Very well. A little bit tired. I didn’t sleep too much last night. I’d gone to sleep at 8 A.M. and woke up at noon. I kept falling asleep and waking up and the way our bus driver was driving last night, the best way I can describe it is gas, brake, gas, brake, gas, brake. I was flying all over the place.

Bouncing around in the bunk. Tell me a little bit about Bayside.

I’m Nick and I play bass. Chris plays drums. Anthony sings and plays guitar. Jack plays guitar. We’ve been around for about seven years. We’re from Long Island. We never stop touring unless we’re writing new songs.

What’s your favorite part of being in a band? Being out on the road or doing a record?

Definitely the road and playing and just meeting people and seeing new places. I don’t know if everyone in the band is like that but I prefer that to the studio side of things.

What brought you guys together? How did you meet up?

Anthony is the only original member. The band started just over a message board. People on Long Island talking about shows and looking for band members. That’s how the band started and just over the years through mutual friends we all just joined the band somehow. One way or the other.

I guess a couple of years back you guys had a pretty bad wreck.

Yeah, it was two years ago almost exactly on Halloween. We were going from Denver to Salt Lake City driving through Wyoming and hit a patch of black ice. I broke my back in the accident and our drummer passed away at the time. I was out of commission for a little less than six months. We all grew up and learned from it and take the most positive things out of it that we can. Obviously it was a terrible thing that happened but we didn’t want anything even worse to come of it. We didn’t want our lives to become a waste after that. We wanted people to learn from everything that we’ve been through. We had support from all of our friends and family and fans so we barreled through it and are telling our story every chance we can.

Tell me a little about your drummer that you had at the time.

We both joined at the same time. His name was John. We both joined in August of 2004. We became instantly close friends. He was a great dude and I think what brought us closer together too is that we joined at the same time. We were going through the same experience. We were barely together a year. We joined in August ’04 and the accident happened in October ’05 so it was barely a year. We spent a lot of time together. We wrote and recorded one album and then the tour we were on was our big chance to shine. It was the Victory Records tour two years ago. Unfortunately it happened. It’s hard to stay up but like I said, between friends and family and our fans and the music community in general, it’s helped us persevere and we knew that there were other people out there who could gain a lot of what we went through. A lot of our songs are about perseverance and about life not necessarily being the most easy thing but how to make it through. If we didn’t listen to our own advice it might not be worth anything.

If life were meant to be easy we wouldn’t learn a hell of a lot.

Yeah, exactly.

Tell me about your record, The Walking Wounded.

That’s our first album with our drummer Chris. We wrote it last summer, recorded it about this time last year we started recording it, and we’re all very proud of it. We went to the same producers we did our self-titled album with and we’re a little more comfortable with them this time. Sonically it sounds better than any album we’ve done and I think we’re trying to do different things with the Bayside sound. We certainly don’t want to keep writing the same songs over and over. I’m not so sure our fans want to see that either. They’ll get bored very easily.

Well, there are some bands out there like AC/DC or Def Leppard that can do that sort of thing and it works. If they did anything different from that, people would be like “what the fuck are you doing?” With other bands, they have to change things up.

Yeah, a lot of bands in our general music scene, if they get any type of success they want to, I don’t know if solidify is the right word, but they want to justify their success by maybe expanding their musical abilities. We didn’t reach what any other band has reached yet but we have a specific sound we want to have and we do want to be creative and add something to the music in general. We also aren’t into it just to please ourselves with instruments and musical arrangements.

What did you guys start out sounding like and what do you guys think you sound like right now?

Very early on it was very Drive Thru Records era. 1999 era like New Found Glory type or pop punk type of stuff. Right now when anyone has to say we sound like someone, it’s either Alkaline Trio or Dead End Kids or anything like that which is great because those are some of our favorite bands. I don’t necessarily hear a lot of bands that sound like us and I think that makes our band harder to reach the masses. The bands that are popular right now might all sound like Taking Back Sunday. Taking Back Sunday was a huge band. They still are. It’s easier for a 15 year old kid to be like “oh, I like Taking Back Sunday. I’ll listen to this.” But when someone says Bayside sounds like The Getup Kids or The Smoking Popes, a 15 year old kid doesn’t necessarily know who that is so it’s not as appealing to them.

I don’t necessarily know who the hell that is either.

Our sound isn’t a very easy sound to lump in with anything that is really going on. It’s not completely off the wall out of wack music but it’s something within our scene that isn’t prevalent in a lot of bands.

When I first started out I wondered if I really wanted to cover a lot of younger bands because I’m an older girl but I really enjoy that though. It opens my ears up to so many different things.

There are some younger bands that are doing good things. There are bands younger than us doing good things.

Bands younger than you?

Oh, absolutely. Quite a bit younger than me and the rest of us. I think the youngest person in our band is Chris. He’s 22. A band like Paramour for instance, I’m not sure everyone is even older than the age of 21 in that band. But they’re certainly blowing up right now.

Collect all that money while you’re young. Tell me about three songs on your record that you like the most. Everyone always has two or three that they really like.

Yeah. The title track, “The Walking Wounded”, is extremely fun to play. Whenever I figure out that I like a song, it’s usually because of the way our fans react to it while we’re playing it. “The Walking Wounded” is one song that the kids sing just as loud as we’re playing it. That’s always fun and just something about the way the way it’s arranged. It’s just really a powerful song. Then another song off of that is “They’re Not Horses, They’re Unicorns”. Again it’s another fun song to actually play and kids react to it fairly well. We open up our show on this tour with it. The last song on the album, “(Pop)Ular Science”, is about the music industry in general and people making money we should be making off of us. That’s an age old thing.

Oh, hell yes. I’m amazed that some of these older bands like the ones that I grew up on such as Black Sabbath and KISS and bands like that, it’s a wonder those guys ever made the shitloads of money that they made considering how much the record companies collected.

KISS is a monster at merchandising so they probably could never see any money from music and still make millions upon millions of dollars just off of the KISS name and logo.

I remember a long time ago someone from some band telling me that they made two to five cents off each album they sell.

It’s something ridiculous. If a record label makes enough money and makes their money back that’s when you see that money and sometimes you don’t even see that. You’re lucky if you’re signed to a label and you get to put it out and it’s easily and readily available for people and obviously the Internet has changed the game for everyone.

I think the Internet has been a big awesome fucking thing for a lot of bands.

It certainly is. It’s making all the old school label types shiver in their boots but it’s good for the people who are actually making the music.

It makes it a lot easier to go around covering bands and shit like that. How’s the tour been going so far?

We’re about two weeks in, maybe a little less. We started off with a bang. We had done our home show in New York in front of about 2,000 people. In Philadelphia the day after that was like 1,100 people. As we went down the coast, as we left our home area, the shows have been a little smaller but just as energetic and action packed as any other show. The kids who are coming are just absolutely excited to see us. We made a lot of new fans on Warped Tour all summer and on tour with Anberlin last spring. This is our first time headlining on this album so there are people who have only seen us play for about a half hour at a time seeing us play for a little bit over an hour now so hopefully we’re doing our fans justice.

How is signing with Victory Records helping you guys out?

Great. We signed just when Taking Back Sunday and Thursday and all those bands were getting big. The way Victory works is they have their big bands and then they have all the bands that they want to follow in their footsteps and everything is lumped in. You come to Victory Records and you’re on samplers and websites and all this type of stuff. This person who buys one album also hears about every other band on Victory so everyone gets a shot. It’s just like any other label. You work with them, you give them stuff, they give you stuff sometimes, and it’s great to see your record in stores. My advice to any band is that you’ve got to work for anything you get. You can’t just sign a record deal and figure everything is going to be all right after that. It’s definitely not that way.

No, you’ve got to put a little effort into that if you want to make it work. Any other thoughts or comments?

We don’t necessarily have a functioning website. We just use our MySpace which is way easier to keep updated and all that stuff. It’s www.MySpace.com/bayside. Got a bunch of free stuff that is downloadable, banners, and all that type of stuff.

I did see the memorial website that you guys started for your drummer. When is that going to be ready?

I’m not sure. I only really deal with the MySpace stuff. Anything else is run by other people so whatever they run by us we okay and all that kind of stuff. As far as our fans and the Internet go, we’re a community on MySpace. We reply to as much mail and definitely read as much as we can. I would say I’m on MySpace probably a minimum of one hour a day reading fan mail and trying to reply. It’s good. I think it keeps us all grounded to be in that type of relationship with our fans where they can tell us that we sucked last night and I can say sorry. That never happens but if it did I’d apologize.

I like the fact that bands can be so much more intimate with their fans now.