums worth of b-sides, then it would be pretty cool. Right now we have a good amount of b-sides, but not a full record yet. Once we have another full record, we’ll probably do a b-side record or at least like a double disc.

Josh: It’s nice to have something in your front pocket to hold on to for later.

Bobby: It’s also good for – well not so much now – but it used to be great for compilations and stuff; just to be able to throw on an unreleased track. Now, sadly compilations have kind of disappeared.

Josh: Now there’s Now That’s What We Call Music

Bobby: I read that you guys had almost one hundred songs that you wanted to cover on Explains It All,so how did you cut it down to the eleven that you went with?

Dan: I mean we cut the list down to maybe twenty or thirty and then when we got to the studio, there were some songs where we went “okay, let’s try this one… nah, we’re not going to be able to do that one.”

Josh: Wasn’t one of them Metallica?

Dan: Metallica we were going to do and then we were like “nah, this isn’t going to work.” And then we tried to do a Rage one and we’re like “we can’t really rap.” So there was some where it was just like “oh, it would be awesome to cover this song” and then we went and thought about it and realized it probably wouldn’t be that good for us covering that song. When it came down to deciding songs, it was kind of like trial and error. Let’s try this song out for a song, oh this one kind of works, this one’s kind of weird. Let’s throw this one out, let’s try a different one. It was just a lot of playing around, seeing what felt good and seeing what felt like a Four Year Strong song.

Bobby: One of your major influences is New Found Glory obviously and they’ve also been known to release quite a few cover albums with the From The Screen To Your Stereo series. With them having done that, did that have any impact or influence on you wanting to do this cover album?

Josh: Not directly.

Dan: Yeah, not directly. I mean, we knew that they had done it but I think with us it was something we had always just talked about – even a long, long time ago. It just kind of came up where we had studio time that we were thinking about using for Enemy of the World but we just weren’t ready to do that album yet and we were like “let’s go in there and have some fun and record some covers.”  Instead of it being more about the New Found stuff – there had been other bands who have done cover records that we’ve always love and I’ve always been a big fan of them. Like we were on the Punk Goes Pop… I don’t know what number it was, two I think. I’ve always been a fan of those. I like when bands take their perspective on different songs. There’s just so many songs that we thought would be cool to cover. It felt like the right thing to do at the time. We did it more because it was something we thought we’d have a lot of fun doing and we thought kids would have a lot of fun listening to it.

Bobby: After you guys worked with Decaydance and I Surrender Records, you guys signed to Universal Motown Records last December and earlier this month released your major label debut, Enemy of the World. How did you get in contact with Universal Motown and what made you decide to go with them?

Josh: Universal had kind of come to us. We had been talking to them for a while. I think it kind of surprised all of us, how comfortable the whole situation was. I don’t want to speak for everyone but I know that growing up I always had this real distrust of major labels. But then you kind of meet these people and realize they’re in it for the same reasons as Rob and Pete and everyone has been. It’s a genuine appreciation of something. I felt a lot more comfortable with everything than I had expected to.

Bobby: Now having worked with the independents and having a CD out on a major label, have you noticed a big difference between the two label structures?

Dan: With a major label, there’s definitely a lot more going into the release. They set up all these different things everywhere to try and get more people to listen to your music and stuff like that. But as far as from our end, it’s pretty much the same. Like when we were on I Surrender, we were working with Decaydance and now that we’re on Universal Motown, we still talk to everybody that has everything to do with our band. We talk to them all the time. Everything that was involved in the release was either our ideas or something that we approved or we were told about. It’s still very much just us having fun with our band.

What’s also really cool about our unique situation is we still work with everybody we worked with on I Surrender and everybody we worked with on Decaydance still. Even though we work with Universal, everybody’s working together now. It’s not like we had a change, we just got a couple more people that came into our group of people and everything just works really well. I just love everybody that works with our band.

Bobby: Sort of like you expanded your family instead of changing it.

Dan: Exactly, exactly.

Bobby: I read somewhere that on Enemy of the World you guys had a lot more freedom and no limits at all when you guys were recording it. Did having that freedom help with the creativity process when you guys were writing and recording it?

Dan: I mean it was definitely a way different experience than we ever had before. Because before we had just wrote songs and then when we went to record them we were like “let’s just take all the songs we have, pick our favourites and then record them.” Whereas this it was like “okay, let’s write a record.” It was definitely a little more stressful than writing it before. Once we got in there though, everything felt very comfortable though. It was definitely a lot more fun than the first way around because we had a lot more time to really just experiment with different things and really concentrate on making sure that every little thing was the way we wanted it. Instead of like on the last record, it was jute like “okay, let’s do this; yeah, that’s good enough.” It was just kind of fun to be able to do that.

Bobby: To me, the album has a lot more of a distinct sound to it compared to Rise or Die Trying. It sounds fuller, particularly in the production department quality of it and it just seems more structured in a way I guess. How would you describe the difference in the sounds of the two albums?

Josh: I know even in Rise or Die Trying this was something we would talk about all the time; we just hadn’t gotten there yet: we always had the problem translating how we sound live to recording. I think on this one we came a lot closer to doing that. It’s a lot more healthy and heavy.

Dan: And energy.

Josh: It was what we were trying for Rise or Die, just more so.

Dan: I think the energy on Enemy of the World comes over a lot better than it did on Rise or Die. I’m not saying that Rise or Die didn’t have energy – and we tried to put as much energy into that record as possible – but I think this new record, especially with the way we got to do vocals and the type of guitar tones and drum tones we got to use, it really got to portray the intensity that we want to come across in our music. I mean, it’s kind of the reason why none of our records have had the slow ballad on it yet. We want our records to just be nuts from beginning to end and I think this record kind of captured that quality that we wanted it to have.

Bobby: That kind of touches on something you (Josh) said in an interview with PunkNews. You said there were a lot of little things with Rise or Die Trying that looking back you would like to go and improve upon and fix. Were you able to improve upon and fix those aspects with Enemy of the World?

Josh: I’d like to think so. I did an interview a while ago, I don’t remember who it was for even, but somebody asked if this was Four Year Strong 2.0 and we said it was more like Four Year Strong 1.5. It’s not like a new operating system; it’s just like a new…. I don’t know, this simile is failing apart. Or is that a metaphor?

Dan: What he means is that we didn’t try to make our band into this new better band. We just tried to take Four Year Strong and just push Four Year Strong to the next level, the level that we couldn’t achieve on the last record. A) Because we didn’t have as much song writing knowledge as we have now. I mean, we’ve been touring for so long now that we know what type of stuff works live, we know what types of stuff comes over kind of weird. We’ve toured with some amazing bands and we can watch their sets and go “well, they do this thing live that’s really, really cool we should do that.”

Josh: Learn what you like a little more.

Dan: Yeah, exactly.  You kind of refine what you want your sound to be and we kind of really got to explore on this record.

Bobby: One thing I’ve always found interesting about you guys is the album artwork. I mean, on Rise or Die Trying you have a wizard riding a cracken fighting robotic sharks in space. Enemy of the World you have the same robotic sharks, dead on the bottom of a pile of destruction with you guys with muscles, war, fairy wings and everything like that. How do you come up with the ideas behind your artwork?

Dan: I think usually somebody says “what do you want your artwork to be?” and then everybody just kinds of throws out the most ridiculous idea we can and then we just take everybody’s ideas and send them to somebody.

Josh: It’s unbelievable that its work as well as it has actually.

Dan: Yeah, like literally on Rise or Die we were sitting around and like “let’s do a wizard riding a squid.” “Yeah! Fighting like an army of sharks.” “Yeah, but there should be a monkey in there too!” Everybody just yells stuff out and I’m just typing it out and send it to an artist. We kind of did the same thing here. We were like “we want it to look crazy, like an old romance novel/Fabio type thing but we want…”

Josh: Army of Darkness cover.

Dan: “…yeah, but Dan should be throwing a rock and be huge and we want Alan to be a centaur and Josh wants to have wolves licking his face and we want pine trees and we want it to be on a Saturday.”

Josh: Yeah, yeah, one of the things we said was “the healthiest of pine trees on a Saturday.”

Dan: I think we usually just find an artist that we really like and then send him something that I don’t think he’ll be able to make any sense of and just usually whatever they come back with is awesome.

Josh: It wouldn’t really be our style if we were like “yeah, could you just take a picture of a wilted rose and send that back to us?”

Dan: Yeah, if the artist doesn’t look at our list of things and go “what the fuck do I do with this?” Then we haven’t done our job.

Bobby: But that’s kind of your entire personality of just having fun and goofing off. Like your lead single is “It Must Really Suck To Be Four Year Strong Right Now.” Do you think it is good to have that happy-go-lucky attitude towards it and just roll with the punches?

Josh: I think it takes a lot of the stress out of some things. A lot of the times I think it’s really easy for bands to take themselves too seriously but at the end of the day, we’re just friends that are playing music. The second that you start putting yourself on a pedestal, you kind of lose what’s cool about the whole thing.

Dan: I think we get to pretty much do what we wanted to do when we were kids, so why would we change the fact that we’re still kids at heart? You know what I mean? Like we still get to do the job that we wanted to do when we were twelve so the twelve year old me is stoked.

Josh: “Say penis!”

Dan: [laughs] Yeah, exactly. It pretty much just gives us a reason for to us put growing up on hold for the time being.

Bobby: Yeah, just delay it a bit. You don’t really need to grow up.

Josh: I’ll grow up when I’m forty.

Bobby: The single, “It Must Really Suck To Be Four Year Strong Right Now”, was stolen from a review of Set Your Goals’ This Will Be The Death of Us by Scott Heisel. Right now, of course, your entire genre of music is becoming quite popular. With you guys, Set Your Goals, A Day To Remember, The Wonder Years and stuff like that – the pop-punk meets hardcore combination. Why do you think that genre, that style is suddenly becoming more popular?

Josh: Wow.

Dan: I mean, it’s not that it’s a brand new thing. There were bands like Lifetime and New Found Glory and all these bands that put pop-punk and underground hardcore music together before. I think it’s just more of a case of what used to be cool and then wasn’t cool is cool again. I think that’s kind of really what is happening. I think kids were getting sick of these emo, black straight hair, take myself seriously, like sit in the corner and cry music. That sucks. Like how can you have fun listening to something like that? Kids were just like “I want to have fun at shows again” and this is the type of music that we all used to have fun at shows to. It’s the same reason why, at some point in your life growing up… like I listened to tons of music when I was a kid and I would listen to new music, listen to new music and at some point you eventually just don’t kind of look for music anymore. You just kind of listen to the same stuff you listened to back in the day. It’s not because you don’t like the new music, it’s just because that was so fun. It just reminds you of the best times and having so much fun. I think that when we first started, that’s what the older kids were kind of seeing in us. It kind of reminded them of the music they had fun to when they were kids and I think a younger crowd is starting to get into that now. I think the same reason why it worked when all those other bands did it before and the same reason why it’s working now is that kids need something to have fun. Take everything serious in their life and just completely forget about it and go and just run around and sing along at shows.

Bobby: I guess that’s about it. Thanks a lot. Do you have any final thoughts you’d like to add?

Josh: Just check out the record, if you don’t like it, that sucks. If you do like it, come to a show and hang out.