Photo by Mark Jaworski



By Brett Leader, July 22, 2014

New Jersey acoustic pop-punks, The Front Bottoms , have had a wild run since they formed in 2007. After his first year in college, Brian Sella (vocals/guitar) formed the band with childhood friend Matt Uychich (drums) and has been touring relentlessly ever since, gaining plenty of critical praise along the way. Their 2013 sophomore LP,, was even ranked #4 on last year’s Top 20 Albums of the Year by NPR’s All Songs Considered.Currently on tour with Say Anything, You Blew It! and the So So Glos, The Front Bottoms are now rounded out by Tom Warren (bass) and Ciaran O’Donnel (keys/trumpet/guitar). The, named after Uychich‘s grandmother, was released in June and features new recordings of unreleased fan favorites. I had the pleasure of speaking with Sella about the problem with getting offered drugs from fans, their upcoming rap split EP, and what it’s like to always be on tour. As Sella explains, they “like to keep it freaky.” Read on for our interview and catch them tonight at the Regency Ballroom in San Francisco.Brian Sella: We’re driving through the desert right now, so if it cuts out I apologize. The service is kind of weird. We’re driving from Salt Lake to Seattle right now.No, Matt’s driving. Safety first.It’s been fantastic. All of the shows have been super positive -- a lot of people coming out. All of the bands on the tour are awesome. It’s a lot of fun.We have more stage props. We've been having everyone come on stage at the end of “Twin Size Mattress” - our last song - just going crazy and having a good time. We have a sound guy now, Carson. We’ve never brought a sound guy out before, so that’s a really nice thing to have.I think they were good songs and I don’t think they got a proper release, really. Now we’re working with Tom and Ciaran and they’re very good musicians, so it was kind of like, “Let’s see what we can do with these old songs. Maybe we can make them sexier than they were before and give people the opportunity to purchase them.” It was a nice opportunity to go back and relearn them. Some of them we chose by request. Some of them we already knew how to play.I think we’ll probably do my grandma next and then so on and so forth after that. The next thing we put out is not going to be another EP of old songs. It’s probably going to be new material – a new album. After that, maybe if we have some downtime, we can go back and learn some more old songs and then that will be the second one. It could be Ciaran’s grandmother, or maybe Tom’s grandmother, or maybe some other old lady we find and all fall in love with.Hell yeah, dude. They were a huge inspiration for us - at least for me and Matt. We both went to see Say Anything a few times before we started the band. Those first couple of Say Anything albums were really something that inspired me to be a rock star. When Max asked me to sing on the new album that was a pretty big trip for me.We’re going to put out a split EP in the fall with this rapper named GDP from Jersey. He’s a fantastic lyricist. I think it will be very positive. He’s in a project called #$ (Hash Money) – it’s him and this DJ called Space Jesus . Tomorrow we’re going to meet up with him in Seattle. He’s going to come to all of the shows in California. It’s all about keeping things freaky. It keeps things interesting.Drugs. A lot of drugs.All of them!Any that we can get our hands on: the harder, the better. No, I’m just kidding. It’s intense to be on the road. This has been a month and a half stretch. Before this we were in Europe. We go home for like two weeks and then we go back to the UK. I think the fact that we all really do get along with each other, genuinely, plays a big part. I couldn’t imagine spending so much time with people that I wasn’t really friendly with… but also drugs, dude.That’s not true. That’s definitely not true!Listen. This is why I can’t talk about things like that. This is what people do: The other day, this kid’s like, “Yeah I was outside and you smoked weed with my friend.” And I’m like, “No I didn’t. I didn’t smoke weed with anyone outside at that point in time.” But I’ve got this 16 year old kid coming up to me and being like, “Yeah you smoked a blunt with my friend! You want to smoke this blunt?” I’m just like, “No! No!”

Photo by Mark Jaworski

I just like to relax. I like to hang out with my girlfriend. I like to hang out with my friends at home that I never really get to see. I love to ride my motorcycle around. I like to make music. I don’t really get the opportunity to do that on the road so much. When I’m home I can kind of just kind of sit in my room for hours and strum a guitar and let ideasdevelop, which is probably my favorite thing about being home. I love seeing my family, but when I’m home for more than two weeks at a time, I do start to get a little stir-crazy, so it’s good to have the opportunity to be able to go out and have adventures across the country and make friends that I’m excited to see when I roll through wherever we are. It’s a nice balance.Hey man, sorry about that. The desert is a fierce place.Oh, God help me.I just kind of get a lot inspiration, lyrically, and then when I go back home I’ll just sit down and play like three chords and see if the lyrics work. Then get together with the boys and try to make it more of a structured song. So far thankfully, it’s come together pretty naturally. I don’t like to spend too much time on one thing, so if it doesn’t come along quickly a lot of times those ideas go to the backburner, but they’re always around for next time.I think they go hand in hand because you are trying to tell a story, or at least I am with these songs. You take experiences from real life – things that have happened to you and to your friends and to their friends – the stories that you’ve heard. All of those, kind of hand in hand. A lot of it is first person experiences that we’ve had on the road. There is a lot of storytelling involved in the songs and I think that is important. You want to make sure people have a good story.Just being on the road basically full-time is a pretty crazy experience – a pretty wild way to live your life. I just got an apartment back in Jersey. I didn’t really have a solid place to stay up until then, so I’ve finally got a place to crash. It’s been an interesting way to live – just the experiences that come along with like, “I’m not going to wake up and go to work today. I’m going to wake up and try to write a song” and with that all of these other things come with it. I think just the experience of living the way that we’ve chosen to live is pretty inspiring, in terms of writing music.I would just like to expand. I would like to become a better guitar player maybe. I would definitely like to try to become a better singer and I would like to keep it freaky like the way that we keep it freaky. I don’t want song structure to get in the way of a cool idea. I want to keep making things that maybe when people first listen to it they’re like, “What the hell is this?” but then as they listen to it, it kind of grows on them and becomes something that’s a part of them. I would like to hold up the name of the Front Bottoms and make sure that as many people hear about the Front Bottoms as possible.