Billy: 'Our other members, (identical twins) Benji (lead vocals) and Joel (vocals/guitar), are in Ireland today. They're both Irish and we have the day off, so they wanted to take a trip there really bad.'
Home town...
Paul: 'We live in Washington DC. We actually live in the suburbs right outside of the city.'
Billy: 'Just normal suburban towns where regular kids grow up. Nowhere really exciting.'
Getting together...
Paul: 'Me and the twins, Benji and Joel, met in high school. A little after high school we decided that we needed another guitarist. Billy was in another band called Overflow.
The twins were really down and out on money and were practically homeless. They met Billy, who was kind enough to take them in. '
Billy: 'They said - we need to find a new apartment, can we crash at your place for two weeks? And I said of course you can. Ten months later they were talking about probably moving out soon. Pretty funny.'
Paul: 'I started the band when I was 15 and Billy and Joel were 16... and then we met Billy when he was about 17.'
Getting signed...
Billy: 'We were playing as many crappy places as we could find around where we live, then luckily we found this really nice guy from New York who wanted to manage us. He got us a bunch of really cool shows and we ended up opening for Lit in New York City. Apparently we did good because we got a record deal from it.'
Their style ...
Billy: 'People like to call us a million different things. Whatever you hear in the band is fine, but of course we get dubbed as a pop punk band all the time.
You can hear some punk influnces in a lot of the songs but at the same time, there's ballads on the album, there's even some hip hop inspired things, but for the main part, I'd say we're just a rock band.'
Their message...
Billy: 'A lot of bands write about girls or whatever and that's fine, we even have songs about girls ourselves, but most of the stories are just about kids growing up in a normal everyday situation ... going to high school, getting picked on because you don't play sports and you're not the cool kid at school.
We want other kids to hear this record and think - wow, they're doing this and they're in this band, and they've had a pretty tough life, so it can be alright for us too. The message is that we're normal kids doing whatever other normal kids do.'
What's next?
Billy: 'January/February, we're going to have a UK release (and all of Europe as well). We're going to do a full headline tour at home, all through October, then we're gonna head down to New Zealand and Australia. Hopefully we can come back here again at the end of the year.'