Q&A: Mayday Parade Celebrates 20 Years with Three-Part Album, Anniversary Tour
INTERVIEW
INTERVIEW
☆ BY KIMBERLY KAPELA ☆
Photography Credit: Eli Ritter
THREE CHEERS FOR 20 YEARS, AND THEY’RE JUST GETTING STARTED — For two decades, Mayday Parade has been a defining force in the pop-punk and emo realms, evolving from hopeful newcomers to seasoned torchbearers of the genre. Now, as they celebrate 20 years as a band, the five-piece—Derek Sanders (vocals), Jake Bundrick (drums), Alex Garcia and Brooks Betts (guitars), and Jeremy Lenzo(bass)—is embarking on one of their most ambitious projects yet: a three-part album that showcases the depth of their songwriting and artistic growth.
The first installment, Sweet, marks the beginning of this expansive release. The album was recorded with longtime collaborators, multi-platinum engineers Zack Odom and Kenneth Mount, ensuring that the trilogy remains deeply rooted in Mayday Parade’s signature sound—an emotionally charged fusion of anthemic choruses, soaring melodies and heartfelt lyricism.
“You can expect us to stick around, because I don't think we're going anywhere,” Betts says. “I hope it comes across in what I'm saying, but I've never been more immersed in music in my life than I am now, and I've been playing for 27 years, and professionally for 20 and I love it. I'm doing more of it than I ever have. I think that's why we're doing what we're doing because our band is very excited in what we're doing, nothing that we are doing is from a lazy standpoint.
“Being a band for 20 years feels big, and we wanted to do something big to match that,” Sanders says. “Our next release will be a large album split up into three different parts. It feels like a challenge and an exciting step forward for the band. Our goal is to take the things we’ve learned and the ways we’ve grown and apply them towards an ambitious release. We’re incredibly thankful for the opportunity to continue to create music, and we cannot wait to share Sweet with the world.”
To commemorate this milestone, Mayday Parade is hitting the road for the Three Cheers for Twenty Years North American Anniversary Tour. The tour will celebrate every chapter of their career, with a setlist featuring fan favorites, deep cuts and brand-new material. Kicking off on April 22 in St. Petersburg, FL, at Jannus Live, the extensive run will take the band across the U.S. before culminating in their hometown of Tallahassee, FL, on June 7 at The Moon.
As Mayday Parade steps into their third decade together, 20 years isn’t just about longevity; it’s about evolution. They’ve grown with their fans, embracing change while staying true to the songwriting that has made them such an enduring force. With Sweet setting the tone for the next chapter, this anniversary isn’t just a look back at where they’ve been—it’s a thrilling glimpse into where they’re going.
And if the past two decades have proven anything, it’s that Mayday Parade’s story is far from over.
Photography Credit: Eli Ritter
LUNA: Welcome back and thank you for talking to Luna again. It's super exciting to have you back since the last time we talked about your single “Pretty Good to Feel Something.” I would love to catch up and see how life has been treating you and what have you been up to since the last time we talked.
BROOKS: Since the last time we’ve talked, I had my son, so I've got two kids and my wife is taking care of them while I'm usually doing a lot of lessons down here in the basement. Life has gotten really busy. But I love it. I've built this guitar session and lessons up so much that I stay busy all the time, especially off the road.
LUNA: Mayday Parade has reached a huge milestone—20 years as a band and that’s an incredible milestone to celebrate. When you reflect on where you started and where you are now, what factors have been the key to the band’s longevity, especially in an ever-evolving rock scene?
BROOKS: There's a lot that goes into it. I think that we came along at a good time. Emo music was still strong, but it was the last bit of that window when the emo scene had a lot of momentum. I think that helped us a ton and then we just never stopped and we've just worked really hard through all those years. We toured our butts off. I think we put out music about as regularly as anybody would, but we also never took a long period of time between anything. We always made sure that we were putting out new music and kept being in the face of fans and making new fans, and on top of that too, dynamically, the way we work as a band, we're five members who all make decisions together who have a voting system for most things.
We're all writing music, so we're all putting music on the table. There's this healthy competitiveness of what makes a record. The way it works out is that we get paid out the same. If Derek writes the majority of the songs, I still get paid the same. I still make the same royalty. What that does is that makes it so that nobody feels pissed off that they're getting paid less because there might be a bias towards wanting to get more of my songs or his songs on a record to make more money. It truly makes it so that we are all putting equal work in putting songs on the table, and we're all striving hard to do that, and then we're actually making the best decisions on what songs we put on the record based on the record and the art, not based on monetary gains. That goes a long way. Having a piece of everything in the band—at any stage or level or aspect of what we do—keeps everybody involved, gives a feeling of belonging, whereas, I think with a lot of artists, that doesn't work that way, and one guy is running the show and the rest are feeling left out or create creatively, they're not being heard, and that creates animosity and a lot of breakups.
LUNA: You’ve released your newest album Sweet and huge congratulations! It feels like a natural evolution of your sound while staying rooted in vision. What inspired the decision to break the traditional album format and release a three-part album?
BROOKS: The world of music and the ever changing landscape and the fast paced changing landscape of music formatting and the way that the audience digests music based on what's given to us or the outlets that are given to us. We're living in a fast paced industry where music can be put out cheaper than it was in the past. We have access to the tools to be able to do it on our own sometimes, or a lot of artists create more freely. I have a home studio where I'm not going to create album ready material, but what I can do is get pretty dang close for a cheap price, and that's happening for all artists across the board, and that's just making it so that music can be put out quicker and and more freely. It's opening up that box of having a budget for 12 songs, so we have to stick to that, and that's all we can do, and we've got to whittle everything down to it. Also, that's because of the price and what it costs to do these things, it's making the world music world a bit more competitive. Also, even if it's just from a standpoint of people only having so much time in their day to listen to music, right? You stay relevant. You have to keep up with that pace, whatever that is.
I think that where that is currently in the world, it makes sense to put more music out and waterfall it a bit and put out more singles and then put out an EP that's a part of a trilogy. We're trying it out. For the longest time, we would do full albums and then we messed with doing shorter releases or even singles, but the way we had to do it was something more like a crash. We have three songs that are on that release. But really the idea was that you wanted to just release three singles, but the way that iTunes or Apple Music and Spotify structured things, they needed to come together. They want to put it in a collective. We released it that way because that's part of the constructs of the platforms that are available.
LUNA: Sweet is the first entry in this trilogy—how would you describe its sound and themes compared to what’s coming next?
BROOKS: I think that they could just expect the best music that we can create. We are trying to drive things by having fun with a title, not steer lyrics, but let's use the lyrics that naturally fit within that sort of theme. Let's highlight some things and make that a cool vision. But at the end of the day, we're not trying to do Sweet songs. Then for the next title, we're not trying to make just whatever that vibe is to the term, it's more around what are the best songs on the table in that session.
LUNA: You worked with longtime producers Zack Odom and Kenneth Mount. How did they help shape the sound and overall vision of the albums? How was it like reuniting with them to bring the trilogy to life?
BROOKS: Zach and Ken are great and we've worked with them for a long time. They did A Lesson In Romantics, and then from there, we had worked with other producers, and we've come back and worked with Zach and Ken, and then we had gone out and worked with other producers just to be creative in a different way because every producer or an engineer brings something different to the table. I think that's a really cool thing to try to experiment with, because artistically, it just gives you diversity and a different way of looking at your music, it's a bit of a crapshoot of what you get right, working with different people on certain songs, right? But you would have ended up with a different product. You would have had the same songs, possibly right. Most likely, you would have at least some of the songs surely would have been, but you would add a slightly different product, and that's part of the cool thing about the producers touching on the art that you're working on.
Zach and Ken have been the mainstay with us, and for that, they are a huge part of the Mayday sound. I think that at this point in our career, we're just super comfortable with that. They know what we know, they know what they are going to expect from us. We know what we expect from them, and it just works, and in that, what the audience gets is that sound that they're used to hearing from Mayday Parade.
LUNA: Can you walk us through the creative process for Sweet? How did the songs evolve from the initial idea to the final version? What did a typical writing and recording session look like?
BROOKS: We're all writing music at home. We're all putting demos together most of the time, that is an idea is basically almost fully fleshed out by the individual in the band. And then those demos start going to a dropbox where they are compiled, and we can all start listening to each other's demos. We try not to put too much weight on anything to show too much bias towards certain tracks or whatever, in that stage of the process. Then by the time we get to the studio, we're all listening as a group to everything with the producers, and we're starting to compile our thoughts and notes and share those with each other. And after the first day of doing that, basically by day two and what we call pre-production, we're doing rounds of voting where we are slowly chipping away at 30 songs and whittling down to what is that going to be on this session, which has been somewhere around six to eight songs each time we're going in.
It's really hard to do because there's so many factors and not every song is completely finished. That's the other problem with that too is you might have a song where it's great up through the first chorus, but then there's no second verse, and then you're like, wait, but it needs to end a certain way. But that third chorus, I don't really know how you're going to do that. If you did it the exact same as the first then you have these what ifs you have to make a decision to pull the trigger on songs. Usually there's some tweaks on everything and that's where the band really comes in and the producers come in. But there's also songs that need whole verses, or you change the chords up in a progression, or the drums are going to be completely different from however somebody demoed it. Then we're also nitpicking lyrics. Everybody's sitting there going, ‘What if you said this instead?’ ‘That would make more sense.’ ‘That would rhyme and you didn't rhyme there, or you rhyme too much here.’ There's a lot going on.
LUNA: What is your favorite song from Sweet and why do you love it? Is there a certain lyric or message that stands out to you the most?
BROOKS: The song “Natural” is a song that I wrote. So that song, very, very much just is going to be like a bias for me to choose it. I think that if I'm not being biased, “Towards You,” is such a well written song. Lyrically, it's just a really cool story. It comes full circle. It hits all the spots for me. The title hook is “Towards You,” but there's just so much in that one that feels great. It's tough because “By The Way” has such a cool feeling to it.
LUNA: Your fanbase has been incredibly loyal over the years. How have your fans influenced the way you approached this milestone release?
BROOKS: I think it's gone over really well. There's certain things that we try to look at to get a gauge of how things are going, and it's very difficult to tell until you get on the road. Obviously, you can go off streams. You can go off of what people are saying. The real test is when you get on stage and you go to play a song and you either get crickets or you get a reaction, and that's only time can tell with some of those things. I feel like there's other songs in the past that were slow creepers and then became mainstays in our sets, like “Oh Well, Oh Well” felt that way, or even “Piece Of Your Heart” felt that way, but those are more mainstays in our set now, because they did gain that popularity amongst the fan base. I'd like to think that “By The Way” is going to be one of those mainstays. A band can dream that on album eight, you can continue to put out songs that people want to hear every show. But the truth is that it's really tough to keep up the momentum with things. I think we're doing a good job. I'm loving the music, but that's again biased, right? And the fans will tell you whether you're doing it right or not.
LUNA: What excites you most about this new chapter in your career and what are you hoping listeners can take away from this new era?
BROOKS: I just want people to be at the shows, and just know that we will always play all the favorites, at least I'm probably the most like, ‘let's play every song that they want to hear.’ And then, if we have time, then you play some deep cuts. Maybe you play a song that you have never played for the die hard fans. I think you're always going to hear some of the new music and you're always going to get your favorites, that's what you're going to expect.
You can expect us to stick around, because I don't think we're going anywhere. I don't know how we made it 20 years, just because that's from a point standpoint of being young, coming into it, having certain goals and just saying, ‘hey, if this thing lasts five years, that's a lot of fun, right?’ To going, ‘I don't know how it went from a five year goal to here we are still 20 years,’ and I don't really know when it slows down, so it's a good problem to have and we're still very excited. I hope it comes across in what I'm saying, but I've never been more immersed in music in my life than I am now, and I've been playing for 27 years, and professionally for 20 and I love it. I'm doing more of it than I ever have. I think that's why we're doing what we're doing because our band is very excited in what we're doing, nothing that we are doing is from a lazy standpoint.
LUNA: How are you feeling in this current era of your career and what does the rest of the year look like that you would like to share with Luna?
BROOKS: We've just got a lot of touring, so with the front end of this year has been pretty easy. We're hanging it at home. We're doing a lot of writing, and that's probably why I have a guitar in my hand most of the day. I'm literally going from teaching it to going right back into Pro Tools and finishing my demos. It's great because I'm at home and I can be with the family. Then we're going into the next bit of this year touring like crazy—international touring, domestic touring, and it's probably going to be too much, and it feels okay right now on paper, and later we're going to be sick of it, but we're signed up like we always do. We never learn our lesson. We just tour our butts off, and we do it over and over every other year.
