The godfathers of pop punk New Found Glory will be heading to Australia this August for a very special 20 Years of Pop Punk Anniversary tour. To celebrate two decades as a band, New Found Glory will be playing two classic albums in full each night for an evening of nostalgia and infectious punk anthems.

We chatted to New Found Glory guitarist Chad Gilbert about what to expect on the upcoming tour, re-learning over twenty years of material and performing songs for the first time ever live.

Upside: So, let’s jump straight into it and into the obvious questions. It’s been 20 years with New Found Glory, you’ve spent longer in this band than you have out of it, how does it feel? Is it good fun and awesome to reflect on it or is each interview making you feel old?

Chad: Not at all, the great thing about it is we’re able to be a band for 20 years and still have this feeling that we’re just getting started. We still have that same energy and excitement with this band than we did when we were younger.

When you’re younger you’re worried about where this band is going to take you, and then you get there and you’re like ‘oh this is what it is?’ and you love it in an entirely different way. You have security in this band after having loyal fans for so long. You can have more fun with the creative aspects and the touring, this is why we can play 6 whole albums on this tour cycle because our fans like different albums for different reasons.

Upside: How did you go learning and remembering the songs, you learnt over 6 albums that were mostly over 10 years old and some of them you must have not touched in nearly 20 years right?

Chad: I set up a little amp in my living room, pulled up all our records on Spotify and went through and listened. The hardest songs are more of the later ones, Nothing Gold Can Stay, self-titled and Sticks And Stones were the easiest ones, Catalyst, Not without A Fight and Coming Home were the harder ones to remember. You can remember the stuff you did early on, but in the middle years you’re like ‘what was I doing then?’.

Upside: Do the songs and lyrical content hold up now that you go back and learn and remember them, or do you sometimes think ‘what was I thinking back then?’

Chad: I don’t listen to the lyrics of ‘Boy Crazy’ and feel the same way. It came out 20 years ago and I absolutely do not relate to the lyrics of ‘Boy Crazy’ that were written when we were juniors in high school. But that doesn’t mean I don’t think they still relate to people that are that age. I think it’s a good song for younger fans who are just getting into it, maybe they’re 18 and in high school, they can relate to that song the same way we did when we were in high school.

The best way to describe it is like when you look through an old photo album of when you were a teenager and you think ‘oh that was a really cool time and I loved that’, you might not look the same or act the same but that was a really fun time and I appreciate that time in my life. That’s how it is when we play these songs.

The New Found Glory 20th Anniversary Tour starts on Tuesday, 8th August.

For complete tour and ticketing information, visit:
livenation.com.au