Between health scares, injuries to loved ones and the loss of a founding member it has been a hellishly tough few years for veteran Florida pop-punkers Yellowcard. But somehow by sticking together and with the support of their die-hard fan base around the world Ryan Key, Sean Mackin and co weathered the storm and came out fighting with the release of their biggest and most triumphant record to date ‘Lift A Sail’. The record’s touring cycle finally saw the band make a near sell-out return to the UK on a co-headliner with long-time friends Less Than Jake.
Already Heard sat down for a pretty deep chat with YC violinist Sean Mackin at the tour’s final UK date in Leeds. Read on for an update on Sean’s health, his delight at introducing his baby daughter to music as well as his thoughts on his band’s move to Razor and Tie Records, the importance of making videos that inspire people to change the way they think and much more.
AH: It seems like the most important place to start, and the thing that most people will want to know, how are things with you right now?
Sean: I’m doing well thank you. I’ve got a family back home and a new little girl in my life who is six months old. My health is something that I’ll just always have to keep an eye on. I think just like for any other person the ‘C’ word is terrifying, but I have an amazing support system of family and friends and fans too. Sometimes it’s overwhelming. I do what I can to make sure I’m healthy for my family, our band and having the ability to play music. At the moment I’m just basking in the enjoyment of the new found bundle of joy in my house. It’s a full time job and my lady is doing it all by herself right now, but it’s a pretty exciting time right now for Sean Mackin.
AH: Leaving your wife and baby girl behind to travel to Europe must have made coming on tour more difficult than it has been in the past.
Sean: When we started touring 2001 was really our first full time year. I didn’t have a computer, I bought one in 2003, so there was no video chat. It was all calling cards and hotel rooms. Now on my cell phone I have service and I can face time. I was at the tower of London the other day and at Tower Bridge I face-timed my wife and kid. So there are technology advances that help me for a change rather than affecting record sales and other technology stuff. But life is good man. Everyone has got their thing and we’re doing alright. From tomorrow we’re half way through so it’s not too bad.
AH: Have you played violin for baby Mackin yet?
Sean: Yeah I’ve played her a bit of violin. In my house we have all of my instruments out. And some good friends of ours had an old vintage piano. It wasn’t well taken care of but it wasn’t firewood yet so I rented a trailer and went to get it. So now I’ve got a piano in my house and I got my ukulele, guitar and violin out for her. It’s tough because I can’t sit her down on me and play violin, but I’ve got one of those little dad backpack things and I put her in there and then put the ukulele on her belly and play in the mirror. She moves her fingers on the instrument as she sees me play. She’s a pretty special girl. We’ll see but I don’t want to force her into music.
AH: It sounds like she’ll be playing in no time.
Sean: (laughs) Yeah we’ll see. Hopefully we’ll get a piano player in the house. That would be great.
AH: Has the last few years, as challenging and adversity filled as they have been for you all, made you closer as a band and helped to give you fresh inspiration as writers?
Sean: For Yellowcard in life we have always wanted to push and be the best and work hard. With all of the troubles that we have gone through, sometimes you hear about artists getting writer’s block, but with us our lives are just like anyone else’s but our art will always mimic our lives. We didn’t want to fold because there was pressure from every direction. From health, from life and from love. Everyone gets that as its part of human nature, we just didn’t want it to make us fold. We’ve powered through and we’re working hard. The shiny side of the coin is we always have something to write about.
Was wanting to start over after all of that at all behind the decision to leave Hopeless Records and sign with Razor and Tie?
Sean: Hopeless are great. They helped facilitate Yellowcard to get back in and they have an amazing roster of bands. I think with Yellowcard, historically, we have always ridden the middle area, the grey area, between having mega singles and television and radio super hugeness to indie record labels putting the songs out, putting the records out and just seeing what happens. I think with Razor and Tie we wanted to see if they were an in-between record label. They have a radio department and they put out the record. They didn’t get in the way of our process and they believed in the Yellowcard record. It’s been a great marriage so far, and I think any time you take on a new partner there are always growing pains, but they are doing a great job. I think what it most important and that we can control is that Yellowcard is out on the road. We’re grinding it out and we’re playing ‘Lift A Sail’ for the fans every night. That is a positive experience and people are coming up to us and they are wearing the shirts and they are singing the songs and that is the best feeling. To be in Yellowcard and 15 years later be putting out full production record number seven and people still be loving the music, there is no feeling like that.
AH: Did signing with Razor and Tie and the diverse roster they have give you a little more freedom to make ‘Lift a Sail’ a more diverse and expansive record then you have made before?
Sean: Any time we have signed with a record label they have no creative control artistically. I think the direction of ‘Lift A Sail’ we went in, well obviously lyrically I can’t speak for Ryan, but we had touched on that a lot of things had happened in our lives and we wanted to get into that and talk about that. Musically for us, now you are always going to get that vintage Yellowcard sound, but I think we wanted to use modern song writing elements. A lot of production, a lot of futuristic sounds that we hadn’t used before and that we didn’t want to shy away from. We had also talked about doing a lot of things on a Yellowcard record which we had never done before. There is a song which is one of my favourites which is just predominantly string production base, it’s called ‘MSK’, and there are no guitars. We were are dudes in our mid-thirties who are going to branch out and explore some of those influences that we have. I know that people want the rock beat and the big push Yellowcard stuff, and we delivered some songs like that, but we definitely wanted to make sure that as artists we explored some of the things which we hadn’t done before.
Ah: How did Longineau’s departure and Nate from Anberlin stepping in on drums in the studio change and influence how ‘Lift A Sail’ turned out?
Sean: I think it was awesome. Nate has always been a really great friend of ours. I met him on a Yellowcard tour with a band called Acceptance and Nate filled in for them. He’s a great songwriter and he’s a heavy hitting drummer. He’s from Florida so he has that Florida style and it was great to bounce ideas off of him. Obviously when you lose a full time member of the band like that it’s always difficult. But to have a close friend and a brother like Nate Young come in, it almost seemed like the scheduling just worked out as he did the last Anberlin record and then had some time off, we needed some help and he came in and bailed us out and it was almost like the studio process was seamless. That is really to his credit. He’s a great artist and a true brother.
AH: ‘Convocation’ has somehow managed to be one of the most stirring songs you’ve made yet has no lyrics, where did the inspiration and motivation behind the song come from?
Sean: Two years ago we did this big festival run in Europe. I think we did about six weeks over here. And we heard all of these different sounds like bagpipes and Dropkick Murphys and all these other European artists that we don’t get in the States. Every day we would play a 45 minute set, but then you have all day with these artists and you pick up your instrument and jam a little bit. From hearing all these sounds I came up with the kind of intro riff of ‘Convocation’ and it had a sort of Irish bagpipe type feel to it. I played it for the guys and they were like “that’s like a call to arms; that has to be the thing for the record|. So I asked them do you want it to be instrumental. Throughout our records we have done a lot of instrumental intros and we knew we were going to explore more sounds on the record, and they thought it would be fitting if I did that. So I put together what ended up being something I wrote two years ago with a little bit more of a cinematic solo violin arrangement in the middle. But its bookended by this call to arms bagpipe feel. It was just really meant for the European festivals I guess. That’s where it came from.
AH: It has a big fantasy film score type vibe to it, is that something you were aiming for?
Sean: No. I would love to be able to say that I could be a big Hollywood film scorer but I think it was just some of the big chord progressions and changes, and (by) having the violin being predominant you’ll get a feel of that timeless thing of ‘Game Of Thrones’ or ‘The Hobbit’ or stuff like that because of some of the instrumentation that I used. Especially from the droned strings to sound like a bagpipe. It’s a very specific sound that you get from those styles of movies. If it fits and someone wants to use it and pay us a whole bunch of money, that would be great.
AH: Where did the idea for the ‘One Bedroom’ video come from and how did the tie in with Invisible Children come about?
Sean: That collaboration is the glory of the Vans Warped Tour. We’ve had a strong relationship with Kevin Lyman and Warped Tour since the early days of Yellowcard. Our first stint was in 2002, and we’ve done most of it six or seven different times. Invisible Children are a great non-profit organisation doing something totally outside of their world to benefit people who are having to fight for a living. It’s awful. Ryan is good friends with Alex from Invisible Children and during Warped Tour they were collaborating. Instead of doing a typical we have a video where it’s a guy and a girl and they are walking down the street and they kiss at the end or whatever, we wanted to do something a little bit different. I think for us when we used to watch videos on MTV, when MTV used to be a real thing and they used to do videos, it was never necessarily about the song and the video it was always more cool to see a video that had a different story that was almost unrelated but that at the end you got the same feeling emotionally. I think that Invisible Children and the production did a great job of stirring emotion. I mean I’m in it just ugly crying. They caught us as they showed us this thing about this young man who had been abducted and taken away, and forced to do all of these things, and however it got there he picked up a defection flyer and got out. They were able to capture some of that and it’s just an amazing story. We were able to do something which is way bigger than our little bubble of a band. We got to design a flyer for Invisible Children and I’d love to see if at any point anyone came out with our flyer that has the Yellowcard logo on it and says ‘Be Strong Believe’.
AH: With videos like ‘One Bedroom’ and ‘Sing For Me’ does it mean you value being able to educate, and inform with your videos rather than just entertain?
Sean: We don’t want to be educators and stand on a soap box and pound our chests and point at people. It’s more about moving people to be inspired. I think as an artist you always want to, not be the best band in the world making the best videos, but if you can show someone something different something that they maybe haven’t seen or stir up an emotion that they haven’t thought about, then those two examples within our videography really highlight that. I also think that we have done the entertaining video stuff. Little comedy here, a little action or high energy stuff there. It’s all been great to do those things. I never dreamed as a little orchestra nerd sitting in school playing classical music that I would be in huge music video. I think at this point in Yellowcard’s career it’s good to do the fun stuff but if we can inspire people to do something else or to think about something differently then that is what we would try to do.
AH: When you first learnt to play the violin could you have ever imagined it would lead you to becoming a rock star and travelling the world?
Sean: Absolutely not. It wasn’t until we were in high school when I started hanging out with some guitar players, and we started drinking beer when we probably shouldn’t have been drinking beer, that’s what became Yellowcard. I have amazing friends and there are other artists out there, countless violinists that I have met, who shred way harder than me. The idea of doing something different, that I can play classical music and I can pick up a guitar and I can write a song, I think was something I knew that I wanted to do. I just didn’t know that it would be Yellowcard.
AH: How does writing your string parts for new songs work, do you simply come up with parts to fit what the other guys have, or does the parts you have written ever directly influence the melody or tone of new songs?
Sean: There are a couple of different ways. But I think with the string arrangements in particular I call them the song within a song. Every time I come up with something beforehand I usually get ‘oh we can’t do that because we’ve got the vocal or we’ve got a guitar part’, I kind of get bullied by the other guys a little bit. But once it’s all finished to where nothing is moving or changing I have a little more freedom. I don’t have to think about the constant change I can just go in and something that I want to do. So usually I wait until the end when the product is kind of finished up.
AH: Are you possibly the most positive man on Twitter, and how often do you have to explain the NFL to non-Americans as a result of all your tweets about the Broncos?
Sean: I’m not the most positive. There’s a guy in New York who is a motivational speaker and he came out and was like ‘I love your band and you’re so positive’. So I follow him and he’s a super famous guy who does these amazing quotes and he does giant conventions and speaks to people. So I know I’m not the most positive, but I probably am the most positive within the band. And anyone who doesn’t really know the NFL they don’t really talk about it. I’m pretty sports orientated. If someone asked me to go for a jog I’d say not really, but if they asked me if I wanted to go throw a football around I’d say hell yeah. Basketball, soccer, football or whatever you want to call it, any of those I’m there. I would happily talk sports all day but people on Twitter they kind of give up. Twitter is like an instant drug. You look and if they don’t write you back by the time you put your phone down, then they don’t really talk to you anymore. I wish they would talk to me more. I’ve got like 46,000 followers and only about seven people write to me.
AH: How humbling was the ‘Strong for Sean’ movement by fans during your illness? Did it bring it home just how valued and looked up to you are by your band’s fans?
Sean: I still can’t believe it. When people came together for ‘Strong for Sean’ and were making me flags and banners and posters and writing me letters, it crumbled my world to have an illness like that and not know the depth of it and still not know if there’s an end, but to know I inspire those people, and other people who have way worse illnesses or other things that were bothering them, and they all came together to support me in that moment. I still wear this band that they gave me, and a good friend of mine who passed away last year I wear his and one for another friend of mine who is also fighting. It’s amazing, you hope that you don’t ever have to be around that illness but that life can be long enough that you see that happen. That is all that I think we as human beings can ask for is for someone to let us lean on them when we are weak and that we can help prop them back up and get strong.
AH: Did celebrating the ‘Ocean Avenue’ anniversary make you realise just how long you have been making music with Ryan?
Sean: I think being in Yellowcard and having such a long career, we always talked about what was our dream, and it was to have longevity in music. It really is a testament that ten years later people are coming to shows and selling them out. We are on the other side of the planet playing sold out shows with Less Than Jake. We have a blessed life and there is not a minute that goes by that we take for granted.
AH: Finally, what’s the key to achieving a strong stage back flip?
Sean: Ah, I don’t know because my back flip is weak. I’m old so my calves are strained right now and I’m not getting the proper lift. You need to have a balance of agility and strength. Last night I learned that, we have a giant mover light and our lighting guy, god bless him he’s amazing, but he tried to light up the stage and he shone the light right in my eyes and I was blind for like ninety seconds and I just did it anyway. I thought ah well I’m here. So you have to be aware of your surroundings. It’s a blend of things and everything has to be right!
‘Lift a Sail’ by Yellowcard is out now on Razor and Tie Records.
Yellowcard links: Website|Facebook|Twitter
Words by Dane Wright (@MrDaneWright)
