INTERVIEW // FOUR YEAR STRONG
“We just had to relearn and really just practice the songs and play them really well until we got to takes. It was challenging, but I think a lot more rewarding in the end.” The track “Go Down in History” of the EP is probably one of my favorite recent songs from you guys and it’s also on this record. Why did you put it there? Mostly because it was one of our favorite songs and quickly became a fan’s favorite in the live shows. It became one of the best songs to play live and we didn’t want to kind of let that disappear on the EP. Not that it would, but we didn’t want to take that chance, so we decided to just put it on the full-length and let it be a part of our actual discography. The album’s artwork is so funny! Tell us a little bit about it and who did it. The artist is Ryan Eyestone. We were on tour and we knew we had to come up with artwork ideas. We just got around one day on the tour bus joking about different ideas and how was the one that stuck. Our tour manager made a list of all the things we were saying and sent it to the artist,
and that’s exactly what came to be the artwork. Actually, the artwork was finished before the actual music was finished. At this point, do you have any bands that still inspire you musically? That’s kind of all over the place. Something that we take pride in our songwriting is that our influences are directly different from each other and it has a lot variety in genres and styles. I listen to a lot of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, but also Taylor Swift and also Led Zeppelin. I listen to stuff all across the board and I like to think that shows in the music we write, not necessarily that we sound anything like that, but we take little bits of pieces and make it unrecognizable in our guitar playing and like little pieces of the music, not like the song as a whole but taking influences the way that we feel they should be taken and not necessarily stolen directly and apply in a certain way, but more
like “The energy of this song... I want to capture that in a certain way, the way we do it.” What’s next for Four Year Strong after the album’s release? We don’t have a lot of 100% solid plans for the rest of the year. We’re still working most of it out. Everything that we’re doing right now is just releasing this record, we have some music videos coming out and we’re on a tour right now with The Story So Far and that’s going really well and we’re hoping to do another tour in the fall. We’re taking a bit of the summer off just to spend some time with our families. I’m going to get married later this year, so we’re taking some time off then.
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Four Year Strong is out now via Pure Noise Records 47