Interview: Christian McAlhaney Discusses Upcoming When We Were Young Set, Nearly Twenty Years of "Never Take Friendship Personal"
Anberlin is getting ready to take the stage at this year’s When We Were Young Festival, where they will perform their sophomore album Never Take Friendship Personal from front to back. This band has been around for over twenty-years, seamlessly fluctuating through various rock subgenres, fitting on bills with acts ranging from emo saviors to radio-friendly alternative rock.
Ahead of their set, we sat down over Zoom with rhythm guitarist Christian McAlhaney to discuss the legacy of Never Take Friendship Personal, was it was like learning material that he’d never played before, who they’re looking forward to seeing at the festival, and Matty Mullins taking over the mantle of touring lead vocalist. Check out our interview below. Please note that the interview has been edited, solely for the purposes of clarity and length.
Main Photo: Christian McAlhaney of Anberlin performing in Chicago, IL // Main Photo Credit: Jared Stossel for Shameless SF
You’ll be playing Never Take Friendship Personal from front to back at this year’s When We Were Young Festival. This album came out in February 2005, which means that it’s nineteen years old. You guys have eight studio albums, and you’ve been going strong since 2003. Given the age of the album how does it feel to look back on the material nineteen years later, and see that there is still a hunger for songs on this record from audiences?
So a little backstory here. I joined the band in 2007. I was previously in a band called Acceptance, and we had an opportunity to tour with Anberlin when they released this record in 2005. That tour was Anberlin, Saosin, Acceptance, Codeseven, and Terminal on a full U.S. tour. I had know the Anberlin dudes really early on in their career. We were kind of like brother bands on opposite sides of the country (Acceptance is from Seattle, Anberlin is from Florida), but we were trying to do similar sounds. So I knew them for a long time and I admired what they were able to do.
You know, if you had someone different than Stephen [Christian] at the time singing for Anberlin, it would almost come across as like “butt rock”, right? Because it’s kinda riffy, but Stephen has such a unique voice that it transcended any kind of genre, so I was always a really big fan of the sound, and a really big fan of the dudes. Honestly, I think you could talk to any of the band’s that are playing this weekend, I think most of them would be pretty floored that they would be this far into their careers and still being able to play music. If you asked the other dudes in Anberlin, they would have been grateful to have recorded one or two records, let alone [have] a twenty-year career.
We’re just super thrilled to still be able to do this, that the fan base still cares, and that the music is still relevant, The songs we wrote back in the day are not embarassing; if anything, they’re things that we’re still very proud of.
I listened to the record the other day, and there are songs on there that still absolutely rip and hold up almost twenty years later. You said something really interesting about Stephen having such a unique voice and how, for lack of a better term, fall into the “butt rock” territory. But you hear “The Feel Good Drag” and that makes sense; if you didn’t have Stephen’s voice, it fits in really well on alternative rock radio. But because he’s singing in it and the band has the dynamic that you do, it can fit on something like Warped. Fascinating to think about.
I think Anberlin has always done a good job with “dancing between the lines” [of genre]. I think Never Take Friendship Personal was their first step into that territory. Blueprints [for the Black Market, their debut] was still a pretty straight forward rock and roll record. But I feel like on Never Take Friendship Personal, they started to introduce new genres. Songs like “Symphony of Blasé” and the last track “Dance, Dance Christa Paffgen”; these are songs that are outside of the normal realm of “hey we’re gonna play some rock.” They were defining their sound even more. I really like Anberlin because we’re not pigeonholed into one sound, and we can do whatever we want. We can write super heavy stuff, we can write acoustic stuff. We’ve already done that in our back catalog; we have the history. So it’s not out of left field, where we’re doing a turn and our fans will go, “what are they doing?” We’ve always been experimental, and on every record, we just try different things as well as incorporate things we’ve done in the past.
I think the first time I ever saw you guys was at the Live 105 BFD Festival in Mountain View. So that was The Offspring, but you also had a lot of radio-friendly alternative rock bands play with you, but then you’d go on tour with Yellowcard a few years later, or play all summer on Warped Tour. You’ve always tread the line between those rock subgenres very well.
A chameleon, if you will.
You have some incredible records in your discography, Cities being a favorite of mine. Why Never Take Friendship Personal over any other?
You know, like you said, it’s nineteen and we’re a few months away from it turning twenty. That’s a big deal these days. It’s like your high school reunion - you have your ten year reunion and your twenty year reunion, but Anberlin’s never done anything like a ten year…anything. I think we were broken up when most of the ten year anniversary was happening. It’s a big deal; two decades worth of a career to celebrate. And I think When We Were Young was asking people, “hey, would you want to play this record?” It wouldn’t make sense for us to play Cities, since we’re on the cusp of the birthday for Never Take Friendship Personal. I think that makes the most sense.
The concept of the festival this year has bands playing albums from start to finish, which means rehearsals to revisit older material that hasn’t been played in years. Is there any song from the album that has surprised you upon revisiting it all these years later? Are there any that caused more of a challenge when trying to relearn it as a band, particularly given that you weren’t in the band at the time of release?
It’s funny you ask that. During COVID, every artist was kinda flailing because the business was shut down. No one could tour, a lot of people weren’t even consuming music, it was kind of pointless to be releasing records during that time. So we did livestreams and the thing that we chose to do was start at the beginning of our discography, and livestream [a performance] of that full record in the hopes that we wouldn’t get all the way through our discography. Sadly, we did [laughs] since that’s how long COVID lasted.
We were doing it every couple of months, going up to this studio in Orlando where we’d shoot it and do the livestream. Like I said, I had joined the band during Cities, right when it was released. There was a lot of prior catalog that I had never learned because we were never playing those songs, right? Certain songs on Blueprints, certain songs on Never Take. When we got around to learning the songs to do these livestreams, I thought, “I’m such a lazy member, I’ve never taken the time to go through these, ah I should probably learn this entire discography!” It was fascinating to run through stuff that we had truly never played.
Every band releases a record, but it’s rare that - unless it’s your first record, you’re probably going to play every song on that first record. Every subsequent record, though, your set times are always different, so you’ve gotta pick. When you’ve got eight records and an hour long to play, it’s like, how do you pick what to play? A lot of stuff falls by the wayside. You know what your fan favorites are, you know what the band favorites are, so you have to pick.
There’s a lot of songs that are the “stepchild”, if you will, so it was just fascinating for me to run through and learn stuff that I’d never played. As a band, there would be times where we’d go, “why aren’t we playing some of these songs?” Some of them made sense, but others we were like, “oh, this would be cool to throw into the set!”
You’ve had Matty Mullins of Memphis May Fire join you as your live lead vocalist, with Stephen Christian taking an indefinite hiatus from touring. This is a bit unusual for a band to do, but Matty has such a powerful voice and stage presence. How has the reception been with Matty stepping into the spotlight of Anberlin?
I think the reception from the people that have actually taken the time to listen to it or taken the time to come and see us - we just got off a three-month long tour - is good. I talk to fans every night - like I said, Stephen has a very unique voice to him, and I understand that, a lot of times, singers are the very defining thing of a band. That’s what people connect to; it’s the person that writes the lyrics, it’s the person that’s singing. That song [they sang] might have saved your life, so it’s not lost on us that it’s a difficult transition for people to accept someone else to come in and sing.
Anybody who I talk to after a show would say something like, “hey, I came in super skeptical, but Matty absolutely killed it.” He’s not trying to replace Stephen, but it was basically a way to move forward other than breaking up again. It’s honestly been a really fun experience and a really cool story. Matty grew up listening to Anberlin, you know, singing into a spoon to Anberlin songs, so it’s really cool in that sense when you hear him say it onstage. It’s like, “hey you guys are all Anberlin fans? I’m the same as you are. This is such a dream come true for me.”
It was Stephen that facilitated it all; he’s the one that reached out to Matty and said “hey I think I need to step back from touring”. We’ve been writing the script as we go; I think it’s been awesome. We don’t really know what the future holds, one way or another, but Matty’s on tour right now with Memphis May Fire. We haven’t even got a chance to rehearse with him [for When We Were Young], but we just got off tour with him for three months so it’s gonna be fine.
The band’s gonna rehearse here behind me - I converted my garage into a studio. We’ve already played all of these songs before, but now it’s just making sure that the rig’s running correctly, the playback is working correctly, everybody’s ears are working and making sure we don’t sound like a bunch of jackasses. But I think it’s gonna be great; I’m super excited.
When We Were Young is essentially a larger-scale version of the Vans Warped Tour, with all of the bands that fans of this music grew up loving, coming together in one place. Given that it’s a “family reunion” of sorts, are there any sets you’re most looking forward to checking out during the day?
Like you said, it’s like a reunion. With something like Warped Tour, they always called it the “punk rock summer camp”. It is a bigger version of that, in the sense that you’ve got a lot of these kinds of “headliner acts”, your My Chems and Fall Out Boys that are massive now. Those bands had played Warped Tour before, but as they were rising into this arena superstardom. To have multiple of these sized bands all being on one festival is a pretty big deal.
I just like running into any of our friends. Unfortunately, to date ourselves, this band has been around for over twenty years, and I’ve been doing this since 1998. I’ve known a lot of these guys for a long time. I’ve toured with a lot of these bands, so its fun to surprise someone and be side stage. They can turn around and go “oh my god, hey!” As long as our sets aren’t overlapping. We’re really close with Bayside, we just got off tour with Armor for Sleep, and we shared a bus with them. I’d really love to see them.
I could name probably seventy-five percent of the bands, and they’re all made of people that I know very well. Taking Back Sunday are such good friends, we’ve toured with The Maine dudes - it’s a microcosm of what was already a very small scene. A lot of these bands have all toured together their entire careers.
