A few weeks before the start of New Found Glory’s upcoming tour, RockYourLife! had the opportunity to chat with the quintet’s drummer, Cyrus Bolooki, during a phone interview live from the US.
Hello, how are you?
Cyrus Bolooki (drums) : I’m doing good! Everything’s good right now, I’m enjoying some time at home before we get ready to leave ad go across the water and hit France and other countries in Europe.
Cool! You’ll play two shows in France, one in Paris and one in Lyon. Last time you’ve played here was four years ago and you even recorded a video for the French fans. What do you expect from the French audience? What were your best memories in France?
C : Our french shows are always amazing. I don’t remember the exact date but I remember a show in Paris that was crazy, and all our shows that we play in Paris are always crazy. The last time we were in France was pretty memorable. Everytime we play France it’s been great, and I’m personnally excited to play Lyon because it’s great for us to play other cities beside the ones that we always come to. Paris is amazing and I’m very happy that we’re playing here again but to be able to play other cities is great for our band.
You’ll even bring We Are The In Crowd with you but you will also have several opening acts from the French music scene. Mary Has A Gun and Switch To Happiness will be performing in Paris, then The Earl Grey and Eden Line will be performing in Lyon. Have you ever heard about these bands?
C : No we haven’t but for us it’s something that we’d like to do, we like to have bands that are local or from the area, normally it does help them bring their fans to our shows and sometimes it brings more people to the shows, but also it’s the kind of way our band started. We came from South Florida and sometimes when bigger bands were touring and played shows in Florida, we’d be able to play at the beginning of the show even if those bands hadn’t heard of us. It’s kind of a way for us to pay back and due what happened to us to other people. They may have people in Paris or Lyon that haven’t heard about those bands. So we’re excited to play and you know it’s always great to be able to hear new bands. Sometimes you end up loving new bands when you see them or you hear them or meet them or all of that.
Talking about young bands, what advice can you give to them?
C : Being a young band now is a little different from when we first started, it’s a bit easier now. The most important thing is to love what you do. You have to love the music and you have to love playing music and everything about your band. There’s a lot of hard work that you’re gonna have to put into this if you want to succeed but on top of that nowadays, it’s really about trying to get your band out there and now there’s Twitter and Facebook and Tumblr etc… there are so many ways to do that. But at the same time, you really have to focus on trying to get good music and to interact with people, not only letting somebody hear your music. You need to maybe try to make a connection, to talk to them or have them at a show and try to get them to tell their friends about your music, things like that. The music has changed in the last few years. Ten years ago it was about trying to make songs and trying to get them on the radio or on the TV, but nowadays you can make songs and they’re all over the Internet. You know, when it’s a good song, people somehow remember it. If you can interact with these people, meet them at a show or something more than just letting them hear your music, then it can get along well.
Your upcoming live album called “Kill It Live” is set to come out October 8th. Why did you wait fifteen years to show the world how good are your live shows?
C : I appreciate it thank you! It wasn’t really about us waiting so long, it’s just that the timing is perfect right now. So obviously we’ve been a band for fifteen years like you said, so we’re a band that throughout the years, we always thought that to listen to us live is one thing, but you have to go to our show. You really need to support the experience. But what we did was that a couple of months ago, we had two shows that we set up in Southern California but it wasn’t in clubs, it was in small venues where we first started playing when we came here in California. And the places were just about a few hundreds people, smaller than we normally do. We picked these clubs because it would be packed, you wouldn’t be able to move and every person in this club would be a huge New Found Glory fan, so that way, when we recorded this concert, it’s a real show, it’s not a show with just tons of people, it’s a show with people that are really excited to be there. And so therefore we recorded a concert where we wanted to have a set that was most of our big songs and a couple of songs that you wouldn’t expect us to play. I think it’s a great representation of the way that we sound and moreover it’s not just a live CD, there’s three songs that are brand new, we recorded them a few months ago and they’re really great (“I Want To Believe”, “Connect The Dots” and “First Bite”). Our friends also think that these songs are some of the best songs we have ever written, they’re really classic New Found Glory songs and catchy with a lot of energy to them and I think that people will enjoy that, especially after hearing the live record!
Times are changing and especially the music industry. The music scene is not what it used to be twenty years ago, but paradoxically, you see younger and younger people coming to your shows. Do you feel that you still have to prove yourselves every night?
C : Yes, we want to prove ourselves, we’ve always been like that. When we first started, we didn’t have so many fans, we really wanted to make sure that every night we played as hard as we can because our music would attract more people, and so this way the next time we would play it would be bigger and things would grow. It’s not the same now but we still do that thing, it’s just that I don’t think we have to prove ourselves because the scene is changing and they forget about it but we prove ourselves because we want to and we don’t want to go play a show and just not care. We always want to go out there because we’re happy to play, and when you really think about it, for us, after playing for fifteen years and being able to say that I’ve been playing six times in France with my friends is amazing. Going to great places just like Lyon where we’ve never played before, and a couple of days after we’re gonna play in Moscow in Russia for the first time. These are the things that make us excited every night, and just because of that, it’s easier for us to play as hard as we can and try to bring as much energy as we can at a show. We don’t want to take this for granted.
We all know that the current music industry is not in a very good place. It’s getting harder for bands to make it or to make their passion for a living. What can people do to help bands out and to save the music industry?
C : I think there’s two things. I know it’s different now when you go buy music, you used to go to your record store to buy music, you heard us on radio or saw us on TV, you liked it and then you went to buy the record. But now it’s different, you go on the Internet, you press a couple buttons and then you buy it on iTunes. A lot of people unfortunately kill the music and just download for their friends. So the first thing is that if people would buy more music, some of the money would still go back to the artist, and that’s one of the things that changed the industry. Fifteen years ago people bought much more music. But on top of that, the one thing that hasn’t really changed and that is keeping the music industry alive is touring. So as long as people continue to go to live shows, it will be alright, because the live concert experience is something you can’t download. You can download our CD but you really need to go to one of our concerts, to experience exactly what we do. If people continue to buy tickets and t-shirts at the concerts then it’s really helping us. Even if the music industry is falling down, you can still help bands to make their passion for a living. It’s really hard to go out as a band and make millions of dollars, but like I said if you love the music, that’s why you do it, and you want to be able to make a livin, because if you work hard on your music you don’t really have time to work other jobs or do other things like that. But hopefully, you can make enough money to survive and to continue to do what you love, which is playing music.
Some bands have been accused of exploiting their fans for making them pay to meet them with Golden Tickets or VIP Packages that cost hundreds of dollars. How do you feel about this system?
C : We don’t really do things like that, sometimes we do contests or different things but to us it’s about the fans that want to do this or not, it’s not really like exploiting people. Concerning our band, it’s not hard to meet us. You want to get an autograph or a picture, you can usually find us before the show or maybe after the show, sometimes in the crowd or in the club. So because it’s not too hard to come find us, you shouldn’t go and pay a lot of money to meet us. Sometimes the people who put up shows, the promoters, need to do contests because it attracts more people to the concerts or maybe other companies are trying to promote their brand and they want to have us because it makes their brand a little more popular. But for us we don’t try to make extra money out of autographs or pictures, that’s something we do all the time. When sometimes we have extra songs that we recorded or something extremely special, then maybe I understand that you’d pay a little extra money, but you shouldn’t have to pay extra money just to meet us because we’re normal people, we’re not crazy movie stars or the President of your country or anything. We’re just like everybody else, so you should somehow come find us without having to pay a lot of money.
Recently, pop punk band The Story So Far (that was being named after one of your songs by the way) did a split with hardcore band Stick To Your Guns. Have you thought about doing a split with another band after “Kill It Live” comes out?
C : That’s something we’ve never pushed for but at the same time I don’t think we would every say no. I don’t know if it would work but hardcore music and New Found Glory have been really close for the entire time that we’ve been around. Chad (Gilbert), our guitar player, used to sing in a hardcore band called Shai Hulud so we’ve had very close ties from the very beginning. Even when we first started travelling in America, a lot of the concerts that we would play would be of hardcore bands. “Kill It Live”, the new record that we have, comes out on a hardcore label (Bridge Nine Records). We’re always very close to the hardcore scene, we’re friends with a lot of the bands that are hardcore bands and like I said, we haven’t pulled too many thoughts about doing a split but you never know, it can happen! The Story So Far is a great band, we’ve played a lot of concerts with them so it’s very nice to know that they’ve named their band after us. Obviously there’s a lot of influences there, but at the same time they’re a great band and they put on really great shows so it’s cool for us to see a band that didn’t just take the name from us but that is a good band. Hopefully we’ll continue to bring good music to people.
We know the pop/punk and hardcore scene are most of the time like a family. Toby Morse of H2O sings in “5 Year Plan” : “My friends look out for me like family”. Would New Found Glory be the same without all your friends around you?
C : Oh not at all! We have our friends obviously like Toby from H2O and bands that we toured with as we were coming up. Those people helped us tremendously whether it was by allowing New Found Glory to play a show when nobody knew about us or just by talking about us. Hardcore bands get that respect and sometimes some bands don’t, a lot of hardcore bands respect us because we respect them, we understand that music scene and we kind of come from this music scene or at least are a part of it. But we also have other friends, and those other friends are our fans that we have made throughout the years. New Found Glory would not be here without fans and support, because when you like NFG, you usually tell your friends, and if your friend doesn’t know who NFG is then you try to make them listen to the music or bring them to a show. We are able to continue to play shows and going to new cities like Lyon because of things like that, and hopefully our shows get bigger and bigger as times goes on and we won’t stop being in a band because people keep spreading the word. Our friends all around helped us and we wouldn’t be where we are today without any of them.
You’re from USA and it’s common for American bands to have some difficulties being as successful in Europe as in the US. How hard was it to try to break into the market over here in Europe?
C : For us it wasn’t that hard, it started in the early 2000s back when we began to have some success in America and we got our first opportunities to go to places like England or France. We told ourselves and we made a decision that we wanted to try to travel everywhere that we could. Even if we were tired or if it was long flights or just playing small shows, we tried to do it anyway, because we knew that if you worked hard and if you came over all these new places, the world would know about you and people would hopefully come back to the shows and bring their friends, so this way shows would get bigger and bigger. Fortunately for us, we came to places like England or France early, ten or twelve years ago, and we tried to come over there often, at least every couple of years. So I think we do pretty well at these places and there are other places such as Australia or Japan where we do really well too. There’s a lot of new countries where we want to do even better and where we’ve been to twice but we’d like to come back and do things bigger like in South America and places like Brazil, Argentina or Chili. We have a lot of fans there so we need to go there more often if we can. There’s also Canada which is very close to the US but we don’t go there very often, so we went there a few months ago and it was amazing. The thing is that you can’t just sit at home, sell your music and make yourself popular. You have to go out, to go play shows. For a band like New Found Glory, that’s how we promoted ourselves fast by playing concerts and being there in front of people.
Finally, our website is called “RockYourLife!”, what rock your life Cyrus?
C : What rocks my life is what I do everyday. Being in this band and being able to play shows all the time and all around the world. My music rocks my life, the fans I interact with rock my life, and my life without all of this won’t be the same. I’m very happy and very thankful for everything that we’ve been able to do and I’m also very excited for the future with New Found Glory. It seems like it will be a long time before the band stops playing so hopefully, we’ll be bale to continue to go to places like France and to other countries and everywhere to be able to play our music.
Amazing. Thank you so much for your time!
C : Thank you!
Website : newfoundglory.com