Source: Promo Image
Houston’s Waterparks have had an incredible past 12 months. Their critically-acclaimed debut Double Dare kicked off a whirlwind of impressive tours with the likes of Good Charlotte, Sleeping With Sirens, and Tonight Alive and we caught up with the band on their recent tour with All Time Low to talk Double Dare, touring, and meeting Pete Wentz.
How’s the tour going so far?
Awsten Knight: Excellent. It’s good, it’s big, it’s roomy, smells like oak, parent approved, not in the summer.
Otto Wood: The air is no longer sickly.
AK: Yep. Lots of room.
You guys just finished up your first US headliner, how was that for you?
AK: It was really, really, really fucking tight because people actually came to the shows and I was kind of worried about that. I mean, I knew people would go but I didn’t realise how well we would do – most of it was sold out, which is awesome.
Now since we’re super rich and famous and everything we’re like so desirable and everyone’s parents want to meet us, because we’re the most famous band.
How different is your approach to shows like today’s, when All Time Low’s fans might not necessarily be yours yet, to headline shows?
Geoff Wigington: That’s a weird, weird transition.
AK: At first it kind of freaks me out a little just because we’re already in full headliner mode. We’re used to everybody in the room knowing who we are.
GW: So there’s that comfort level for those shows.
AK: Yeah! So if I step away from the mic I know it’s gonna be loud as fuck with everyone singing. Here it’s like: “I wonder how today’s gonna go, I hope they know us.”
OW: I don’t know if it necessarily changes our approach but the role is very different. It’s our job to try to get everybody pumped up and so I guess maybe we try to go that extra mile to incite a crowd response that we would probably take for granted on a headliner.
AK: There are definitely some All Time Low fans that do not give a shit about anything but All Time Low. There have been a couple of shows, actually pretty much all the shows, where most of the front row have their arms crossed, their eyes are tired and you’re standing between them and what they actually want to see and they do not like you under any circumstances.
There have been a couple who have looked like assholes and I’ve just pointed directly at them like “EYYYY” and they don’t give a shit at all.
OW: I think it was like the second show, I had the worst people in front of me. There was some dad the other night that was making me laugh just by looking at him because you could just tell he did not want to be there.
AK: But he was at the front.
OW: So obviously that face sticks out.
You guys have gone pretty quickly from being fairly unknown to playing massive tours, how has that lifestyle change been for you?
AK: Spooky. Fast. It’s weird going from our routine at home to here. This time though, because jet lag always ruins me, I kept my Texas sleep schedule, and it’s actually worked out pretty well and I’ve got more sleep than I’ve ever got in my life, it’s really cool.
This is also our first tour with a bus. So that’s really nice because it makes touring so much easier. We have a place to go back and lay down. The thing with a van is you can go and you can sit in it but you still see everybody and everybody sees you.
OW: You’re all on top of each other.
AK: Yeah, and so on a bus, you can go and have your private little area and we figured out a way to get WiFi and stuff. So if I want I can just go and decompress whereas with a van you don’t get a break.
OW: You’re not as pampered.
GW: Yeah, and you have to drive yourself.
OW: We’re so spoiled now.
Is it ever difficult or overwhelming to be on tour for these long two month periods?
GW: It’s veering on two months now, but Warped Tour was the longest.
AK: Yeah, Warped Tour was long. And then we had to come straight out here for the Good Charlotte run. We toured for all of 2016, there wasn’t a break. Except for when we were recording the album, that was our break from touring. We’re away from home like all year.
GW: It’s really weird going home because your family kind of gets used to doing their own thing without you there and then you appear like “Hi, I’m here for I don’t know how long but feed me.”
AK: I left and came back and my dad has this wife now, a whole family.
OW: I came back, I had a beard and kids, I was like “Holy shit!”
GW: Your parents have beards and kids too it’s weird.
AK: My mom’s got a beard!
GW: Everyone gets beards and kids when you go away.
AK: The beards have kids. I’m retired, I care about sports and politics now. Spooky.
At the moment you’re working with the Madden brothers and constantly touring with some huge names, have you ever been starstruck by anyone you’ve worked with?
AK: When we met Pete Wentz at Reading Festival. That’s when I think I was the most starstruck. That fucked me up.
OW: I met him before at the studio and these guys didn’t believe me.
AK: This was when we weren’t rewarded for being healthy people because Otto was like “I’m just going to eat Taco Bell again” because that’s right next to the studio, and Geoff and I were like “no we’re going to make a good decision today we’re going to go find something.”
So we went off on our health run and when we were out Otto texts saying “I met Pete Wentz” and we thought he was lying because Otto fucks with me all the time.
And then Courtney our engineer calls us like “Yeah Pete Wentz is here” and I though Otto just got him in on it, but then Joel (Madden) was like “No we were just hanging out with him” and I was like “FUCK.”
OW: That’s what it took. It had to go all the way to the top before Awsten believed me.
AK: He’s my favourite. He’s one of my favourite writers as far as lyrics go and so hearing that Otto met him and I didn’t, I didn’t like that.
What’s the weirdest thing that’s ever happened to you on tour?
AK: Weird or funny things don’t really happen. We’re a very serious band full of very serious people. We don’t like jokes.
OW: Ohhh, what about San Francisco, where that guy threatened to shoot me?
So we were in San Francisco and there was this man, a grumpy man, who lived right next door to the venue. We had parked right out in front and apparently our trailer was blocking his driveway, and he’d just gotten home from work.
He didn’t ease into it at all it was just immediately like “You guys are fucking blocking my fucking driveway, you guys always fucking do this”. I was like, look I just got here I don’t always do anything.
Then our merch guy Steve just kind of, he didn’t purposefully egg him on, but he wasn’t saying all the right things. So the guy yells and Steve just turns around and fires back with “Well maybe you shouldn’t live next to a fucking venue” and that’s when this guy goes to his car and he gets out a rod and starts walking towards us.
Then it escalated to “I’m going to shoot you all”. So we went inside and Steve decides he’s going to go talk to him. We were like “Yeah that’s a good idea.”
AK: He’s an idiot!
OW: Then he comes back and he’s beaming like, “We talked it out.”
So Waterparks formed in Houston, which is a city synonymous with a very specific type of music, do you feel like that influenced you at all?
AK: Yeah. We’re bad boys, and I feel it reflects in our songs. Everybody knows not to mess with us.
OW: Whenever we’re rolling down the street on our hogs people know to get out of the way.
Would you define yourselves by a single genre or do you think your music is more fluid?
AK: More fluid except it confuses stupid people on the internet. Now I just say we’re a boy band or a pop band. We out-dumb people anyway.
Double Dare is quite a diverse album, and a lot of the tracks clearly draw on your own personal experiences – did you find any of those songs difficult to write or difficult to perform?
AK: Not difficult to write because when writing stuff, especially lyrics, I pretend that people aren’t really going to see them. There’s a good chance they won’t because so many get written. In the past week and a half I think I’ve written five or six full sets of lyrics and maybe one will get heard.
It’s easier to just make them and not think that people are going to hear it and then by the end, you look at what you have and think “Ok, that’s the best song and that accomplishes this and stylistically you need this” and so on.
It’s just been announced that you guys are coming back to Slam Dunk this year, are you excited?
AK: Oh yeah. It’s going to be a Slam Dunk! Get it?
Lastly, what do you think we should be listening to?
AK: Waterparks, Double Dare. Buy our album so we can be richer and buy matching jet skis and go terrorise the local crabs.
