New Found Glory

In the 10 years they’ve been a band, New Found Glory have sold millions of albums, logged hundreds of thousands of road miles, and influenced an entire generation of bands whose sounds range from emo to pop-punk to hardcore and beyond. Yet despite the fame, despite the platinum records, and despite the fact that their fan base includes bands who’ve gone platinum multiple times over in their own genres, New Found Glory remain the same five friends who started making music because there was nothing better to do in the Florida suburbs that spawned them.

Okay, so they’ve grown up a little, and one listen to the new From the Screen to Your Stereo Part 2 shows just how much. A sequel to the band’s similarly titled 2000 EP for Drive-Thru, From the Screen to Your Stereo Part 2 finds New Found Glory drawing on the matured arranging skills that made their 2006 album Coming Home a critical success. Featuring contributions from some of the bigger names NFG have influenced (members of Fall Out Boy, Taking Back Sunday and Cartel, to name but three), Part 2 is the sound of a band and their supporting crew all playing at the top of their game. And though it leaps from classic country (Walk the Line’s “It Ain’t Me Babe,” which finds Eisley’s Sherri DuPree playing June Carter to lead singer Jordan Pundik’s Johnny Cash) to ’80s new wave (a heavier take on Simple Minds’ contribution to The Breakfast Club, “Don’t You Forget About Me”), From the Screen to Your Stereo Part 2 is remarkable for just how much it sounds like a New Found Glory record.

“We really looked hard to find songs that we might’ve written ourselves,” guitarist Chad Gilbert explains about the band’s choice of material for Part 2. “Yeah, maybe we wouldn’t write a song called ‘Kiss Me’” (as in Sixpence None the Richer’s memorable single from She’s All That ), “but we have love songs and songs about relationships, so it made sense to cover ‘Kiss Me’ for this record, because when you look at what they’re singing about, it could just as easily be from one of our old records. Putting our stamp on songs like these isn’t just about playing them faster. From lyrics to melodies, we looked at these songs and really thought hard about how to make them our own.”

The lack of outside pressure also played a big part in how unabashedly free and joyful From the Screen to Your Stereo Part 2 feels coming through the speakers. Having spent the past seven years recording for Geffen Records’ shifting family of labels—on which they saw Gold sales for 2000’s New Found Glory, 2003’s Sticks and Stones, and 2004’s Catalyst—New Found Glory parted ways with Geffen this year and recorded Part 2 as free agents, working out a deal with their long-time friends at Drive-Thru (whose stamp has also adorned every NFG album to date) to release the album on terms everyone could live with. “We reached a certain point where we surpassed everything we ever dreamed of,” Gilbert explains, “and we’re now back at the point where we just love touring and playing music. There’s a new energy about our band now, and we’re really enjoying it.”

That energy shines through every second of From the Screen to Your Stereo Part 2, whether the band are delivering a revved-up version of Amelie’s accordion instrumental “J'y Suis Jamais Alle” or loading Go West’s “King of Wishful Thinking” (from Pretty Woman) with octave chords and gang vocals complete with a cameo from Fall Out Boy’s Patrick Stump. (“When Patrick heard we were doing that song, he was psyched,” Gilbert remembers, laughing. “He actually wanted to cover the song himself!”) Working on the majority of the tracks at Rosewood Studios in Gilbert’s new home base of Tyler, Texas—and in Cartel’s case, flying in to record singer Will Pugh (for the City of Angels/Goo Goo Dolls cover “Iris”) while the band were making their own new record in a glass bubble in Times Square—NFG turned the sessions into a collaborative experience, and the outcome, says Gilbert, reflects the fun they had making it. “All these people had either expressed interest or were fans or friends, so the whole process ended up being really easy and seamless,” he remembers. “It was just like, ‘Hey, we’re doing this record, and we’ll send you the tracks.”

Besides its surprises (Lisa Loeb dueting with Pundik on a lovely cover of her Reality Bites hit “Stay”) and high-profile cameos (including Taking Back Sunday’s Adam Lazzara on the Cardigans’ Romeo + Juliet single “Lovefool” and Say Anything’s Max Bemis on Madonna’s 1985 Vision Quest smash “Crazy for You”), From the Screen to Your Stereo Part 2 features one guest spot that brings everything full circle for everyone involved. “Chris Carrabba from Dashboard Confessional sings on ‘The Promise,’” Gilbert says of the When in Rome song best known from Napoleon Dynamite’s closing credits. “He’s been a friend of ours since back in the day, and he sang on our first album, [1999’s] Nothing Gold Can Stay, before anyone really knew who he was, so it’s really cool to have him on this record and to think of how far we’ve both come.”

While New Found Glory may have come farther than even they could’ve imagined, Gilbert sounds most proud of the fact that the band have charted their career path just they made their latest album: for the love of the music, and on their own terms. “After doing the Warped Tour again this year,” Gilbert says of the annual festival NFG headlined for the third time in 2007,” I realized that we’re at the point where we’ve earned a lot of people’s respect because we’ve been a band for a long time and we haven’t changed; we’re still the same five guys we were in 1997. And in a lot of ways, that’s the whole point of this covers record: Though we’ve toured all over the world and played arenas and sold millions of records or whatever, we don’t take ourselves too seriously, and we don’t think we’re more than we are. We’re here to make people happy and have fun, and we feel lucky every day that we get to do that.”

blink182, green day, fall out boy