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Interview with The Dangerous Summer, by Laila Hanson
Alternative pop/punk band The Dangerous Summer are barely out of high school and are just a few weeks ahead of their debut album release, Reach For The Sun. Despite their up-and-coming status, the band has already signed to Hopeless Records [due to a chance meeting with All Time Low drummer Rian in a Guitar Center] and booked tours alongside bands such as The Secret Handshake and Ace Enders. I got a chance to talk to the US-bred, Maryland-based quartet shortly before their show in Baltimore on May 22nd.
Laila Hanson: First of all, you’re home, right? The Dangerous Summer: Yeah, we’re home!
LH: What’s it like touring as more of a national band now as opposed to, you know, playing locally every week? TDS: It’s more of a challenge. It’s harder keeping your fan base around here, keeping them all interested. We kind of started out touring right away, just glossed over the local scene.
LH: How do you like the guys you’ve been touring with? TDS: They’re awesome, The Secret Handshake’s sick.
LH: And you’re going on this “Barbeque across America” tour soon. TDS: Yeah, with Person L and Ace Enders. It’s going to be awesome. They’re legends to us; we all grew up listening to them.
LH: Is this the first time you’re touring with them? TDS: Yeah.
LH: Have you met them before? TDS: Briefly, yeah, because we have the same publicist as Ace does.
LH: I read that your band name is based on a Hemingway novel. Does that play into all of your writing too? TDS: [The song], “The Permanent Rain,” I got that from Hemingway too. I read a lot of Hemingway, I incorporate as much as I can, I guess.
LH: That’s cool. Most guys your age don’t like to read. TDS: [Laughs]
LH: Do you think you like being on the road better than being on the studio writing? TDS: That’s a hard one. They’re both good and bad in their own way. It’s like, you’re stuck one place but you get to be creative, versus being all over the place and doing the same thing every night.
LH: Do you ever get the chance to write on the road? TDS: Yeah, I mean, sometimes we’ll stay with people that have lots of gear, we can sit down and kind of mess around a little bit.
LH: What do you think of the way the music industry’s going these days? A lot of it is digital now and… TDS: Yeah, it’s scary.
LH: Did you grow up buying CDs? TDS: Oh yeah, we still buy CDs. It’s better quality, it’s nice to have something physical. If you download something, that’s a gamble. It’s either going to be horrible or it will be [ok].
LH: Do you try to get your fans to get your merch and CDs from you as opposed to just buying [songs] online? TDS: Yeah, definitely albums. We’d rather they get the album as a whole, that’s the way we wrote it, as a whole CD.
LH: Did you have a lot of say in your album artwork? TDS: Yeah, a lot of it actually [influenced] us.
LH: How’d you hook up with Hopeless Records? TDS: All Time Low, basically. We met [the label] through them, and we talked to Hopeless a lot our senior year of high school, then we finally signed with them our senior year of high school. We met [All Time Low] after we started [our] band, they heard us, and then we were able to push it. We ran into Rian [Dawson, All Time Low drummer] at a Guitar Center, and let him listen to our stuff. It was awesome.
LH: Your album, Reach For The Sun just came out on May 5th. How’s the reaction been on the tour? TDS: It’s been awesome. Lots of people sing along at shows. People are responding better than they used to, we got a lot of new fans from the album. It’s been great. We try to tour as much as we possibly can.
LH: Oh yeah? TDS: As much as possible without overdoing it. If people see you three times in the same two month period, it kind of gets old.
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