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Hi Doug. Great to see you. This is quite an extensive run through the UK, isn’t it? Amongst others, gigs in Hull, Birmingham, Bristol, Manchester, and then up here to Glasgow. That’s some hard accents for you to decipher right there! “Haha! Yes, but is the American accent difficult for you guys to decipher?” No, not at all. The only time we struggle is when we confuse the American and Canadian accents, and then end up offending everyone! “Gotcha! The differences between the Canadian accent and the American accent are subtle. Very subtle”. South Park captures the Canadian accent best! Now… this tour. It’s a co-headliner between Hoobastank and Buckcherry. Where did the idea for the tour come from? Same management? “No. If anything, it’s just because we know them. We’ve known them for years. They live and do all of their stuff in the same area as we do, just outside of LA. We’ve played so many shows together over the years, but I can’t remember who approached who about the tour. That’s how most tours happen; somebody knows someone in the other band and they ask”. Judging by a lot of posts on social media, the tour has been doing really well. Good attendances. “Yeah, it’s be great. Everyone has been happy. From city to city the reactions have been a little different, you can tell what ones are more of a Buckcherry crowd and what ones are more of a Hoobastank crowd”. 2018 was the anniversary of Hoobastank’s double platinum album ‘The Reason’, and the tour that followed saw the album played in its entirety. You’ve been mixing it up a bit on the dates in 2019 so far? “Yeah we still having been doing that sometimes on this tour. Technically, that album was released in December 2003 with the single coming out in 2004. Some of the shows have been the full album, but lately we’ve been mixing it up with a little mish-mash”. Would it be stating the obvious to say that particular album changed your life? “Absolutely. It was probably responsible for the fact that this is still my only job. We’ve been playing music professionally for almost twenty years, this is all I do, without that album, that’s probably not possible”. It’s frightening how massive the title track from the album is! Over 500,000,000 views on YouTube! “People tell me this. I don’t watch anything on YouTube, but yeah, people come up and tell me.. Dude, you have more views with that, than The Beatles! It might not be The Beatles, but they throw out all these iconic bands and ask me how does that feel? I’m like….wow, I guess that’s cool! To me, because I didn’t grow up with YouTube or streaming music, it doesn’t really affect me when people point out facts like these. Or how many followers we have on whatever platform, that doesn’t mean as much to me, personally, as how many albums we have sold. People that have grown up today see it differently”. From a musician’s point of view, 500,000,000 views is what, worth about a few hundred dollars? “You would think that, but a few years ago we approached our attorney asking; shouldn’t we be getting anything from this? Because we hadn’t been getting anything at all. We’ve had the runaround from YouTube, or whoever it was, saying that they hadn’t figured out how to pay us per view. They are trying to screw us over somehow”. Getting back to the track ‘The Reason’, it still resonates with a lot of people even today. That must be special, knowing that? “You can tell at shows. Like last night, for example; it was a good show, a bit of a mellow audience in general, but the second that song came on, everybody comes alive. It is what it is. Especially when I consider how informally I wrote that one. I remember literally being on my couch watching TV, going through some notes, there was nothing romantic about it! I wasn’t on a hilltop somewhere, I probably had a pizza next to me, scribbling away and it happened really quickly. When the other guys heard it, they felt there wasn’t much to add to it, very little picking at it, and those songs are rare! Usually we just take everything fucking apart! So when I think about how casually it was written, and how much it has done for us both musically and personally, it’s weird. I wrote this song 16/17 years ago, and here I am in another country and people are singing it back at me!” Talking about other countries, Hoobastank recently just played in South Korea? “Yeah, that was last summer. We get to go there every few years. It was a large Rock festival that we played, and it was awesome. Nine Inch Nails were there. Hoobastank headlined the festival six years ago, I think it was. It gets back to what you were saying earlier about the fact that you can still perform these songs all over the world. “Yeah, exactly. We always try and fit in South Asia, Japan, the Pacific Rim. We kind of pinch ourselves a little bit. Ten years ago we might have complained more, ‘oh, we’ve been out too long…’, that kind of thing, but we’ve been out for a month now and none of is in a hurry to go home. Even though I miss my kids, we all miss things about home, but we’re having so much fun. It’s also that thing of all of our friends are at home working! And we are out here having fun! The shows are great, but also, our headspace for the other 23 hours that we aren’t on stage has been really good. I don’t want to say that we’ve been humbled, but we feel very fortunate.” When I was watching ‘The Reason’ on YouTube, it was a bittersweet moment when it then moved onto the video for ‘Same Direction’ and Chester Bennington appeared. It’s still a hard one to accept, I think… Chester, as well as Chris Cornell. “Yeah. Obviously we knew Chester even outside of touring, he didn’t live far from us. We went to his house and stuff like that. Plus Linkin Park… three or four of those guys we went to high school with, they had been in my parents house. It was very much a neighbourhood thing. It happened around the time that other artists had passed away, like Scott Weiland and Chris Cornell, but Chester hit me the hardest. I had toured with Scott, knew who he was, he passed away, I was sad. Chris Cornell, to this day I am a huge fan. His passing affected me in a few ways. I was always looking forward to what he was going to put out. But with Chester, I lost someone that I knew. It wasn’t about the music, it felt like somebody close to the circle. He was the sweetest, nicest, seemingly happy musician that I’ve ever known. My older brother was their head of security for years, so he knew him even more than I did. I didn’t think that it affected me, but a few weeks later, it was still lingering and I realised that it had hit close to home. Interview: Dave S Live images – Dave Jamieson Hoobastank released their latest album ‘Push Pull’ in 2018, details of all forthcoming live dates can be found here. ]]>
