Warped Tour: 5 Questions With Silverstein

On today’s 5 Questions With… segment, Shane Told and Josh Bradford of Silverstein sat down with Cliché Magazine to discuss Discovering the Waterfront anniversary as well as what changes the band have gone through since their start. Check out the interview and don’t forget to take a look at some of the photos of the band’s set in Hartford, CT below!
Cliché: As Veterans of Warped Tour, do you see any drastic changes over the years, or is the same summer camp every time?
Shane Told: The music has drastically changed. I would say everything else is almost eerily similar. I feel like I can wake up this morning and it would be, say, Kansas 2004, and I would be like, “Yup. Everything is pretty much the same!” [To Josh] Would you agree?
Josh Bradford: I would say so. I mean, there are elements where they are constant and then the smaller details in the music and the fashion are different.  I was even thinking last night: where are the skate ramps? I feel that has more of a place here than the YouTubers.
Shane: Woah. You’re being controversial at the moment!
Josh: [laughs]
With being around for substantial amount of time, do you struggle to keep up with the whole social media movement in the industry, or do you just take it one day at a time?
Shane: Not at all. I would say that we are on the cutting edge of that shit. Someone at one point referred to us as a Myspace band, which I thought was funny because we were a band before Myspace was even around! I guess that is an accurate statement in some ways, but Myspace has gone by the way side and became Nospace, but whatever. We’ve always embraced the new shit social media spits out. I think we even had an Ello account…
Josh: Oh my god, we did.
Shane: Which never panned out! We were one of the first bands on Vine and on Instagram. We are always on that stuff and I guess as you would say veterans or old guys, but we’ve always understood the importance of that stuff.

With your 10 year anniversary tour, you brought along Beartooth, Hands Like Houses, and Major League, who are all pushing through the industry with new sounds. Were you looking to embrace your legacy with Discovering the Waterfront with the up and coming revolutionary music in the industry?
Shane: Yes. When you do a tour like that, an anniversary for an album that you wrote ten years ago, there is kind of two ways you can approach it. You can bring out older bands who were with you during that time frame, or you can do what we chose to do and take on the future and pushed ahead. Not only are the bands the next generation, but we have a hand in influencing those bands. The drummer from Beartooth was quoting our DVD from our first album and it is so cool to see that we have been influencing some of these bands that in ten years, they will be doing their own ten year anniversaries. It is a better approach from bringing out fellow bands from those years ago and to leave things in the past. We are a band pushing towards the future as well with our new album. We are promoting that album on the tour as well. That’s important to us; the future.
Looking back on Discovering The Waterfront, do you feel as though you’ve learned as how you have evolved as a person?
Josh: I found myself thinking that a little bit as we were playing those shows. It was always nice in the set when we came to playing tracks off of Discovering the Waterfront, because it was like, “these songs are not so difficult!” They tell of the time when we wrote them when we were a little bit less experienced. I think they are comfortable and solidified us in our place in the industry, but as Shane said, we are here to move forward now. It’s pretty nice!
Shane: One cool thing is when we started practicing and looking back, for me as the main lyricist, when I looked back on the words, I was able to put myself where I was 10 year ago writing these words and I remembered what I was thinking when I read the lyrics. It’s interesting, because when I look back on those words, I just think, “Man, you are such an idiot! Why did you ever think that way?” There are also moments, when I look at other songs and I go, “Oh yeah, I remember feeling that way.” Maybe reading it now helps my current self understand where I’ve been and helps me where I am at this moment. It was a bit refreshing in some ways and I would say a bit emotional some times in remembering some stuff that happened in the recording process and overall in the memory of it.
In regards to the new album, what made you want to compose a concept record that is geographical? Can this be taken to be an autobiography of the band’s experiences since you started?
Shane: Yes. It almost touches on what I was just saying before about doing the album shows and reflecting back, because when we were writing the new album when we were playing the Discovering the Waterfront shows, it had us thinking back to the last 15 years of us being a band. I think that is where the idea stemmed from; looking back. I wasn’t sure how autobiographical it was going to be, but when I sat down and started writing, that’s what came out from it. Geographically, it made sense because it was we have been doing the better part of our adult life. We’ve been touring and going to these different cities and having all these experiences, so for us it made sense to write about them.



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Warped Tour: 5 Questions With Silverstein: Photos by Heather Glock