by: Nicole Juliette Hetlyn

Stages & Stereos; a band that you all know and love that is BACK! I caught up with Daniel, Stephen, and Rucker to talk about the band’s exciting return.

You guys have been quiet the past three years, but you’re back! What’s going on? What have you guys been working on?

D: Our last tour was more than two years ago, and we kind of took an involuntary hiatus. A few of the guys in the band got jobs and started to move on. I’ve been learning how to record and write for the last two years, and I never wanted to stop. I wanted to keep the machine going It didn’t seem to be happening at that time, but I decided I couldn’t do it alone, so I reached out to Rucker and Stephen. We started writing new music around December, and it started going really well and things were clicking. Things started with just the random tweet from Stephen. I gave Stephen all of our social media account passwords and he just randomly started going at it. People seemed to be stoked about it, so that kind of lit a fire under our asses.

N: Yeah, it definitely caught us all of guard, in the best possible way.

D: Yeah, it was cool that we were kind of dark for three years until randomly Stehen posted that tweet to let people in on what was happening. It’s really cool to see that people are excited and that they cared. We weren’t sure how any of this was going to go.

There were some changes in band members, how did this go about? Tell us about the new members.

D: ‘Stages’ has had a few member changes, but Stephen and Rucker were in the band more towards the beginning, around 2008. We’ve all kept a close relationship over the years. We were always friends and we always worked well together. It made sense to rekindle that fire, I’m glad we did.

S: When I was 16 years old, growing up in Tallahassee, I remember seeing this band and being like “oh shit, these guys are really cool!” They ended up asking me to play guitar for them, and Rucker was one of my really good friends at the time. I did two summer tours with Stages, and then my parents made me quit because I was in high school. Fast forward about five years and Stages is going again and they needed a touring bass player for the Go Radio tour, so I hopped on that. I also played the Anchorless tour, and did merch for the Mayday Parade tour. I’ve always been there along the way, played some music, hung out with the dudes, and Rucker and I have always been good friends. Daniel texted me out of the blue about two months ago asking if I wanted to be part of the new Stages record, and I said hell yeah!

Does your band name come from the Bayside lyric?

D: Yes. Our old bass player, one of the founding members came up with it. We were young and didn’t have a lot of ideas of what we wanted to call the band. We were all reading through our favorite record booklets, the ones that came with compact discs. That line “storming stages and stereos” really stuck out.

Could you see yourself doing a collaboration with Bayside?

D: Oh my God, if Bayside would! In our dreams! Bayside is amazing.

S: If we could do a split with Bayside, that would make my day!

You are awesome with keeping up with social media and interacting with your fans. Do all three of you run the account? What do you think the most important part of this is?

D: Yeah, we are all a part of it. Most of the social media is Rucker and Stephen though.

S: It keeps the buzz alive. It keeps people interacting with you and it keeps people checking back to see what you are up to. It let’s you know that people like your music, and that means the world to us. You can see people’s opinions and you get to talk to people who really like your music. Responding is the least we can do after someone checks our band out. It’s us three hanging out, making music, and being friends; and people like it which is awesome.

D: It also feels really good when you reach out to one of your favorite artists and you get something back to them, it’s crazy. I remember Chris Conley (Saves the Day) liked one of my tweets about him, it’s just crazy.

If you could tour with any other band, who would it be?

The Beastie Boys (laughs)

R: Relient K

S: There’s this new band out called Creeper, I’m really fond of them. They have this vampire thing going on, and their music is awesome. They are up and coming.

D: Yeah, it would be sick to tour with Creeper. They are on the rise, but they are not too big, not too cool for school yet. For me, if I could tour with any band ever, Saves the Day 1999. I would have loved to have been on one of those tours, they are really cool.

What does 2017 have in store for Stages and Stereos?

D: We are going to play as much as possible. We love to tour, so hopefully we can get back to that level again. We are constantly writing, so our plan is to write and release as much as we possibly can. We are going to try and release music every month. We would like to make a full length, as well as play as many shows as we possibly can. We want to build on the momentum that we currently have.