INTERVIEW WITH ANTHONY RANERI BY JAMESON KETCHUM
Nine records deep, Bayside is more full speed ahead than ever before. The Queens, NY foursome have left most of their early contemporaries in the dust and nothing is more proof of this feat than their 23 city run aptly named The Errors Tour, where every city gets twice the Bayside. Night one the first four records are torn through, highlighted fan and band favorites alike while night two encapsulates the latter half of their still blossoming career. Singer Anthony Raneri is energetic when asked about the band’s longevity and charmingly candid when presented with thoughts on the band’s calculated but numerous zigs and zags. Ultimately, Bayside is where they are because of hard work and genuine care for their fans and content. Not many bands can say they’ve been growing AND maintaining a fanbase for a quarter of a decade but it’s a badge that the frontman wears proudly and without apology.
Years ago I interviewed your bassist Nick Ghanbarian and he said something that I’ve quoted in interviews quite often ever since. He said that Bayside is “working class people who became working class musicians.” I feel like even now 25 years in that that mentality is alive and well.
When I think of grinding I think of us playing six or seven nights a week and touring ten months out of the year and just jumping on any show or tour that would have us. Certainly, what we do is a lot more calculated now. I don’t think of it as still grinding but we’re still working. We tour as much as we’re comfortable touring. We make records when we have good ideas for records. In the early days, especially the Victory years, as far as writing and recording goes, we expected it of ourselves to make a record a year.
You feel like that expectation was self-imposed?
Not really. When we were really trying to grow the band we felt like, and this is still the case, new music is what moves the needle and gets peoples attention. Even for bands whose fanbase don’t necessarily love their new music, the new music gets you in the press and in the algorithm and gets everyone’s attention. To even keep the touring going you do have to keep putting out content and the most valuable content is new music.
To have that mentality back then, not knowing how populated that landscape was going to be, was a really good foundation.
I think we’ve just always been both proactive and reactive in our career. I think the reactive part is really important as far reacting to trends in the industry or in business or learning from mistakes. Now it is just a content machine, every artist regardless of genre or format is just expected to…I say expected but you just have to keep pumping out content. It’s the only thing that gets attention because there’s so much static. Back then when we were doing the Victory records we would feel the ebb and flow of a record roll-out. A single would come out and everyone would get excited and it starts building and you tour the record and there’s all this excitement but then it tapers and it tapers. Then you’re like “Okay the only way to get that momentum again is to do it again.“So at the time when growing the band was so important to us it was like “Okay we can’t have lulls. We’ll make the record and we’ll tour while we’re promoting it and it’ll come out and we’ll tour on it and while we’re on that tour we’re writing the next one.“That’s how we were able to do records as frequently as we did back then, we were writing them while we were promoting the record before.
That’s pretty amazing really. Originally, I had a question about if you were even having those kind of forecasting conversations early on. A lot of bands weren’t, they’re not thinking about 25 years from now.
Yeah, there was a time where I thought it was naïve to think this way and I feel like we’re proof that it’s not naïve. If it’s good that’s all that matters. There are bands or artists you may not think are good that get popular, then there are bands I think are some of the best in the world who don’t find a big audience. I do think that if the work is there in trying to find the audience and the music is good then there is an audience. We’re not the biggest band in the world but we’ve found enough of an audience that we’re able to sustain our lives.
When you look back at the touring history of bayside and who you have played with over the years, so many have dropped off. So many have come and gone. The longevity for you all is very special.
We would always ask ourselves “Are we gonna be embarrassed of this in ten years?” We still always talk about it, whether it’s a photoshoot, or an album cover, or an interview, anything. We were having the longevity conversations even when we were making Sirens. What do want to accomplish? It was never to be the biggest band in the world. When we made Sirens, Fall Out Boy exploded and My Chem exploded, Taking Back Sunday was huge. New Found Glory and Good Charlotte was on TRL. I remember really pointed conversations like “If that happens, cool” . I think all those bands are awesome. We were always saying “We’ll never mortgage what we have to try to get more.“That’s always been our thing since the first record like “I just wanna be doing this in 20 years. I never wanna get a job (laughs). How do we keep playing music in 20 years? It wasn’t “How can we get to MTV or on the radio etc.” We still have these conversations now when talking about tours we’ll do or interviews we’ll do. We will not mortgage what we have to try to gain more.
I think that’s the secret sauce then. I feel like very few bands from your era are still around and thriving. Every time Silverstein puts out a new record I can’t believe these are just getting better and better.
It’s not an accident. Us, Silverstein, we’re very career minded and longevity focused bands. Silverstein still sounds like Silverstein. Bayside still sounds like Bayside. We could’ve tried to write poppier songs or screamed when everyone was screaming or put in electronics when everyone was putting in electronics. We never chased what was happening to try and get bigger in that moment and that’s why we’re not dated now.
I recently talked with Ben from Armor for Sleep about that time period of Fall Out Boy blowing up and major labels paying attention to this Warped scene, trying to snatch up the next big thing.
Just like Seattle in the ’90’s. Those bands who got big like New Found Glory, My Chem-that’s what they sounded like, they didn’t chase anything. They were the best bands of the era doing what was popular in the era. The cream rises to the top. There are so many pop punk bands who do hardcore parts but A Day to Remember I think is the best. That’s’s why they’re the biggest.
I love seeing who influenced A Day to Remember, bands like MxPx and New Found Glory etc. great bands but they never reached the level that ADTR has.
New Found Glory I would argue did.
The fact that they’re still big as they are, you’re right.
You listen to Fall Out Boy, My Chem, or New Found Glory pre-mainstream breakout and they sound like themselves. Then they just wrote the best songs of their lives and that’s what exploded. They didn’t change for what was cool. We’re not quite The Foo Fighters, we’re not quite New Found Glory, we have elements of all that, even elements of Shinedown but we don’t fit quite in any of those genres that really break through. To go back to the original point, we never said “Lets make it more like Shinedown, what would make us sound more like Fall Out Boy?” We just are who we are because that’s what our band is like and that’s what we like to do. We’ll never gamble the audience to try and push it further, especially now. I was 21 when we made Sirens and we’re even more so like that now. We care even less about growing. At that time we had to grow the band to a sustainable point so we could live off it. Now that we have and we’ve lived off it comfortably, we don’t care about growing the band. It’s going to grow naturally. New people find out about us all the time. People tell their friends and say what you will about the streaming landscape but it’s amazing for music discovery. We’ve never seen anything like it before.
Bayside is such a distinct sound, not just musically but your voice is very identifiable.
We know who we are and what our secret sauces are. My voice is a secret sauce. We can write a heavy song, a poppy song, a fast song but if I sing it then it’s gonna sound like Bayside. If Jack is playing guitar on it and he’s doing his thing and the four of us are doing our distinct thing and being uniquely ourselves it’s gonna sound like Bayside. We try to write weird shit all the time but it doesn’t come out weird, it comes out sounding like Bayside (laughs). You’d be surprised if I told you the inspiration for certain songs or records.
I first heard Bayside, like many, on a Victory sampler. “Tortures of the Dammed” was the first song I ever heard and I was listening to it on the way here and thinking of the line “I’m burnt out at 22…” and I’m just always so blown away that I’ve been a fan of certain bands for that long and then getting to sit down with so many and ask all the questions of my fandom is pretty weird.
How long have you been a journalist?
About 15 years.
When you transitioned from a fan, I wonder how much of the story people actually give you. Like I just talk. I’d rather just have a conversation with the person. I’m not guarded, it’s not pre-baked.
Anthony Green is one of my favorite people to talk to because he can’t not be himself. I’ve also had others that were so open that after the interview they might be like, “Hey actually can we take that part out?” Which is great because it meant they were comfortable. I try to almost role play my interviews beforehand so I know if I need to tweak something.
It’s just easier that way. I don’t know how to be a rockstar. I wouldn’t know how to have canned answers. Even when I’m on stage I don’t know how to command an audience. I just talk.
People can sniff that shit out. Young kids can’t and that’s why you see bands that appeal solely to young people. You see the faker personas. We have a drum tech with us who’s 22 and has only done tours with his buddies on a weekend. He’s from New Jersey and this is his first time west of St Louis. Everywhere west of St Louis is his first time on this tour, it’s awesome. I was asking him and I’d be curious with you also, now that you see how this all works, how is it different? What are you surprised about when you were a fan?
It’s 50/50. One part is being happy to have these conversations and working with some of my favorite bands. The other half is when something doesn’t go “right” I think, “I wish I didn’t know.“
Really?
But that’s my own expectations. I can come to you and say Anthony my favorite song of yours is this or that, tell me the whole story. There’s no way you’re gonna meet my expectation because I’ve already built it up so much. It’s a recalibration.
For sure. I think we do put a lot of ourselves into the music and especially the lyrics. At the end of the day we are kind of characters and people think they know us and if they pay attention to interviews maybe they have bullet points and their imagination fills in the rest to create this person. It’s just not real. If I’m not on tour, or in the studio, or writing, I’m not thinking about Bayside. It’s not my identity. Like Daniel Radcliff is not Harry Potter (laughs). That song that you love, that was how I was feeling the day I wrote it. Not to mention, it was 22 years ago. I’m a completely different person. People think I have a big Bayside bird on the wall at my house (laughs). We talk about anything but work in between work. People just think it’s our whole existence.
I quote Buddy from Senses Fail a lot. The basic idea being that once he writes a song and puts it out there its no longer his, its yours, so what do you think?
I do the same thing, it’s whatever it means to you.
I know early on, as a fan especially, I’d be disappointed when I heard the truth behind a song because it didn’t hold enough weight for me for what I’d already taken from it.
The song “It Don’t Exist” from our acoustic record, people tell me all the time that it’s gonna be their wedding song or their first dance and I see that song as really sad. It’s about unrequited love to me. That’s what I meant when I wrote it. The subject of the song is like not reciprocating the dedication. If you want to have your first dance to it, that’s fine.
Do you ever feel like you didn’t make something clear?
(Laughs) No I don’t care. I don’t put that much stock in it. I’m writing stuff that I love. I’m not writing it to evoke anything. I’m writing it for me.
Does that ever get into your head though? Like a song hits and you think, “Maybe I should try to write that again?”
I think the success that we’ve had is like good armor. I have the luxury of not caring (laughs). Rich people don’t worry about money. We’ve had enough success where I don’t have to chase anything. We’re nine records in, the fans just keep coming with us. We did the self-titled and put key changes and weird time signatures and people loved it. Then we did The Walking Wounded and I was like “Okay I want this part to sound like Fiddler on the Roof so lets put tubas in it and everyone loved it. With the later records we wanted to get heavier and faster and put big riffs and solos. We always teased the metal in our songs so what if we write metal songs? Whatever we do people come along. We’ve proven to ourselves that we’re allowed to experiment. The fans have given us that grace.
That reminds me, you played Heavy & Light in 2009 in Orlando. I talked with Dustin Kensrue at that show and Thrice had just put out The Alchemy Indexes. I told him I thought it was amazing that they could take such a left turn and their fans followed. He said something with a laugh to the effect of “No one followed.“
I don’t think anyone gets too big that they can do anything they want. I don’t think it has to do with being big. I think it has to do with how dedicated the fanbase is but also how you do it. Going back to that secret sauce, I know if we write a metal song and I sing it, it’ll sound like Bayside. If someone who listened to two of our records that came out in succession they would see how this is the same band but if you listened to Sirens then Worse Things, then there’s the progression. I think we’ve slowly peppered in new things and we’ve seen what we liked. We started putting in key changes and that was a big part of the self-titled so now that’s a big part of things. We experimented with different things and if they work then we stay and we ask ourselves what we’ll experiment with on the next record. It’s like bricks building up to who we are now. If it worked, then it stays.
When you went to Wind Up did that feel like a level up?
The only difference with Wind Up really, besides having a massive budget to do whatever we wanted to do…we had creative freedom at Wind Up and they never told us that it needed to be more this or that but we would write stuff and bring it to the A&R and they’d say it wasn’t good enough. I hated it in the moment because it was incredibly stressful because you kill yourself over this idea. I’m the type of writer who won’t show it to anyone until I think it’s solid, not even the band. I work on it for as long as it takes until it’s rock solid and then the band shapes it into what they do and then maybe someone else can hear it. With Wind Up we’d go through that whole process and they’d say “I think you can write a better chorus” or “I think this could be stronger.“
Were they right?
We have producers tell us that all the time. With Wind Up it was an added layer before even getting it to the producer. I think every time I’ve ever been told that, it’s been right. You can always go back. I haven’t written “Mr. Brightside” or “Bohemian Rhapsody” yet so anything I’ve written anyone can say “it can be better” and they’re right because I haven’t written one of the greatest songs of all time yet.
When are you satisfied?
When I’m out of ideas. At some point you do have to say “I love it and I think it’s great.“
Killing your darlings is not easy. You can push something out there or you can shelve it thinking, “Maybe I’ll crack the code for this in a year, or five years.“
What’s been cool about how we wrote and recorded and released Worse Things, we were writing it as we were releasing it. Some people thought it was cool how we trickled the songs out. Some people said they just wanted a record. Interrobang was like our last straw. We made Interrobang and we thought it was one of the strongest records we’ve ever done, from front to back. The way that the industry works and people’s attention works, we have two singles come out then the whole record and a year later those two singles are the only two people remember and you’re like “But track seven is a banger! And no one knows that track nine is great.“So we’re like “Okay every song is a single now then every song gets a shot.“The biggest single we’ve had since “Sick” which was in 2011, was “Go to Hell” or “How to Ruin Everything.““How to Ruin Everything” is, by the numbers, the biggest, fastest streaming/selling/whatever we’ve had since “Sick” and that was the fifth song we released. It might not have been a single if we just released the record. It might have been a deep cut we never even play live. Given the chance, every song gets the chance to stick with people and resonate with people. That one, “Go to Hell,“ “Strangest Faces,“ a few have really stuck with people. It’s our first time playing “Miracle” on this tour and people go nuts for it. In the streaming era fans don’t get four or five songs in the set where everyone knows the words. It only happened because we released every song as a single.
You have so many big anthem/well known songs. I’m trying to think if you have one song that fans are like, “If they don’t play that song it’ll be weird.“
Like three months ago I would’ve said it was “Devotion and Desire” but we don’t play it on this tour and it’s fine.
What do you feel like has been the band’s biggest triumph and what do you think might be your biggest failure?
I’m gonna try not to cop out (laughs). I think the biggest triumph is the longevity. We’re standing here celebrating 25 years and the band is as big as it’s ever been. Chris Conley once said to me “Your record is a success if you get to make another one.“Every tour is successful enough for there to be another one. Every record is successful enough for there to be another one.
I quote Chris all the time from an interview where I asked him how he deals with criticism and he said his answer is often, “Where’s YOUR record?”
(Laughs) I think everyone is entitled to their opinion. I want to give you an answer on our biggest failure.
Even just to reframe it, looking back where did you maybe turn left when you should’ve turned right?
Oh, that’s baked into our recipe; zigging when everyone else zags. I’d love to give you specific examples but we’re always like “Everyone is doing this so what should we do that’s not that?” Sometimes it’s to our detriment. One of the more famous cluster fucks of our career, which I still stand behind as a great idea, was when we did a battle of the bands with local bands to open our tour. We had a battle of the bands in every city. Bands submitted and we had people vote for who should open the show in that city. I think it was a great idea and a very fucking cool thing and it was such a cluster fuck because people were cheating and there was jealousy among the bands. Local scenes are weird, right? There’s all kinds of jealousy and animosity between bands and they steal members and steal girls (laughs).
It’s crazy you hand your hands in that so much though. I would’ve thought you were just putting that in motion then showing up to the gigs.
We were trying to give back. We weren’t doing our biggest venues either. We were only doing 500-1000 capacity venues. When we were in that position as an unsigned local band to get to open for someone in front of 500 to 1000 people would’ve been amazing. We thought we could give that opportunity to 25 bands. I thought it was awesome and very nice of us (laughs). I think what people don’t realize is that the platform to do that idea doesn’t exist. So to run 25 different contests with voting and submissions, I don’t people realize how manual so much of it was. We would set up an E-mail address then post and we’d get thousands of E-mails. Our manager and people who work for us were on it but I wanna say there were like 1900 submissions. We were helping sort through them. It’d be a form like “Hey this is our band, here’s a link to the music etc.” We’d have to manually put in all this information. Then we’d get messages like “So and so is cheating, there’s no way they could have that many votes.“We’d have to look at where the votes were coming from and be like “Okay they have 1000 votes from the Congo, okay we’ll remove them.“It was so much work. The bands involved with it probably still think they got a raw deal. No good deed right? (laughs).
I love all those stories about hacks that local bands try though. You hear stories about someone calling a venue and saying, “Hey this is Metallica’s manager and they want this local band to open for them.” I suppose you can’t get away with that stuff as much anymore.
Well, do you remember The Kevin Says Stage at Warped Tour? It’s called that because they used to get all these small bands showing up and saying “Kevin says we can play,“ so they made that stage.
That guy is a saint. By the way I read today that Chris Kirkpatrick did your solo record?
Not really. I was playing solo shows before I ever recorded any music. I was on tour with Andy Jackson from Hot Rod Circuit and we were in Orlando and Chris had a studio in his house. Andy was tight with him so before the show we went to his house and recorded my first solo song.
He seems like an actual fan of punk and this music.
He is! I know him a little better now because he moved to the town I live in so I seem him around.
I imagine even being adjacent to that level of success in music is wild.
Its weird. They were like Michael Jackson level, just the most famous ever. It’s interesting to hang with him. I went to his birthday party one time at a bar and the bar played “Bye Bye Bye” and he got up and did the dance. It just shows he’s a good sport and doesn’t take himself too seriously.
At this point can you say what your favorite album of yours is? I’ll say that I think Vacancy is very underrated.
I agree. I think Vacancy doesn’t have the hits that some others have. I think it’s a great record front to back. It doesn’t have “Sick” or “Devotion” or “Duality” or even “Pigsty.“I know it’s a lame answer but the new record is my favorite one.
The new record feels sonically really big. I’m not sure how to describe it.
I know I was talking about the business side or releasing that record, like giving every song a chance but creatively we were releasing those songs as we were writing them, as opposed to being the studio and having to write a whole record. A record is a thousand ideas. They’re not always all gonna be great. It was cool to make that record like “Every good idea goes on these three songs. Every idea we have we take just the best ones and we use them all.“ Then we have six months to a year to come up with whole new ideas.
The way fans consume that is interesting then. You get a record and you start strong and taper off as you get distracted. You released this like a TV show week to week.
People complained about it saying “We like records” and I’m like “No you don’t.“If you want you can wait for the whole record at the end but I know you don’t like records because we have the numbers. We know how many people listen to just the singles. We know how many more people listen to track one than track 12. You don’t want a record (laughs).
