Source: Alternative Addiction
They had one of the biggest songs in 2007 with “Hey There Delilah” and now The Plain White T’s are faced with the daunting task of showing the world there’s more to their band than the acoustic ballad that broke them onto the music scene.
For their second major label effort, the band entered the studio having been allotted enough pre-production time to layout and rehearse the entire album, which Guitarist Dave Tirio said made a big difference.
“We wanted to record the record mostly live and have everyone in the same room all together and let that be the basis for all the tracks,” Tirio told Alternative Addiction. “To do that we really had to just rehearse, rehearse, rehearse, so that two weeks of production really was to get all the songs down cold.”
The result from the hard preproduction work is an album that Tirio says is some of the best work the band has done, and fits very well with the mid-tempo sound that is at the core of the band’s sound.
“We’ve definitely been lumped into the whole pop-punk thing, and I think that’s mostly by nature of who we tour with, and some of it is warranted,” says Tirio. “I do think that we are just a pop-rock band; we tend a lot more towards the mid-tempo songs.”
Tirio says the band has learned a lot since their last release, specifically from the unexpected success of “Hey There Delilah.”
“It opened our eyes to the fact that there was no rule on what can succeed,” said Tirio. “You’re getting told left and right that you have to write the big rock guitar song and that you’ve got to compete with Nickelback and Three Doors Down even though you aren’t in the exact same genre as them, you are competing for space on Modern Rock Radio.”
The advice seemed to make sense to the band when their first single “Hate (I Really Don’t Like You)” began to take off on alternative and modern rock stations throughout the country. Then the label came to the band and wanted to release Delilah as the next single, which seemed to go against everything they were told.
“This little tiny ballad comes along, with one little acoustic guitar, and that’s the song that works, so it’s kind of like – okay, there are no rules,” said Tirio.
Instead of trying to fit into a mold that everyone else wanted the band to be, Tirio and his band mates just set out to write and record the best record they could. The result was a very organic sound, that transitions perfectly from the success of Delilah.
“I feel like in a way, it’s a lot of the same from us, you’re never going to get away from the melodic hooks, you are never going to get away from the harmonies,” says Tirio. “We know what our bread and butter is, we have been a band long enough to know what kind of sound we have, so you are going to get a lot of the same ideas, just sounding better.”
The Plain White T’s new album, entitled “Big Bad World” is due out September 23rd, and the first single “Natural Disaster” is heading to radio soon.
