By Toyin Alaka

A mash-up of cool, colorful cups and cold slurpee concoctions combined with the sounds of We Are The In Crowd and Gym Class Heroes greeted those lucky enough to snag a ticket to 7-Eleven’s MixMaker Concert Series held July 25^th atChicago’s Lincoln Hall.

Gym Class Heroes, currently on the 2011 Vans Warped Tour, detoured to the windy city for the MixMaker series and before the show, UnRated Urban Magazine got a chance to speak with the band’s front man Travis McCoy.

What is the inspiration behind the new Gym Class Heroes album The Papercut Chronicles II?

McCoy: The inspiration…um, I would say that in going into this record… it was kind of a conscious decision to go back to the essence of what Gym Class Heroes is and was and always will be, and it’s kind of us putting our antennas up and trying to bound these sounds that we like and enjoy.

We feel that calling the album The Papercut Chronicles II, um it’s kind of going back to the urgency and the kind  of naiveté of the first album, you know we were kids and they say you have your whole entire life to write your perspective and after that you lose that mind and all that, so there’s a kind of sense of urgency and also an innocence from our first album (The Papercut Chronicles) that we want to bring to this album without re-creating the first album and taking everything we’ve experienced and learned since the first album and kind of expressing that. 

For me it kind of sets the bar pretty high as far as expectations for this album because our first record means a lot to us and was written from the time I was seventeen to age twenty-one, so there were a lot of growing pains in there you know and for me it’s like my little baby and we definitely took a lot of time to nurture a lot of these songs and lyrically I was very, very conscious about touching on a lot of things that was touched on the first album, so there are some reoccurring themes and anyone who is a fan of the first album will pick out the tiny nuances that are on the new album and go wait a minute was…. that.. like the drum feel from Simple Living? You know there are little surprises and little treats in there.

Did you guys draw from any of your musical influences while creating The Papercut Chronicles II?

McCoy: For sure, we always do.  I think anyone who says that their music is completely original is a f***ing liar, you know what I’m saying.  Like I think that originality is just the evolution of influence.  We listen to all types of music so at the end of the day our product is an amalgamation of everything that we listen to and everything that we are inspired by so us having such an eclectic and wide palate for music makes us end up with a hard to slap a label on genre.

Genre-blending?

McCoy: Yeah!  It’s been a blessing.  I love it when people ask me so what would you call your band and I look at them and say what would you call it?  And they can’t answer and I can’t answer.

Right!  I think that’s the beauty of what you guys do, it’s the fact that you blend so many genres together and it makes it so appealing to a wide audience.

McCoy: And it gives us the freedom to tour with bands like Fall Out Boy or The Roots or whomever we want.

So how did the first single Stereo Hearts come about and the collaboration with Adam Levine?

McCoy: Well I was working with my boy Benny Blanco (music producer), and he played this beat and it was a skeletal beat.  Whenever we work with producers they will come up with a skeletal frame of a song and then we will build around it if we are not writing the song ourselves, you know what I mean.  Umm, so he had this idea of a song Stereo Hearts and there’s a reference that his boy Amir had sang and I was like this is cool and we both felt like man, Adam Levine would really kill this. 

So we made the call and Adam happened to be a fan of Gym Class, which is very funny because when we first signed to our label they asked if there was anybody that we would want to collaborate with in the future and who would it be and the first person I said was Adam Levine and that was around the time that I was absolutely in awe of the album Songs About Jane that was like my record at the time that I was playing non-stop and so I said Adam Levine. 

It’s crazy how things come full circle and we actually get to have a song with him but umm watching that dude like go into the booth and belt out that hook so effortlessly, that like made me want to go home and rethink my whole career, cause he was like cutting takes that were like beautiful. He was like naw, naw, naw do it over.  I’m like what are you talking about do it over! Are you serious?!! It was crazy!! That dude’s an animal and he’s a nice guy too!

Are there a lot of guest appearances on The Papercut Chronicles II?

McCoy: We are trying to keep this album not so feature heavy, we’ve worked with a lot of artists in the past that we admire. Artists who are really good friends of ours, the first album had no guest appearances with the exception of Patrick Stump, so in that sense we are trying to keep it light on the feature side, for me it’s always a little disheartening when you are into an artist and you go buy their record and you go to the back of the record and it just says featuring, featuring, featuring…. And you’re like wait a minute who the f***’s album is this? You know what I’m saying?

Right!

McCoy: and in going back and making this the sequel of one of our monumental albums we kind of wanted to make sure that you get the Gym Class thing as opposed to a party, you know!

Let’s talk about your solo projects and how the solo projects in anyway made it hard or easy to come back together and work on this album and do what you guys do musically.

McCoy: The thing is that we’ve been a band since 1997, so I guess when you’ve invested almost half of your life into one thing it kind of becomes like breathing in a sense.  For me, Lazarus was kind of like recess, like yay, I can go play for a little while. We had been touring non-stop and umm for me it was just another outlet and umm Lazarus wasn’t like the first side project or musical venture outside of Gym Class for any of us. 

Since the beginning of Gym Class we’ve all had other projects outside of the band, I mean musicians get bored easily, not that any of us are bored with Gym Class but we kind of get our rocks of doing other things as well.  For instance: I paint and I have like 5 or 6 other musical projects and Lazarus just happened to have a couple of smash hits on it and kind of picked up some steam and got some label backing; Matt’s in a side project called Kill the Front man; Eric and Tyler have a side project and Disashi’s side project is Soul and all of them are like cousins of Gym Class Heroes but at the end Gym Class is the priority.  I think one hand washes the other and every project or whatever we do musically all it can do is help Gym Class Heroes.

Great, thank you!

 McCoy: Thank you! Great interview!   

 Photo by Tamara Jenkins