All-American Rejects Channel Queen on Next Disc

All-American Rejects have spent the past few months getting ready to headline the Warped Tour, prepping a new album and embracing their deep love of classic arena and pop music from the '60s and '70s. "If there's one thing the band loves collectively, it's Neil Diamond and fucking Queen," says frontman Tyson Ritter. "I just turned 26 and I've realized that this is the time when all the greats like the Beatles and the Doors and Janis made their best records."

Inspired by some of rock & roll's icons, Ritter says the follow-up to 2008's When the World Comes Down, which featured the radio smash "Gives You Hell," will veer far beyond emo-pop. "As a band, we put something different out all the time," he says. "If we've taken baby steps before, this will be our rocket ship to Mars." He adds, "We're not writing scream-out, barky, pop-rock."

So far, the Rejects have sketched out 20 tracks and finely tuned three: "Bleed Into Your Mind," "Beekeeper's Daughter" and a ballad titled "After You." "We definitely have nice walls," says Ritter. "Now we're just looking for that solid foundation." Lyrical inspiration is coming from Ritter's recent realization that he's spent the majority of his young adulthood working the record-tour-record grind. "You wake up one day and you realize you're not a kid anymore," he says. "Living with record cycles, you get frozen in time. It was almost four months to the day that I woke up and was like, 'Well, "Gives You Hell" is over.' "

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Song Stories

“Too Close”

Next | 1998

Next was formed in Minneapolis when the uncle of Terry "T-Low" and Raphael "Tweety" Brown, who was a gospel choir director, introduced the brothers to Robert Lavelle "R.L." Huggar. Sounds of Blackness singer Ann Nesby groomed the R&B group before handing them over to Naughty by Nature's KayGee, who wrote and produced "Too Close." The idea for the song was sparked "from a conversation we had with several girls at a nightclub," explained T-Low. "It's talking about the club scene, with guys getting out of hand and the female telling him to back up, asking, 'What are you doing?'" 

More Song Stories entries »

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