Mayday Parade To Rock The Gov Tonight…

Powerhouse Florida quintet Mayday Parade return to Adelaide to play The Gov. The band will be celebrating the eleventh anniversary of their Self-Titled, third album, 2011’s Mayday Parade, by performing it IN FULL along with a stack of fan favourites from their stellar discography including tracks from their seventh album What It Means To Fall Apart, which is out now via Rise Records.

Released in 2011, Mayday Parade features huge singles, Oh Well, Oh Well and When You See My Friends as well as their classic piano driven ballad, Stay, the video for which is closing in on 12 million views! Since their formation, Mayday Parade have sold over 1.6 million albums in the U.S. inclusive of 675 million streams across their catalogue, earning their spot as a household name in the scene. With a certified Gold album and countless global tours under their belt, the band shows no signs of slowing down as their fanbase continues to grow. Derek Sanders talks to Hi Fi Way about the tour.

It must be great that this Australian tour is finally happening?
It is very exciting because the last time we were over there must of been 2018 or 2019, it has definitely been a while and typically we would come down every year or every other year. Australian has always been great to us and was the first international tour we ever did way back in 2008 I believe. After two years of not playing any music it feels great to be back at it. I don’t want to get ahead of myself but it feels like full swing again. It feels pretty real this time. In a lot of ways this does feel like a celebration, having toured the US and the energy at these shows has been insane. People have missed us a lot, people need that human connection and live music. It is an important thing, it is really a powerful thing, it has been great.

How did you feel playing those first few shows break?
The very first show back was Slam Dunk Festival in the UK, typically at the start of a tour whenever we haven’t played in a few months or however long you get a little bit nervous for that first show. This was definitely the next level of that. It had been nearly two years from the last show and Slam Dunk, what is crazy is that as soon as you go out there and get on stage it all kind of comes back and feels natural. We’ve played two thousand or so shows at this point, it feels natural again and you get back right in to it. It was definitely very emotional to be doing this again after so long. It is like the way it used to be with the first show of the tour where you are nervous and it goes away fast, then it’s like we’ve got this! When we are on tour it’s nothing as we are doing it every night and feel comfortable and confident. Once the first one is out of the way it feels great.

It must be great to finally be celebrating the tenth (well eleventh) anniversary of your self titled debut album on this tour?
Yeah, exactly, it has been incredible, in a lot of ways it has been nostalgia and playing this album every night brings you back to the writing process, the recording process and how much fun all of that was. Some of these songs we haven’t played ever live since this tour, some we haven’t played since seven or eight years ago. It is nice to revisit those songs and it is surprising that some of those songs wouldn’t go over as well as they do but the energy is really solid through the set.

Even now when you look back at your debut album does it amaze you how far around the world it has taken you?
It is an amazing thing, it is a crazy thing and hard to even put it in to words how lucky we are and how grateful we are to still be here. It has been over sixteen years since we started and to still be here making new music and doing these anniversary tours and going to countries all over the world, I was nineteen years old when we started this band and it was about wanting to play music. We didn’t have a long term goal and it was like this is what the next six months would look like or the next year would look like. Trying to achieve those things and now here we are, we have been able to do so much with this and so much more than we ever had expected. We’re happy and grateful to still be around.

Were there any particular moments that stick out for you when A Lesson In Romantics came out?
There’s so many of those that are hard to pick. Playing Warped Tour and the progression of our career, going to Warped Tour as teenagers, I went for the first time when I was fifteen years old and it truly changed my life. We followed the Warped Tour in 2006 and sold CD’s outside of it even though we weren’t part of it. Our first EP we pressed ourselves and we weren’t signed, we just followed the tour and sold CD’s and then we started playing it the following year on a smaller stage working our way up playing the main stage for the first time felt like such an accomplishment. We were so proud of being able to do that going from the bottom most rung to headlining the tour playing the main stage. We did that a number of years and I’ll always be proud of the amount of international touring we have been able to do. It blows my mind the fact that we have been able to travel to so many places and play must for people. The first time we played Bamboozle Festival is a show that stands out in my mind for most of us. At the time that’s the biggest show we had ever played and we were all back behind the stage, we weren’t even playing main stage, and we didn’t know what to expect or how many people would be there. We couldn’t see the crowd until we literally walked out on to the stage. It is hard to guess how people were there, probably six or seven thousand people and it just blew me away, it was far more people than we expected and a surreal experience. I always think back to that.

Are there plans to follow up What It Means to Fall Apart with a new album or EP now that life is getting back normal?
I feel the inner urge to go in and record something and get it out. I feel like things have changed so much when I started this band and I still want to continue putting out albums every two to three years but the in between I feel it is smart to keep trickling music out, putting out some new songs or new EP’s so hopefully we are able to do that.

Interview By Rob Lyon

Catch Mayday Parade on the following dates, tickets from Destroy All Lines…