After being a band for over a decade, alternative rock band The Maine have built quite a name for themselves. The Phoenix-based five-piece released their sixth studio album ‘Lovely Little Lonely’ just two months ago, and already scored high with it on the Billboard 200 charts. Now they’re more ready than ever to get their music heard on our side of the pond as well, so frontman John O’Callaghan found some time just before their Slam Dunk debut to talk about the festival, their world tour and the band’s latest album.
You are playing Slam Dunk Festival for the first time this year after being a band for over 10 years now. Are you excited?
Yes, very! We’re excited for the opportunity and we’re really eager to put on a performance that hopefully is unique to the festival and could help us create more of a name for ourselves in the UK.
Was it difficult to prepare a setlist for this festival, seeing as it’s your first time playing it and you had two albums come out since your last UK festival?
It gets harder and harder after every album. Hopefully there will be a few people that are familiar with our band, but we’re going into these things thinking that nobody knows a thing about us, so we had to find a balance of what we know works well for people who know us, what satisfies us to play on stage and what we think will hopefully win over a completely unaware, foreign crowd.
You just came back from touring with All Time Low and Neck Deep in Australia, and you’re in the middle of your own Lovely Little Lonely World Tour. How have those tours been?
We were very fortunate to be invited to support All Time Low. A lot of people didn’t know who we were, which is the point of touring. Those shows were really great and everybody was really supportive. Our US tour is the biggest headliner we’ve done to date and people were really vocal about their enthusiasm of the new music, it has been really overwhelming. Fortunately for us, we’ve got insane support of everyone at 8123 [their artist collective] and everyone that’s come out and shown their face.
As you are currently doing a world tour, is there anything you would change to the setlist or the show when you prepare for playing in all the different countries?
Usually, for something like the Lovely Little Lonely tour, we don’t like to stray too far from the setlist because we want to deliver that same set everywhere we go. But it’s a goal for me personally to deliver something a little bit unique every single night, no matter where we are. There is nothing more disappointing for me, than to see a band go out on the road and have the singer recite a prewritten script every single night, it just seems fake. It’s important to be in the room at that moment, to get involved with the crowd and make it more personal, I think we owe it to the people that are there to deliver something authentic and unique.
In the months leading up to the album release, you uploaded a series of videos called Miserable Youth in which fans could follow you during the making of Lovely Little Lonely. How did you come up with the idea for making those videos?
It derived from us being so secretive about the creation of our albums in the past, we felt like it was time to show people the real behind the scenes kind of vibe of what happens when we make an album. It’s one thing to be in on the touring aspect of being a band, but I think most people don’t comprehend what it takes to make an album and what goes into it. We wanted to break that wall and let people in for a different perspective and hopefully let them gain a new look on how we work as a band, who we are as individuals and what it all means to us. What we really wanted to convey is how excited we still are about being a band and what this music still means to us.
You even made a Miserable Youth Season 2 now, where you take fans with you on the road. Isn’t it weird to be followed around by a camera all of the time?
It doesn’t always feel like the camera is there because it’s just a little handheld camera and we’re so used to being around Lupe [Guadalupe Bustos, the mastermind behind directing, filming and producing the videos]. He’s been so fortunate and has become a really close friend and that makes it really easy for us because we feel like we can be a little bit more vulnerable around him and reveal a bit more than we would to a stranger. His eye for things is insane. He wasn’t doing videos at all before, he just did photos, so for him to kind of step into this role was really special for us to watch happen and be a part of. He does a great job of mapping everything out in is head so to not have the camera out all the time and be in the way, but at the same time capture a lot of what it means to be on the road.
You took a new approach for the song-writing process of the new album, where you focused on the melodies first and wrote the lyrics on top of that, how did that go?
For me personally, it was the most challenging album that we’ve made so far. I think it was necessary to get out of that comfort of how I always used to write things, because it made it feel special and like whatever I was doing meant something because of the struggle. I think what I’ve taken from the whole thing is that it’s important to make yourself uncomfortable when you get too comfortable with something that you love, because it will give you a different appreciation for that thing.
For the release of Lovely Little Lonely you decided to steer away from the traditional music industry and turned your fans into the label, giving them full control over everything album release related. How did you come up with that?
We’ve always build our band on the foundation of needing people to be a part of it for it to advance, and fortunately we’ve build this community where it’s about more than just us putting out albums and people coming to concerts. It’s about people connecting and making long-lasting relationships, it’s stuff way bigger than The Maine. We just wanted to showcase that and make it known that this relationship is completely symbiotic and only works when we work in harmony, and the people that participated realise they were a loud voice in getting the record out.
To celebrate your ten year anniversary of being a band, you created your own festival, 8123 Fest, featuring many other bands that are part of the 8123 collective. Would you consider doing something like that again in the future?
The only reason why we could do something like this was because of the people that listen to our music and support what we are about. The fest was an acknowledgement of everyone that has helped us along the way and we can only hope that we can do another one in ten years. I’d like to see 8123 Fest become more of a regularity and to see it happen in different parts of the world. As more and more people identify with 8123, more opportunities will be presented to us and hopefully the scale will make it bigger and bigger as we go along.
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