The All-American Rejects: “I’m only as happy as the last song I wrote made me feel”

Towards the end of 2024, All-American Rejects released a cover version of Flagpole Sitta by the now-defunct Seattle alt-rockers Harvey Danger – a song Brits will know as the opening theme tune to the comedy series Peep Show. Not that this means anything to Tyson Ritter, mind. “I’ve never seen Peep Show and I’ve never been to one,” the 42-year-old jokes.

Tyson and the rest of All-American Rejects – guitarists Nick Wheeler and Mike Kennerty, drummer Chris Gaylor – are currently in Denver, where tonight they play the latest show on their House Party Tour. These pop-up gigs take place in what Tyson calls “alt-venues”, including houses, barns, and in this case, the home of The International Church Of Cannabis, a religious organisation that uses the ol' devil’s lettuce as a sacrament.

These shows have been top secret, with each only announced the day beforehand, and everyone involved in their production having to sign NDAs. Sadly, not everyone has been able to remain tight-lipped. Just the other day, in San Diego during graduation weekend, the support act let the cat out of the bag, so by the time AAR arrived in the area, it had been transformed into a campus lined with people and party buses. The band therefore sought alternative arrangements, with a fan stepping in to host them at a private venue in the mountains. For Tyson, it wasn’t simply a question of everyone’s safety, but of staying true to the mission statement.

“This is a goodwill heartbeat that we’re trying to share,” he explains, looking as chiseled as when AAR first burst onto the scene with their self-titled debut in 2002. “We’re trying to gather people and create a community and some fellowship. But if that energy isn’t there, it’s a bust.”

All-American Rejects are about to release their fifth album, Sandbox – their first since 2012. The band never officially called it a day during that lengthy period of inaction, though, as Tyson felt it unnecessary to bring drama and attention to an already tricky situation, or want it to become some marketing ploy, “to try and capitalise on some false break up.”

It’s fair to say that Tyson is a man of strong principles. This tour and its direct approach with fans is, after all, a rebuke to the inflated prices normalised by major ticketing platforms.

“Maybe it’s because I don’t have a yacht,” says Tyson, explaining his powerful aversion to corporate greed, as he takes K! through some of the lessons he’s learned from a life in music. “Or maybe it’s because I haven’t tasted the forbidden fruit that’s so sweet that once you get a taste for it, it becomes something you crave, like a vampire.”

“My musical hero is my dad. He played me all the music that informed my love of it, because all I wanted to do was be close to him. I was a child of the radio, a poor kid from Oklahoma who lived in a trailer park, so I never got to buy records. My dad is the biggest rock star I know, and his taste in music was the triple-distilled stepping stone into my love for music. My dad was a young dad, so he’d get excited if The Black Crowes came on, or Stone Temple Pilots, or Nirvana… or Seal. His taste was a broad swathe of what was popular at the time. That’s what you get in the Midwest.”

“We had the same regional booking agent when we were kids. He played at our local town college bar, which is kind of where we cut our teeth as a band when I was 14. And he let us open up for them there. He said, ‘Hey, you guys are good’ and he got us a booker. And then I saw him on the Warped Tour, our first Warped Tour in 2003, he sat me down and said, ‘Hey, bro, you are flying close to the sun. I need to straighten you out and tell you to make sure that the people around you have your best interests in mind, and that you are watching out for those you empower with your voice.’ If I didn’t have that nugget of wisdom given to me at that moment, then I don’t even know if we’d be a band today.”

“We used to go on writing retreats. We’d pack up our shit, get some provisions, and go to the woods. It almost felt like a pilgrimage every time we would do it, because we were going into the abyss of a secluded space and trying to speak to the daemon and conjure some magic. I always say that I don’t know how to write a song, but when a song finds me, it comes out and writes itself. We got an award from ASCAP (The American Society Of Composers, Authors And Publishers), which was weird, winning an award when we were in the middle of writing a record. When I went up to get the award I said, ‘I’m only as happy as the last song I wrote made me feel’, and I’m really hoping to be happy tomorrow.”

“Either I’m afraid because I think the song is too saccharine, or in the case of Gives You Hell, which is our most streamed song, we were afraid because the moment we finished the song, everybody said, ‘Get in the studio!’ We still had a couple more songs to write for the record [When The World Comes Down, 2008] at that point, but we thought we better get in the studio and those songs would come eventually. The moment we played Gives You Hell for the label, their hands were rubbing together. It was a real Daddy Warbucks moment and I remember thinking, ‘I hope this is going to help us more than hurt us.’ We made part of When The World Comes Down at George Lucas’ Skywalker Ranch, but we never met the man himself. I did get to fish at Yoda Lake, though, on the ranch, which is about as Oklahoma as I could make that compound in Northern California.”

“I’m a creative spirit, whether it’s a canvas or a frame or a recording studio. To me, everything is visual. Music is visual. For me, when I talk about writing music, I’m trying to express how I want something to sound, I describe it visually. That’s why I can’t watch scary movies – everything I see is real.”

“Fifteen years into being a band, it felt like the well had run dry after our fourth record [Kids In The Street, 2012]. Nick [Wheeler, AAR guitarist] and I were in Mobile, Alabama and 18 months into touring a record that was not commercially viable. We were raised through the label system, so when you’re not told you did a good job, that’s really defeating. We parted ways with our label shortly after, and Nick and I disbanded in a way, though we didn’t let everyone know about it. It wasn’t that dire. We just needed some space, and if we ended up coming back together, then that would be a beautiful thing. There was a lot that we didn't want to talk about when you're actually on that precipice of not knowing what's going to happen next as a band, the last thing you do is fucking talk about it. The last 10 or 12 years have been about soul-searching and growing up, asking ourselves: how do we evolve as a band and write a record that isn’t dipping back into a well we know to be dry?”

“I became the trope musician that moved out to LA and found a crowd that I wrote about in the song King Kong [from new album, Sandbox]. I found myself with this cluster of people that were there to sponge off me and and enable fucking bad behaviour. It was kind of a wave of neglect – both self-neglect and relationships that I just kind of just let dissolve. I had a lost weekend, I guess.”

“I’m seeing the blood being sucked out of artists’ audiences through dynamic ticket pricing, and taking all the money off the table and not putting any of it back to knock down ticket prices. Ask yourself: do you think we need to expect more from artists? I see a lot of people say of musicians, ‘They have to eat’ and, ‘Artists need to make a living’. Well, what kind of a fucking living do they need to make? Because everybody wants to blame billionaires for all the troubles in the world, but there are a lot of people that don’t have a billion dollars that make a lot of fucking money, that could make less and pass that on to the people who really need music to get through life, the have-nots and the have-littles.”

Sandbox is released May 15. All-American Rejects will play Download Festival on June 12–14 – get your tickets now.

Read this next:

• The dirtiest secrets from All-American Rejects’ Dirty Little Secret video, ranked in order of dirtiness
• The story of pop-punk in 16 songs
  
• Bowling For Soup’s Jaret Reddick: Punk rock, perseverance and getting personal