Do you think your music has changed at all now that you’ve been touring with so many different groups and you’ve been traveling the country?
It’s maturing, I definitely think. I’m trying to go with the small baby steps into the new stuff that I’m writing, which is a lot more mature. It’s still pretty happy, but it talks more about real things like about how hard life can be sometimes and also the happy parts still. I’m trying to baby step into the newer stuff.
It’s a little more mature, kind of the same sound. It’s a little more vintage-sounding—we’re trying to go for old school, kind of like a Beatles, Beach Boys sound with the new album. It hasn’t changed too much, but it’s definitely growing, I feel like, which I’m excited about.
And Butch Walker’s producing this album, right?
Yeah, he’s done a great job. He’s been really, really good to us.
Do you think he’s influenced your music at all?
No, not terribly. We came in there pretty much knowing what we wanted to do, and he’s just thrown out a couple of good ideas here and there. I don’t know, he’s given us just enough space because we didn’t really want the album to be produced. We didn’t want to have to rely on the producer so he just went in there and he’s pretty much just being our coach and just being like, ‘This sounds good, this sounds bad.’
So on tour, do you find that you enjoy that it’s a lot more laidback for you or do you at all miss roughing it and figuring things out on your own?
I miss roughing it. Yeah, not being able to shower for a couple of weeks and just being gross—I miss that because it was such an adventure. It’s still an adventure, but you kind of know what’s going to happen, you know what I mean? Like, somebody’s always telling you where to go and what to do. Before, we just had to follow our phone’s GPS.
