Why don’t you guys go ahead and introduce yourselves?
I’m Jake, I’m the vocialist.
I’m Andrew, I play drums.
Josh, I play guitar.
I’m Sam, lead guitar.
Cool! So you guys just got off of playing a show at Warped. How’d that go?
Jake: It was incred-ulous. Incredible and fabulous.
Andrew: It was a dream come true for us.
Jake: OH MY GOD IT WAS SO COOL! No but it was cool, we played the big amphitheatre, the Xfinity center in Boston which is actually his [Andrew’s] hometown Warped show. Andrew is actually from New Hampshire. It was great because he got to show us around and it was cool, the whole week leading up was like a weekend at Andrews. We got to play the amphitheatre, a lot of people, it was awesome.
Awesome! That’s very nice. You guys are just now kicking off a tour right? I think this is the second show of the leg. You guys excited?
Jake: Yeah this is the second. Yeah! We’re ready.
Where all are you going?
Jake: We are going to Indiana, Iowa, I think Oklahoma.
Andrew: Minnesota and Washington.
Jake: Yeah Minnesota and Washington, actually so it’s crazy because halfway through the tour we’re gonna end in Houston, then fly out to Washington to play a show, fly back to Houston, then finish out the leg working back to Ohio.
So obviously you guys have toured a lot, do you have any interesting tour stories? Or tour nightmares?
Jake: Oh boy yeah there’s a lot… actually we didn’t preface this with anything, am I allowed to swear or anything?
You can say whatever the fuck you want to say.
Jake: Oh fantastic. Well, now I have to be a gentleman in this interview.
Andrew: I won’t.
Jake: Ok good Andrew won’t, cause he’s not anyway haha. So there’s so many stories. There’s the mosquito story… which we almost died, it was really hot. Long story short we were in Louisiana in the middle of July. Josh and I have this thing where we like to drive until… We’re so polite. We drive until 3 or 4 in the morning until we’re seeing stuff and Bigfoot’s like humping a deer on the side of the road and we’re like “that looks cool!” Then we swerve into it because we don’t want to miss it. So we started seeing stuff and I’m like “Hey Josh we should probably pull over man. I’ve been seeing Puff the Magic Dragon for the last half hour dude… We need to pull over. So here’s the thing: When you wanna pull over it never works out so there was like 70 miles and a little gas station in this swamp bog in Louisiana, then nothing for like 80 miles after that. There were signs that said like… “Stop now or forever hold your peace. And you’ll die or something.”
No gas for like 300 miles sort of thing.
Jake: Yeah exactly haha. We govern ourselves out here haha. So we pull over it was like 4 in the morning, we got a can of bug spray for like 9 dollars. We sprayed the bus down and tried to go to sleep, but two minutes later all the guys are just smacking every 5 seconds you just hear [repeated smacking on arms sound]. We got up, turned the lights on our phones, and it was mosquitos EVERYWHERE. Alllllll over the van. It was Egypt all over again.
Josh: We weren’t able to clean our blood off the roof.
Jake: Yeah haha. Full disclosure there’s blood from one of us… or all of us.
Andrew: Lots of health code violations.
Jake: Yeah our health code is noooot up to date but… whatever.
You literally put your blood, sweat, and tears into it.
Jake: Yeah exactly! That’s right hahah.
Josh: Literally… blood haha. Yeah.
Jake: Yeah that’s just one of them, crazy. Oh and we had to drive because we couldn’t stay there so we drove for a good two more hours…
Josh: We finally found somewhere to stay or something. Like a Walmart or something.
Any shows that stand out as particularly memorable or as awesome shows? Or are they all pretty awesome?
Andrew: Firebird was pretty sweet.
Jake: Yeah absolutely, Firebird was awesome. We met some friends, hung out with some old friends that we went on tour with a while ago. That was cool to see them further in their careers. And we had a new lineup and stuff. And OH it rained too.
Andrew: It… poured.
Jake: Yeah it was The Day After Tomorrow in like, 30 minutes because it rained, then it hailed, then it was like, sunny again, then God was like “I hate you” annnnd yeah. Fun day.
Talking about the origin of your band for a bit, how did you guys meet? Like Andrew you said you were from Boston?
Yeah I grew up there. I moved to Cleveland because I had family here, and I just wanted to get back into a touring band and stuff so I went onto Craigslist. I found an ad that they had put up, I was just checking it out. I started talking to Josh and it just kind of came together. It was weird; I had actually already watched their music video, randomly. I was just looking for new bands and music while I was in Florida once…
Jake: This is my favorite.
Andrew: When we were talking, they sent me a link of the music and I was like “Oh dude I’ve already watched that, crazy small world.”
What were some of your inspirations for music? How did you guys decide on the direction of the band?
Jake: I think all of us love rock, obviously, we all came from different areas of rock.
Sam: Definitely.
Jake: When I was in middle school I was really into grunge and I was like “oh you know what? This can get happier.” Then I started listening to bands like All Time Low, and stuff like that. I was like “That’s what I want to do!” Bands like Blink-182. Like, oh you don’t have to want to die, I mean we all want to but we can be funny about it. So that’s where I like the whole, Top 40s like, pop-punk sound and the guys listened to… well go ahead guys!
Andrew: Yeah, my bands growing up, I was always into like, The Who, The Beatles, Zeppelin, and stuff like that. Their drummers mostly. Avenged Sevenfold, Motley Crew, I just go everywhere with it, but 60s through everything.
Josh: I’d say like, throughout my teenage years the music I listened to really made me wanna do this. Bands like The Used, AFI, Taking Back Sunday, those kinds of bands are what I wanted to do.
Sam: Me, I come from a mostly metal background. I’ve always been into heavy metal since I was a kid. 13 years old and homeschooled. Then I started playing guitar when I was 16 and I just played metal the whole way through, but recently I got bored of it, tired of it, I stopped playing guitar for a month, then branched out into punk and pop-punk and ska and stuff like that. Then I found Morning in May, I was like “yeah you guys sound awesome!” I started listening to more of that stuff.
Awesome!
Andrew: Yeah we should preface that by saying he [Sam] did some tech work for us and he’s a good friend of our guitarist who actually left the band.
Sam: This is my first tour.
Jake: Sam lived the dream. He went from like working to this, yeah.
Andrew: Yeah he went from working it to being IN it.
Jake: Yeah Tyler unfortunately had to leave. He got engaged, we had a good talk.
Andrew: He went to pursue other things. Going to school, doing some other things.
Good for him, good luck.
Andrew: Yeah exactly.
Where did the name Morning in May come from? It’s quite unique.
Jake: Thank you! Thank you very much, that was the best compliment I ever got haha. It’s very unique…
Not like, in a bad way!
Jake: Haha no no, ok so Morning in May, I love this question. Ok so there’s a band called Ludo.
Oh! Hell yeah! I love them.
Jake: Yeah Ludo! Ok so they came out with the Broken Bride EP back in 2003 and I loved the storyline. When I was getting in and trying to shape what I wanted the band to be when I was just doing it by myself, I listened to Ludo and they do all this crazy stuff, and funny stuff…
Yeah they’re very theatrical.
Jake: Yeah! They don’t really… care… what they’re trying to do they literally just make music they love and all kinds of stuff which is what I always wanted to do. The whole story of this EP is this guy loses his wife in a car accident. He stumbles on a time machine and he tries to get back to her on that ‘morning in May’ to save her! So he overshoots it and goes to like… apocalyptic times, then he goes back to dinosaur times, and it’s this whole crazy rock opera thing that’s only like four songs long. It’s awesome and I really liked it, and the message behind it. They did so much stuff and it was… I don’t want to say inspiring but I liked it enough to mush that into my life… so… inspired! Yeah! That’s pretty much it.
Yeah that makes sense! That’s cool. What is your process for writing music? Who writes the songs and whatnot?
Jake: This is really cool but we pretty much all.. Well, while Andrew and Sam are a little newer, but Josh and I usually would just go back and forth. I’d write a rift and Josh would be like “no that sucks, how about this?” and I would be like “okay.” Josh would have rifts, we’d always go for the feel and say we want it to be like ‘bouncy’ and stuff. We want to do this, that, and this. Josh and I literally like, go back and forth. It’s really cool. I’ll write a line and we just build songs together. Josh does a lot of the production work and records all of our stuff. He has a really good producing mind. I just throw ideas and he just says “no” for the most part but the ones that stick really get ya! He just goes “okay, we’re gonna do this.” We have a formula. I don’t know if we wanna disclose but we have a formula and a way to write everything that corresponds to other things in life. It’s very natural, I like it. Josh! You can talk man, go ahead.
Josh: This is all highly classified, by the way.
Ok cool, I’ll burn my phone after this interview.
Josh: Haha yeah, thank you.
Something I always like to ask everybody, if you could have one superpower, what superpower would it be? Going down the line.
Josh: Someone else go first, I need to think about this.
Jake: It has to be one?
Andrew: Just one, don’t bend the question.
Jake: I’m not gonna do that haha.
One superpower… Go!
Jake: I would love the power… to move you (looks at Andrew). That’s it.. Or Spiderman is pretty cool. I’d like that. I don’t wanna fly cause that’s like… I don’t know.
Spiderman is like 5 different powers in one.
Jake: Exactly!
Andrew: I would like… probably invincibility. You can do anything.
Jake: You are invincible… You’re young dude.
Andrew: Uhhhh… Nah.
Sam: Yeah I got something. I’d like to be able to shapeshift. I’m like way too self-conscience about my appearance for some stupid reason. I’d like to be like… you know what if it doesn’t work, just shift it out. Just make me an octopus, that’s cool. Go ahead Josh.
Josh: I don’t know I’m trying to think of something that would benefit us on tour, but…
Andrew: Dude… invincibility, you can’t die.
Josh: True, I don’t know. Never needing sleep would be cool.
Jake: Oh yeah that’s a good one!
Andrew: The thing is I don’t think that’s a superpower, that’s just insomnia.
Never sleep with no downside, how about that?
Andrew: Ahh yeah haha that would work.
Josh: Yeah there it is. That’s what I’d want.
Cool, just wrapping up, where can finds find you specifically in the next couple of days? I know we talked about your tour earlier but specifically.
Jake: The Irving Theatre in Indianapolis, The Pin in Washington, The Acadia in Houston. Uhh..
Josh: Oh and I think Groundswell in Cedar Rapids, Iowa?
Jake: Yeah! South Carolina, The Radio Room, Suzie’s in Youngstown, Jack Rabbits in Jacksonville… They’re not in order but those are some of them.
Andrew: Yeah haha, look on Instagram or Facebook and you can find the specific dates.
Segwaying into that, want to go ahead and shamelessly plug your social media?
Jake: Oh, I got it. Ready? We are available on iTunes, Spotify, Google Play, Pandora, Amazon, and YouTube, of course. You can be updated at @morninginmayoh on Instagram and Twitter, facebook.com/morninginmayband would be our facebook, obviously. Annnnd one of these guys has Tinder so I don’t know. You’ll have to find out. Start swiping.
Any closing remarks or shoutouts?
Jake: Absolutely. Anything you want to do in life, be the best at it and build a story. That’s what we’re here for. We only have a little bit of time so do as much as you can with that little bit of time. If you’re afraid, that’s the best fuel there is.
Andrew: That’s what I run off of. Straight fear.
Jake: Hahah yeah. Anything you do, don’t go in with a half heart, because like gas tanks, if you don’t have a full tank you’re not gonna make the trip.
Awesome! Thanks so much guys!
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Interview by Dan Cornelius, RockRevolt Journalist
Live photos by Devon Keller, RockRevolt Photojournalist
