New All-American Rejects Album ‘Sandbox’

All-American Rejects haven’t put out an album since 2012’s Kids in the Street, and for a while, frontman Tyson Ritter thought it might be their last. They spent time on the state-fair and casino circuit, and Ritter says he  got to the point where he “really didn’t give a shit about my band.” But at 2022’s We Were Young festival, the crowd screamed along to the band’s deepest cuts, convincing band members that their music still mattered. All-American Rejects refocused, started playing innovative house-party shows (with more to come this year), and returned to the studio for Sandbox, out May 15, which Ritter calls the most honest work of the band’s career.

Tyson sat down at the Rolling Stone Studio, live at SXSW, to discuss the new album, the soullessness of major-label co-writing sessions, and Playhouse, the platform he’s built to let artists play shows in people’s backyards and living rooms. He also cleared up an old Taylor Swift rumor once and for all, reflected on the origins of “It Ends Tonight,” and shared his memories of filming The House Bunny. “There’s so much music out there that I just don’t believe is truth,” he says. “Is there truth left in this band? Do I have something honest to say?”

Take me back to 2022, at the When We Were Young festival and the moment when you realized that there’s really a lot of life left in this band.
That was a really cool festival for us to play. We hadn’t done much in the decade before that, as far as any sort of relevant festival. I thought it was just this heritage kind of show about the scene, and it was a scene we always felt like bastards in. So it was a joke for us. But everybody out there, all the bands backstage, they were putting on the skinny pants and getting all their old uniforms on. I remember just being like, this juice ain’t gonna be worth the squeeze. And we stepped out there on the side stage and I think Paramore and Death Cab for Cutie were on. We’re like, we’re gonna get snowed. And the crowd was ours. They were singing deep cuts loud, singing these songs that we’d been kicking around for 20 years to much smaller crowds. That was a really revelatory experience because I think I really didn’t give a shit about my band. It was great ’cause it kept the lights on, but having a decade when you haven’t contributed to something, especially something that you associate with a younger person — I always talk about the early years of this band as “that kid.” “Man, that kid did a lot of cool shit for me.” And here I was standing in front of this crowd who was so welcoming. It was hard to turn your head away from: man, maybe there’s still some gas in the tank here.

The new album feels almost like a new band. It feels like you were coming from a new place and it has a lot of artistic juice in it.
They always say you have your whole life to write your first record. And I think this is the most honest thing that we’ve done. When we got on a major label — I’m a product of a broken household, and I was signed when I was 16. The first guy I met, the A&R, was my dad’s age. So you get this dynamic of “I wanna make dad happy.” And then finally when I grew up and dad kicked me out of the house, I thought about my life. This record’s got a lot of my personal shit in it. The thing that happens when you cross 30 — life hits you in the face. Families change, relationships change. I had something to say. And Sandbox feels like — it’s very random musically, but I think we’ve always been that. We’ve made a lot more strong choices as a band to just say, what can we do where we’re not chasing some sort of major label expectation? And I think I’m really happy with the way the record’s turned out.

I feel like over the years you’ve changed the way you sing. On this record, I heard a few different approaches to the vocals, but none of them are the earliest thing you used to do.
The first record, I was listening to all the records that were popular in school. I come from a really lower middle class family. And CDs were like a luxury — they were like 17 bucks. So I was raised on the back seat night drives of friends and their music. And I think that informed the way I started singing, but now that I’ve just gotten a little bit more comfortable with my own voice, I’m going for just whatever it wants to be.

Was it Blink-182? Was that your inspiration?
Yeah, I feel like Blink and like Jimmy Eat World and that shit was like ringing like bells in our high school parking lots. And now that I’m a little older, it’s like maybe I’ve had the time to find myself.

Do you ever find yourself doing your old voice when you sing the old songs?
Oh, yeah. I make fun of it. What a dipshit. But it’s fun to make fun of that guy.

So these house party shows you’ve done have been another big part of the revival of the band. What do you like about that?
We were so disenchanted from playing state fairs and casinos to keep the lights on during those down years. The first thing we wanted was: I just wanna get eye level with an audience and connect. My favorite shows were like 150, 200-seaters. ‘Cause you could look at everybody and see if you were getting everybody off. It was this beautiful umbilical between you and the audience. And the house party tour was this wild sort of resignation to, okay, so we can either, as an independent artist putting out new music, enter the landscape of digital advertising and creator buys on TikTok to set up some false reality that this band is cool. Or we said, let’s just take the 50 grand Kroger grocers just gave us to play a corporate show and get a bus, a PA, a trailer. No video walls, no production bullshit. Let’s just play in front of some people that wanna see a free show.

And somebody told you it was the dumbest thing you could do?
The management we had at the time. So we left them and went with a genius, 29-year-old named Megan [Kraemer] who believed in this band so much. We never had anybody that managed us that actually believed in our band. They just believed in the money we could make. But she believes in this band and we’re like, man, this kid gives a lot more of a shit than we do. Let’s just follow her into this crazy drive. And it worked.

And you set up a whole platform for it, Playhouse.
Yeah. We’re gonna do this again. ‘Cause when we put out the RSVPs, it was the largest data grab the company had in their history. We had 800,000 RSVPs in 48 hours. And then we also had another 25,000 venues that went from a 50-seat single bedroom apartment to an 18,000-seat high school stadium that the teacher got permission from the campus to host shows. And the tool has become this idea called Playhouse where — you have all these big arenas, big stadiums, and now mom and pops have all been swallowed up by this undeclared monopoly. What about third spaces? I think about the independent artists out there that have an audience, but they can’t afford to play a show. They can’t afford to even get in the van. But what if they were able to reach out directly to their audience to say, “Hey, is there anybody who wants to come see us? If so, where?” And then: “Oh wow, we have a lot of fans in Des Moines, Iowa, and somebody wants us to play there and we can route a small four-show run and make direct income off of a ticket to a house instead of a venue that has so much overhead that it’s squeezing us out the door.” How is it a standard that if you’re in a band you’re fucked? It’s a very 1% game to get into a major label’s doors. So what if there’s a different way? We did a 30-person acoustic show for an artist in Pasadena. He made more money at that show than he and his band did selling out the Bowery Ballroom in New York City.

Geez.
Yeah. These are the times. So let’s get punk rock with this shit.

In your major label experience, you saw both sides of it. There was a moment when Jimmy Iovine really liked you guys, was pushing your singles. And then you’ve talked about 2012 when you played what turned out to be your previous album, Kids in the Street, and you played it for the label and you really felt there was indifference. Was it Jimmy’s “rock is dead” thing at the time?
Jimmy always gave me good face. But it wasn’t even “rock’s dead.” It was just, “This is how we do records here.” Songwriting by committee.

I remember they made Weezer work with a bunch of co-writers around that time.
I don’t know if they made them — it’s a choice. They make it strongly. You as an artist make that choice to say, cool, I’m gonna do what dad tells me. And I think there’s a sacrifice of your own integrity that happens when you do that. And of course it’s experimentation. I’m not saying that way is bad. I’m saying for me, it felt like — no, man, that’s not my wave.

So you never took any of those co-writing meetings?
I tried. It felt like I imagine what porn is like. You meet somebody on the day that apparently you’re gonna fuck ’em and they’re gonna get inside every bit of you. And you’re expected to show up with that ease of saying, “Cool, take me.” I remember I sat with a popular songwriter guy, and he’s like, “Cool, what’s going on with you, man?” Immediately trying to get in my head. And I said something about a hamburger. He’s like, “Ah, that’s it. Let’s write about hamburgers.” I was like, fuck me, man.

Did you walk out?
No. I think I was too nervous. I left and I was like, I’m never doing this again. This is awful. This is soulless.

I have some ancient gossip from that era. You can feel free to not comment, but supposedly you went on a few dates with Taylor Swift and maybe she wrote a song about you. Clear it up please.
No, we met because we were gonna honor her at some CMT thing and I played her my record. That’s how rumors get awesome.

So there’s just zero truth to that, not even one date?
Absolutely. But I love the lore.

You just squashed the lore.
Yeah, no lore. I’m not that cool.

And now you’ve missed your chance.
Yeah. In 2012, I was also outta my mind, man. You would’ve sat with me and been like, dude, how many mushrooms did this guy have last summer?

Was it shrooms or what was going on there?
Oh yeah. No, I just had my last weekend, man. It was fun. That’s what late twenties are for.

You’re also a good actor. That could have been your full-time career, but it seems like something you dip in and out of. Was that ever a thought that you might just do that?
I like it a lot. I tried to do it. For me it was like, I gotta get out of this band, I gotta make my own mark. I’ve been working on a musical for the last eight years.

Oh really?
Yeah. We’re putting that production together. I’m excited to star in that thing. That’s gonna be where I really get my chops together.

Can you say what the story is?
It’s just about self-love, about finding yourself and not being dependent on someone else to define that for you.

And do you imagine Broadway?
No, I wanna make it a movie. I want it to be… kind of Rocky Horror.

That’s fun.
It’s called Shit Show.

Any particular memories of acting in The House Bunny?
Yeah. I remember Emma Stone was smoking like a pack a day, man, and she had this raspy, raspy voice.

She smoked?
Yeah. It was great. She was like a dame. Even then, you could just tell — she was beaming on set. Even against Anna Faris, who was living that character. It was a really great experience. It was me and Colin Hanks were the only guy principals in it, so I was basically running errands to [craft services], getting girls snacks. It was fun.

What do you remember about writing “It Ends Tonight”?
I remember being in the bowels of some Atlanta hotel for $48 a night that I ended up getting bedbugs from. And we had this really masochistic approach to punishing ourselves to get a record out at that time. We were running outta money. So our last sort of Hail Mary was to stay in Atlanta for eight weeks and just practice the songs we had written. And my roommate was our guitar tech and he was a dark spirit. And I remember wanting to kill him. Not really, but I remember the song is about wanting to kill your friend. Not really a love song. Somehow it became that, through the romance of the musical dressing. But it was inspired out of just seething hatred.