On October 23, 2007 I had the opportunity to talk with Melee's guitarist Ricky Sans about the jump to a major label, touring experiences, and what makes Melee tick.
Bill: You are veterans of the Warped Tour and have said that sometimes your music didn't seem to be a perfect match for the audience, but you are touring now with Matt Nathanson, and I would think that would be a much better match. Is that true?
Ricky: We grew up and were on an indie label surrounded by pop punk and emo bands, and that was the only world we really new existed except for what we listened to on CD, but for the touring world that's the only bands that we thought really toured. Instead of small clubs we thought pop bands just played arenas or just didn't tour. So we did the Warped Tour and all of those tours and kind of kept growing out of it. As that kept happening it kept getting hard to fit in and sell the show to those kinds of kids and for ourselves we weren't really satisfied. We kept clashing, and by wanting to branch out we saw there's a whole other world out there. We started touring and doing some shows with Colbie Caillat and Lifehouse and Paolo Nutini last month. We've been big fans of Matt Nathanson and finally we landed this tour which we're so excited about, and it's like a night and day difference in the kind of people we're playing in front of.
Bill: With the tours, do you have a very moment or favorite show in the last year?
Ricky: We just played the 9:30 club in DC and that was a really fun show. I've always been a big fan of that venue. Overseas I think the highlight...we just went over to Japan for the first time where our record ("Built to Last") is doing well. Those shows are just unbelievable. Being over there and being part of a different culture that's embracing you even though there's a language barrier was just really magical...We go over there and we do interviews and we hear the Cheap Trick references and all this stuff. They take credit for having broken a couple of bands before everyone else latched on. Being thrown into that category (with Cheap Trick and others), we feel ok.
Bill: With your style of music how was it to work with Howard Benson (producer of 'Devils and Angels')?
Ricky: Oh, obviously it ended up being really good. At first we were a little apprehensive and maybe even more, kind of, confused. He was really pushing to do the record which is amazing because he's such a big time producer, and we're obviously a small band. But this guy does All-American Rejects and My Chemical Romance, so are we going to just set ourselves up to be more a part of a world we don't really fit in? So then we just had a lot of meetings and talked to him. He came from, he used to play in a lot of pop bands back in the 70's, and he's a big keyboard enthusiast we discovered. I think he was kind of waiting for a band to come along like us. I think it's so weird. I think we kind of pulled out a lot of guilty pleasures for him.
I think it was good, because it brought to us a side that I think we needed...rocking a little bit more and having just a little bit of an edge instead of completely where we probably would have ended up...we could use the edge a little bit.
Bill: Is the whole group big movie fans or is there someone in particular who pulled out the scenes for the video for "Built to Last"?
Ricky: We're all big movie fans, obviously, but for that idea our bass player Ryan...he's a really big movie buff, and he was going to go to college to major in film so it was his idea for the video referencing all of these cliche moments in amazing romantic movie history, and we kind of took it from there.
Bill: Does he do the other videos that you have posted on YouTube and MySpace?
Ricky: Those kind of end up being all me, but it's a collective influence. I just like making movies of my whole life. We sometimes forget that people actually watch them or have the possibility of watching them. We go back and we think "Oh my God, what did we do?"
Bill: So..how was it to jump to a major label?
Ricky: It's cool. We didn't go into it being defensive and being a band saying we don't want them to change our songs...sometimes bands want to do a major but they're also super-opposed to it and find themselves in a catch-22 that's really brought on by themselves. For us we looked at that we really needed a major label for the kind of music that we wanted to create and the goals we wanted to accomplish. We wanted to write a good, well done pop record, and we wanted to get it out to as many people as we could. We knew that being on a major label provided us with the means of doing that. So, going in with that attitude, it's been a good experience. They've definitely helped us work towards that goal and have shared the dream. It's been overall a very pleasant experience.
