INTERVIEW: The Wrecks
Pop punk group, The Wrecks, have been rocking the scene for over a decade now with relatable lyrics & punchy choruses. Lexi Schnell from our Noisescape team attended the Vans Warped Tour in D.C. last weekend & had the opportunity to sit down with frontman, Nick Anderson, about everything Wrecks-related. Full interview was filmed below as well as some written highlights for your reading pleasure.
How has Warped Tour been treating you so far?
It's been really hot and really fun. We played yesterday. The crowd was insane, welcoming, loud, crazy. And I've been spending most of the days at our merch table meeting fans. I saw some other bands, they were all standing out and I just wanted to like stay out longer than they were, you know, it became a competition. And, we won.
You won?
Yeah. Now, did our line get down to basically none? Yeah, but if you stay long enough, other people start joining your line. You got a long line again.
That's true. They just want to see who's there.
Yeah. So people were just coming up because they felt bad. Probably they were like, oh, what's happening? Or they thought we were the other band next to us. Who knows.
You probably got tons of new fans doing that.
Oh, I hope so.
What is your favorite Warped Tour memory either from playing or attending?
I think I got my glasses knocked off when I was a junior in high school and I panicked and I was like, on the ground like Velma from Scooby-Doo, I can't see without my glasses. I can't see without my glasses. And so I was like, on my hands and knees, digging through the dirt to find them. And then someone else, like ten feet away was like, there's some glasses. And I got them back and the lens was broken and cracked. And I'm still wearing those to this day.
I was just going to say...
I just also broke these. Yeah— on stage. So at a concert also, but we were performing.
Well, that’s better.
Well, it's simply because I punched them off my own face. I got too into a moment and like, yeah, wow, I'm an idiot.
A lot of your songs feel incredibly relatable. Do your best songs usually come from personal experiences, or do you pull experience from people around you?
Personal experience, I don't know if I could tell someone else's story. Well, because the way that I write songs is from pulling from the imagery and like things that I saw or were there or were like, um, very zoomed in specific things that stood out. And so I have to, I have to feel like I'm in a location to write accurately.
Like if I'm writing about a time I was in the car and something was happening, I can be, I'm there and I know I can look around the memory and I can look around the space and point out things that I think add to the core message of what the song is, whether it be the turning signal being a bit faster than normal because my front headlight's out and my car's trying to tell me, which paints a picture of a guy who doesn't have his shit together, things like that. It's like, oh I can pull interesting memories like that out if I experience it myself. Someone else's story, I think I would just do a really generic boring job.
The Wrecks have always balanced catchy hooks with a little bit of chaos and self-awareness. Is there a song in your catalog that best captures the band's personality?
I would say that the song “Out of Style” or “Freaking Out” is a good one for that. Yeah. Maybe any of the funny ones. Maybe “Out of Style” and “Freaking Out” are a good example of that. “This Life I Have” is a good example of that.
If The Wrecks were a reality TV show, what would the title be?
Oh, um. We almost, want to know something? Actually, we almost did a reality show.
Really?
Yeah. Okay. Well, because we were gonna sign, we signed a production deal with a production company. Like a TV, like a television production. This is right around COVID. And we were going to do a, we were gonna sign up like we even had a deal from a network and we were gonna (like a small, like internet network or whatever), but we were gonna do like a scripted series telling the story of the beginning of our band. And we wrote like synopsis for like, like I wrote ten episodes with our manager and like we had, and we pitched this whole thing.
And then when we started working with production company, they were like it's really hard to get a, I think it's someone was like, well, we got this offer from a network, but maybe we can get an offer from one of the bigger networks. So we got a little bit of greed going on. And so then they were like, well, it's hard to get a scripted show, but maybe a reality show. And so then we started changing the idea. And then I started not liking the direction that it was going with the reality TV show ideas. It started not being about the band. It started being more about like, like, I don't know, just the ideas that were being pitched made no sense anymore.
So I stopped taking the Zoom calls and it kind of died like that. And that, I mean, that production company, the network that was gonna offer us the deal ended up going under like a year later. So by the time we got into production, it probably wouldn't have even happened. But, uh, yeah, so we didn't have a name for it. You would think that that story ends with the name. It would be Keeping up with the Wrecks.
It's pretty good.
You can't do that. Right. We sold knockoff merch this year, so maybe we can knock off Keeping Up With the Kardashians. We are straight up selling, it's the vans logo, but instead of the V, it's a W and it says Wrecks. And we just took the Monster Energy logo and we flipped it upside down and it's a W, we didn't change the logo at all. If you took the photo wrong with your phone and the orientation was flipped, it would just be the monster logo. So yeah, so don't take photos of our merch upside down. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I think we can do Keeping up with the Wrecks. Yeah. That's good.
Do you think the reality TV show is ever going to happen?
Yeah. If television gets that bad, if television gets that bad and someone's dumb enough to give us money to do that. Yeah. Um, or if I just find someone who's willing to follow us around with a camera. Yeah, I'll probably do that. Yeah. Would you would you follow us?
That doesn't sound like a bad job.
We were talking before the interview but you love your job.
I do love my job but this sounds like a fun job.
But in case you one day hate that job.
Yeah. We'll talk.
If you could collaborate with any artist on this weekend's lineup, who would it be?
Uh, wow. I've collabed with a lot of artists. I've written songs with a ton of people playing this weekend like, like I've written with Jutes, with grandson, with, The Used, with who else is playing this weekend? Um, I almost did a song with The Front Bottoms. That was, that was years ago.
I have to look at the lineup. So a lot of the bands that I would have wanted to, I've been able to get in the room and work on stuff. Some of them released them, some of them didn't. But that's just because they have issues with me personally and, uh, they hate me. It's not because the songs weren't good enough, obviously, because the songs were great, right?
Yeah. Of course.
I'd rather they hate me than hate the song. I think that the ones I would have really, maybe that Front Bottoms one would have been cool to make that happen. When we were first talking about it, he goes, he's like, I love this track, I'm gonna write a second verse, blah, blah, blah. And he goes, but I'm really flaky. And I was like, I just appreciate that you're being honest that's all I care about. And so when he flaked, it was okay, I was prepared for it. And my expectations were, I was comforted early. Yeah. And so I knew I didn't have to keep waiting. I love Brian Sella. He's a great guy. He's an awesome writer.
What's next for The Wrecks and what can fans look out for?
We're going on tour this fall. We're announcing it next week. It's gonna be a headline tour called Finally Outside. We're putting out singles for the OUTSIDE EP, which is the second half of our album [Check out “Mint Tobacco” here.] The first half is called INSIDE. The second half is called OUTSIDE and, OUTSIDE has five or six songs on it, I've decided, but that'll come out on the tour, the subsequent tour, world domination, TV show— reality show, hiring a production company or what? What role would you take? Camera?
Videographer or cinematographer?
Videographer or cinematographer, got it. And then, yeah, taking over television. iHeartMedia is going to be all over us. TV, radio…
All right, signing off here. Bye.
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