Shaun: “Straylight Run had just come to an end. People weren’t coming out to shows anymore and they weren’t buying our records. It was just done. I was kind of just happy to ride off into the sunset, having got to live my dream for a little while because that’s all I ever wanted. But Mark had different plans, and the stars aligned and we secretly flew to El Paso – it turned out the longer we’d been apart, the closer we’d grown together.”
John: “I got the call from Mark about him wanting Shaun and I to rejoin the band and it was completely out of the blue. I didn’t really think it was something I wanted to do right off the bat when he started talking about it, but at the same time I’d finally gotten to a point where I’d started to miss those guys. And there was definitely a connection from everything we’d gone through with the rise of Taking Back Sunday, even though it was only two years or something – so much happened during that time, so despite all our problems we had this bond and I’d really started to miss that and having these people in my life. And the first time we got together, in that studio outside of El Paso, it was just the band and no producers and we were just hanging out and reconnecting and playing music and it was amazing. It was immediately exciting and fun.”
Mark: “I called Adam about it first and I was like, ‘We have to do this – we can’t just keep going on like this.’ Because the only thing that would make it fun again in my opinion was having them back. And once we were back in the studio it was like nothing had changed. Everyone was excited to be there.”
Adam: “It was a real amazing thing. I think somehow we just needed that time apart to come back together again. Before they came back, the band was in a very strange place, so when they came back we almost felt whole again. We all started in the same place and we all want the same things as it pertains to the band, so to have everybody back with a hive mind was great. I think [fifth album] Taking Back Sunday was us learning how to work with one another again and then Happiness Is… was the realisation of, ‘Okay – we got this!’”
John: “I think for Happiness Is… and the self-titled, we were still putting ourselves in a box of like, ‘Well, this is what Taking Back Sunday can do and this is what Taking Back Sunday can’t do stylistically.’ And then with Tidal Wave we just sort of decided that Taking Back Sunday can do whatever it wants. And I think we started to realise pretty quickly as we embraced that idea that yes, this is different, but this is still Taking Back Sunday. It still has the same spirit that all Taking Back Sunday’s music has. And that’s really exciting for the future and for when we go into the next record.”
Jillian: “There’s an iconic poster from the Tell All Your Friends days with a green background and Adam in a striped shirt – it was everywhere. And it was my idea to recreate that photo but put bars over everyone’s eyes and we won’t say anything, just post the picture. And it crashed a bunch of websites! It was us saying what needed to be said without saying anything.”