Warped Tour:Interview with A Cursive Memory
Written by Francesca Wahking
Photos by Francesca Wahking
Date: September 30, 2008
This is A Cursive Memory’s first year performing at Warped Tour. The band, who consists of Colin Baylen, Mark Borst-Smith, Shaun Profeta and Dillan Wheeler, formed in 2006 and is signed to Vagrant records. They filmed a music video for their first single, Everything, and put it on the website MySpace as well as YouTube. The video was shot in Los Angeles, where the band followed the paparazzi around getting shots of celebrities with them lipsynching in the background. Their debut album, Changes, came out last February.



During Warped Tour, Colin Baylen came and chatted with Francesca Wahking to discuss Bandarazzi and his love for Blink-182.

Band's website: myspace.com/acursivememory



Muted Magazine: How did the band get together?

Colin: There’s four members now, initially there were different four members. Three out of the four of us are still in the band. That’s me, mark and shaun, there was one member change at one point and then Dillan are drummer was active I think last year. But me, mark and shaun got together in the summer after 7th grade going into 8th grade. We all loved Blink-182 and Tom Delonge is right over there right now so that is making this very weird. It’s very surreal but no worries.

We all loved Blink and that was a common thing among us so we started playing birthday party and started covering some of their songs and then we started writing our own songs. We were together through out high school and came to our senior year. We all had different plans but then we got a record deal with Vagrant Records and we decided to do this for now.

MM: Is Warped tour everything you expected it to be?

Colin: It’s very different than I expected. There are elements that are probably what I expected. I knew it was going to be completely hot. I knew that like the walks and moving our equipment around was going to be completely brutal but I didn’t know it was going to be fun as it was. We were kind of like “uh oh this tour is going to be hard to jump into” like right out the gates but we’ve met so many people. I’ve met so many of my idols. I’ve like talked to Tom (Delonge) for like 10 seconds one time it was really crazy. I’ve met so many people like Andrew McMahon and William the singer of the Academy is… Not only that but having people know who your band is it’s a sort of weird complex.

MM: Was it hard to be in a band while you guys were in high school?

Colin: It was difficult in some forms. It was harder to stay focused in high school. Some of us got good grades and some of the other members didn’t. It ended up working out so it didn’t matter. I think, for example, spring of last year, we played a sold out show with hello good bye and boys like girls at the Anaheim house of blues on the night of our prom. It was really give and take sometimes but it was a really interesting experience.

MM: Was it hard missing your senior prom?

Colin: [laughs] MM: Well prom is supposed to be important for Americans.

Colin: Well… Who gets to do what we did?

MM: So what’s the craziest thing you’ve done while on tour?

Colin: This was last night getting into Canada. On the last tour we did we spent a significant amount of time in New Mexico searching for fireworks that we could light off because it’s legal there. I also have a friend named Andy between the two of us we spent a near $500-$600 on fireworks between 5 people. And all these fireworks were located in our shower we’d take it out on different occasions on tour. We were going to use them on Warped Tour. One of the main things is that they say, “No fireworks. That’s the easiest way to get kicked off the tour.” So we just left them in the shower to take them out whenever. We get to the border last night, the border patrol was going through the RV in front of us of Automatic Love letter. So we look at our shower, and we have so many fireworks. I figured that we should just tell that border patrol that we had them and that would be o.k. but everyone else figured we should just get rid of them and not have to worry about it. We literally take 100-200 pounds of fireworks and pack this trash can. The head border patrol man was smoking a cigarette and walked over to the trash can where we put all the fireworks and he’s about to put out the cigarette in the trash can when he sees all these fireworks and we got yelled at pretty hard for that.

MM: I found out about Bandarazzi and I was wondering who came up with it?

Colin: It was our idea and we were sitting down for ribs one day in Echo park (in California). We were just thinking, we wanted to do a video. People are becoming famous for coming up with different ways of doing things and one of the ways is like YouTube and MySpace and viral content. We were thinking “O.K. what’s more viral than celebrity news?” and how can we corporate that with who we are as a band. And we came up with the worst idea ever which ended up becoming a great music video, which was getting as many celebrities in our music video in a bootleg way as we possibly could.

MM: How hard was it to do all that?

It was very difficult. I’d say about 10% of the people that saw the video still to this day think we green screened it but it took 6 months. We were probably out 3 or 5 times a week for 4 or 5 hours a night. It was pretty brutal but it was worth it.

MM: Who was the hardest celebrity to film?

Colin: Hardest to get or who gave us the most crap?

MM: How about both?

Colin: O.K. the hardest to get was Janet Jackson or Jay Z both of those people are A list as possible we were really hard to get. We were within 10 feet with them a couple times but we could never get the right shot. I think they win that. As far as who was the most difficult with us was probably Kevin Connolly he plays Eric in Entourage. He kind of got fed up with what we were doing and thought it was really stupid. He seen the video since then and thought it was a pretty great video. So Cursive Memory: 1, Kevin Connolly: 0.

MM: For the second video do you think you have to go above and beyond what you’ve done already?

Colin: Actually we filmed the second video already. It’s very secretive. The last…

(Thus begins Colin's mini freakout. He is shocked that Tom Delonge is speaking to him and we have to turn our chairs so that he is no longer facing Tom Delonge during the interview)

Tom Delonge: Don’t be sexist or racist. You’ve got to be really careful.

Collin: I am. (he says to Tom Delonge)

This is why I like Warped Tour. [whispering]

MM: This is why I like Warped Tour too. [whispering]

Collin: Anyways…I’ve got to catch my breath for a second.

MM: Breathe…

Collin: So…We’ve just finished filming the second video. It’s kind of in the same vein as our first one but not at all at the same time. I can’t really say a lot at this time but it should be out very soon.

MM: Have you ever though of like crashing a band interview for a video?

Collin: An interview-razzi. There you go. That’s great actually. No actually someone had similar idea to that, it’s just as funny. I’m not going to remember but that’s a great idea. You should do that.

MM: I should do that. That would be fun. So have any of the celebrities ever try to contact you afterwards?

Collin: No one ever contacted us. Do you mean get into trouble? Some way we didn’t get into any trouble at all. We kind of spinned it like TNZ and Perez Hilton. They have no problems. We weren’t like staying outside their house or taking pictures of their babies. We had an innocent about it and we didn’t portray and nobody was different than any other person in the video…we were just having a lot of fun which is what are band is about.

MM: I heard that Jenna Fischer who plays Pam Beasley in the Office contacted you.

Collin: She loved it. She really liked the video and apparently she liked the song too. We were her Myspace song for awhile which was really cool. We all like that show so it was really cool. If it was Kate from Lost’s MySpace it would have been more of a hit for me but for Mark, Shaun and Philip would definitely go for Pam Beasley.

MM: Anything else you want to say to your fans?

Collin: Look out for the next video.