Tell All Your Friends

Background

Guitarist Eddie Reyes, who had played in The Movielife, Mind Over Matter and Inside, and guitarist Jesse Lacey of the Rookie Lot founded Taking Back Sunday in Amityville, New York in November 1999. Lacey moved to bass with the addition of guitarist John Nolan. The group also included vocalist Antonio Longo of One True Thing and drummer Steven DeJoseph. At a party, Nolan reportedly romanced Lacey's girlfriend, after which Lacey left the band. Lacey formed Brand New a year later. Nolan contacted Adam Lazzara to fill in on bass, which resulted in Lazzara moving from North Carolina to New York. Lazzara had met the band when they played a show near his hometown in North Carolina.

DeJoseph left, leaving the band without a drummer. Mark O'Connell, a friend of Reyes, heard about the vacancy and joined the group. After recording Taking Back Sunday's self-titled EP, Longo left the band and eventually played with Guilt Like Gravity and the Mirror. In December 2000, Lazzara switched from bass to lead vocals. He never thought he would become the group's singer: "I remember getting into [Reyes'] Windstar with that [EP] and just driving around singing those songs, just to make myself actually do it." O'Connell suggested that the group needed a bassist, and brought in Shaun Cooper of Breaking Pangaea. In February 2001, Taking Back Sunday released a five-track demo before touring for a year.

Composition

Lazzara and Nolan shared an apartment, often staying up talking until 5:00 am, and began showing each other compositions on which they were working. Neil Rubenstein, who later became the group's tour manager, would often find them composing songs with acoustic guitars. Taking Back Sunday had a room in Lindenhurst, New York, where they practiced and composed every night; their first song written was "Great Romances of the 20th Century". The band frequently recorded demos. The band wrote music together, while Lazzara and Nolan wrote lyrics. One member would typically come up with a part, which the rest of the group would expand into a song. Many songs feature Lazzara and Nolan use call-and-response vocals. By December 2001, the group signed to Chicago-based Victory Records and had enough material for an album.

Reyes said that the album was written solely for "fun and the love of music, no expectations." Their lyrics were inspired by personal experience. Nolan and Lazzara had a concept where some of the lyrics could be read "like a play where one line is the boy and the next line is the girl ... Sometimes when you read the lyrics it's a little boring and it's more interesting this way". About half their song titles, according to Nolan, came from "sitting around late at night watching TV". The title of "Cute Without the 'E' (Cut from the Team)" came when a friend of the band said that someone he knew was "cut from the team". "Great Romances of the 20th Century" includes an audio sample from the film, Beautiful Girls (1996). Lazzara said "The Blue Channel" and "Head Club" were songs that the band used "to get enough songs to fill a record so we could go on tour". The album's sound would later be described as emo. Around this time, Taking Back Sunday was influenced by emo bands the Get Up Kids and the Promise Ring.

Production

Although other labels expressed interest in Taking Back Sunday, Victory encouraged them to record an album. Tell All Your Friends was recorded over a period of two weeks in December 2001 at Big Blue Meenie Recording Studio in New Jersey with producer Sal Villanueva. The sessions ended up costing $10,000. The band arrived without a drum set, presuming that the studio would have one. Engineer Tim Gilles said, "No major studio in America has their own [drum] set. You've gotta be fucking kidding me". The group wanted to re-record "Your Own Disaster" from their demo, but was unable to due to time and money constraints. Instead, it was re-recorded for Taking Back Sunday's next album, Where You Want to Be (2004). Villanueva contributed guitar work and co-mixed the recordings with Rumblefish. The album was engineered by Gilles, Erin Farley, and Arun Venkatesh, with mastering by Gilles at Surgical Sound.

Rubenstein contributed vocals to "There's No 'I' in Team", "Timberwolves at New Jersey" and "Head Club". Nolan's sister, Michelle, sang on "Bike Scene" and "Ghost Man on Third", and Matt McDannell contributed vocals to "Head Club". Nolan suggested his sister "because I knew she had an amazing voice". In a 2011 Alternative Press article, Cooper said that the band was unhappy with "some of the choices that had been made without us"; the introductions to "Great Romances of the 20th Century" and "The Blue Channel" were changed by studio technicians without the band's input.

Release

In January 2002, Taking Back Sunday toured with Rival Schools. A music video for "Great Romances of the 20th Century" directed by Christian Winters, a friend of the band, was released on March 4. Winters made the video before the group signed with Victory, and the record company enjoyed it. The song was distributed to radio stations on March 12, and Tell All Your Friends was released on March 25. Its cover art was taken by John Clark. To promote the album, Victory founder Tony Brummel targeted people who were familiar with the label and also fans of emo. In Chicago, New York and Los Angeles, Victory gave out 20,000 sampler albums at a cost of about $100,000; Brummel considered this a better investment than attempting to gain radio play. RED Distribution, who handled distribution for Victory, was aware that the group did not have radio play and began posting about the album on emo websites. A Yahoo! Group with over 1,300 Taking Back Sunday fans allowed them to download demos of "Bike Scene" and "Head Club", a tactic which was hoped would increase sales.

For three weeks beginning in mid-March 2002, Taking Back Sunday participated in the Victory Records tour. The band then toured that summer with Brand New and Rufio. In September and October, they toured with Midtown and Recover. During the tour, Lazzara sustained an injury which forced the band to leave for two weeks. In November and December 2002, Taking Back Sunday toured with the Starting Line and Northstar. On December 10, a music video was released for "Cute Without the 'E' (Cut from the Team)" on Launch.com. The video, conceived and directed by Winters, was inspired by the 1999 film Fight Club (a favorite of Nolan and Lazzara). Lazzara's original idea for the video had men fighting women, which was rejected by Winters and Victory Records before Lazzara and Winters expanded it in the final version. In January 2003, Taking Back Sunday toured with the Used and the Blood Brothers. They headlined the Takeover Tour in March and April, with support from From Autumn to Ashes and Recover.

Nolan (citing exhaustion from touring) left the band, and Cooper followed shortly afterwards. According to Lazzara, Nolan and Cooper were "having trouble because everything was happening so fast. Going from being home ... to being gone all the time and having your whole life consumed and almost defined by the band that you’re in is a lot to handle". The band briefly considered breaking up. Nolan and Cooper formed Straylight Run with Nolan's sister, Michelle, and Breaking Pangaea drummer Will Noon. From June to August 2003, the group was part of the Warped Tour. Reyes contacted his friend, Breaking Pangaea frontman Fred Mascherino, who auditioned for Nolan's place; on August 5, it was announced that Mascherino was a member of the band. Bassist Matt Rubano, who grew up with O'Connell, then joined the group. Rubano was asked to audition by O'Connell but was initially hesitant, since he was not a fan of emo music or aware of the band; however, he bought the album and learned Cooper's parts.

On September 16, "You're So Last Summer" was released as a radio single. From September to November Taking Back Sunday co-headlined a tour with Saves the Day, supported by Moneen. In November, a music video for "You're So Last Summer" was filmed at Fulton State Park in New York. The video, directed by Winters, debuted on MTV on November 24. In the video, the band plays while Public Enemy vocalist Flavor Flav (in full regalia) jumps. According to Lazzara, the group was making fun of itself: "We had two guys leave our band and there were two main singers, so we were trying to think of a way to bring the new band members into the video, but not have Fred singing the old guy’s part. And the funniest way to do that was to use Flavor Flav."

Critical reception

According to AllMusic reviewer Kurt Morris, Tell All Your Friends is similar to the Movielife's This Time Next Year (2000); Taking Back Sunday's "ability ... to sound so blatantly" like the Movielife was "almost their undoing". Morris wrote that the vocals strongly resembled those of the Canterbury Effect, and called Taking Back Sunday "a bit more rockin'" than the Movielife: "They have cultivated punk, hardcore, emo, and pop and hybridized it better." However, Morris called the album "nowhere near original or creative". Rolling Stone's Gil Kaufman wrote that the album "sidesteps many sad-sack emo pitfalls" with "pop-infused hardcore" and "enlightened, dramatic lyrics" describing "heartache that teeter[s] between despondency and dark vengeance".

CMJ New Music Monthly writer Andrew Bonazelli noted musical similarities to fellow Victory band Thursday. In Tell All Your Friends, "a series of double teams, two guitars butt heads", merging "clean-channel pop melodies" with "chugging metal progressions" to create "cathartic, schizophrenic anthems". Bonazelli called the songs "bombast[ic]" and "occasionally dazzling". Stuart Green of Exclaim! wrote that the album was "a spirited and well-produced" work, although noting it arrived "at a time when there's a flood of similar sounding bands. It's not bad, but it just doesn't stand out either." Olli Siebelt wrote for BBC Music that the band brought "a welcome mix of original styles to an overcrowded playing field", with "an interesting mix of southern Californian post-punk, nu-metal and old school hardcore". According to Siebelt, Taking Back Sunday composed "fantastically catchy songs" which were "poppy and fun" and "upbeat and emotionally aggressive." Siebelt compared the album to All and the Descendents, retaining "enough of its own identity" to lift the band above its peers.

Commercial performance

Although it was reported that 15,000 copies had been shipped, only 2,000 copies were sold in Tell All Your Friends' first week of release. The album spent one week (at number 183) on the Billboard 200, and 68 weeks on the Heatseekers Albums chart, peaking at number 9. It spent 78 weeks on the Independent Albums chart, peaking at number 8, and peaked at number 23 on the Catalog Albums chart. Despite little airplay, Tell All Your Friends sold 110,000 copies by March 2003; near the end of the year, sales stood at 252,000. By April 2004 the album had sold nearly 400,000 copies, and by September 2005 it was certified gold by the RIAA. By May 2009, the album had sold 790,000 copies in the US. As of April 2010, the album has sold over one million copies worldwide. Tell All Your Friends is Taking Back Sunday and Victory Records' best-selling release. It would also become Victory's longest-running record on the Billboard Heatseekers and Independent Albums charts.

Accolades and legacy

According to Alternative Press' Philip Obenschain, Tell All Yor Friends "has remained one of the scene's most celebrated and influential releases". Despite its "not be[ing] their best sounding, most mature or highest in ambition ... it’s Tell All Your Friends' intangible and emotionally charged energy, the uncertainty, the earnestness and the rough edges that make it so special". The album was included in Rock Sound's 101 Modern Classics list at number 13, and the magazine considered it "[t]he Hybrid Theory of emo." NME listed it as one of "20 Emo Albums That Have Resolutely Stood The Test Of Time".

Chris Collum wrote for AbsolutePunk that Tell All Your Friends "grabs the listener’s attention from the start" and the album expressed "feelings that are completely genuine, not contrived, rehearsed or formulaic, without being over-the-top or sappy". Collum called Lazzara and Nolan's vocal delivery "rapid-fire" in a "back-and-forth way, as if they were carrying on a dialogue, [that] allows you to really attach to and get a sense of the raw emotion behind the songs". In a retrospective review for Alternative Press, Brendan Manley wrote that the album "is as close as it gets to a modern masterpiece, capturing not just a band at their apex, but an entire scene". According to Manley, Tell All Your Friends was "the crossover breaking point, finally bringing what had been percolating for years in East Coast VFW Halls to the attention of the masses". Channing Freeman of Sputnikmusic wrote that the album features "power chords and clean strums and palm muting and reverb". About whether this was negative, Freeman said, "With songs this good, it shouldn't be ... It's all here, solid and undeniably catchy". Jonathan Bradley wrote for Stylus Magazine that although the album "is notable not so much for being a blueprint as it is a playbook", it would "provide the perfect How-To guide for teenagers with guitars all over the United States and beyond."

Four of the album's tracks would later be included as part of the Notes from the Past compilation in 2007. Tell All Your Friends was performed live in its entirety at Bamboozle 2011. In a 2011 interview with CMJ, Adam Lazzara and John Nolan chose the album's final track ("Head Club") as their least-favorite Taking Back Sunday song. To celebrate Tell All Your Friends' 10th anniversary, the band toured the U.S. in October and November 2012 with support from Bayside. In November the album charted on the Billboard Vinyl Albums chart, peaking at number 8. In June 2013, the band released a live acoustic version of the album and a companion film, TAYF10 Acoustic. The recordings were made in Los Angeles and Chicago. In September, the band performed two electric versions of the album in New Jersey. TAYF10 Acoustic and TAYF10: Live from Starland Ballroom were released as a double-DVD set in December, and TAYF10 Acoustic was released on vinyl. In 2014, Cooper said that Warner Bros. wanted the group to re-record Tell All Your Friends during the Louder Now (2006) sessions; Cooper replied, "Are you nuts?" In 2015, Lazzara said that he disliked his vocals on the album: "I was just yelling everything hoping it fit in there somehow, trying to paint with some strange color".

Track listing

All music written by Taking Back Sunday. All lyrics written by Adam Lazzara and John Nolan.

Personnel

Personnel per booklet and back cover.

Chart positions

Original release

Reissue