Taking Back Sunday are spending 2019 celebrating their 20th anniversary with the release of compilation album ‘Twenty’ and a world tour.
The album includes two new tunes but is mainly a voyage through their seven studio albums with the band making damn sure to include all the biggest hits to chronicle the heartbreaks, feuds, line-up changes and emo phases that all ultimately shaped them into one of most reliable alt-rock bands in the world.
But, for the usually effervescent and swaggering frontman Adam Lazzara, looking back at the history of Taking Back Sunday is actually unfamiliar territory.
“It’s funny putting out this record ‘Twenty’ and even going through that stuff I was hesitant because I don’t want to be redoing something we’ve already done, or standing in still water looking back. I wanna be moving forward,” he begins.
“But, it has been nice as I’m not usually the kind of person to do that in the sense of being able to look back and say, ‘Man, I’m really proud of us’.
“I’m happy to be going on this tour because I don’t look at it as a nostalgic thing but look at it more as a celebration as this is the thing that changed my life when I was 18 years old, and I feel happy celebrating that.”
While the semi-reluctant participant of a nostalgia trip into their back catalogue, Adam’s vision for the anniversary release differed slightly as his idea was to release a box set of the band’s entire work but in the end settled to whittle their songs down to 19 hits and then the two new tracks. In the end, looking at his work retrospectively had its bonuses.
“The thing that I’m proud of and what I was picking up on as I listened back was that each record and era of the band is a perfect snapshot and representation of who we were at that time.
“Throughout all this time and all these records we have always been true to ourselves and that is something that wasn’t a conscious thing and I’m proud of that. It’s very easy to fall into this cycle of doing what you know will work and there are glaring examples on each record of us not doing that.
“I’m glad that we maintained our identity and allowed that idea to grow. I mean, how awful would it be if we had written the same album six times, y’know?”
The anniversary allows both the band and fans an opportunity to see Taking Back Sunday with a wider perspective and appreciate the full extent of their evolution.
Back at the turn of the millennium, when the band were starting out, Long Island was awash with talent and its scene thriving thanks to bands like Glassjaw, The Movielife, Silent Majority and Bayside who followed soon afterwards.
That scene is what drove Adam Lazzara from North Carolina up to New York to join Taking Back Sunday (as their bassist) on somewhat of a whim, as he describes.
“At the time I just wanted to be playing in a band, and I couldn’t find that where I was living. I looked up to what they were doing in New York and that Long Island scene. For me to be a part of that, even if it was just a short time – I remember thinking, ‘If this doesn’t work out you can always just go home’.”
