All American Rejects
All-American Rejects deliver their best album yet

Review By Matt Conner

When your first album hits platinum status and the follow-up’s sales double that, it’s an understatement to say the pressure is on. Yet music industry lore would have us believe it’s normally the record label placing such expectations on the band to sell records and create hits. For the All-American Rejects, that’s not quite true.

“Pressure is good for us,” says lead guitarist and band co-founder Nick Wheeler of the band’s latest effort, When the World Comes Down. “This time around, it was us putting the pressure on ourselves. That was different than the last album because everyone else was telling us we weren’t done. ‘Keep writing and write new songs.’ That’s what they said on the last one. But this time it was us. People were telling us we were done, but we didn’t think so. And ultimately, I don’t think we did anything wrong this time. We made a great record and it’s definitely our best yet and it took that pressure to make it.”

For AAR, the desire to continually improve comes from the lack of concentration they’ve observed in other bands.

“I’ve seen some bands — some big bands — come out with a new album and it’s not good. Or the new single wasn’t good. And you end up thinking, ‘Why didn’t people tell them? Why’d you let them do that to themselves?’ This time around, I think some people have some fear that they were putting too much trust in us to do what we do since had the success. But for us, we didn’t think it was ready and we wanted to go back in and do it ourselves.”
That “going back” is hard for a band constantly on the move. While trying to write When the World Comes Down, the All-American Rejects headlined a cross-country tour, released a live DVD, recorded videos and even designed their own Pepsi can. As Wheeler explains, the inspiration came in bursts as the band found open dates in its tour schedule.

“Making this album was difficult and interesting,” explains Wheeler. “We couldn’t stay anywhere for more than two weeks to get this done. So in the time we had, we would take writing excursions everywhere — to the mountains in Georgia, to Vancouver, to New Orleans. We even just got on a bus for two weeks and drove across the country. We didn’t know what we were doing. We were just writing songs and trying not to look back. We were just doing it for us again, whatever that might be.”
At first, When The World seemed to come together quite easily. Early sessions found the band working well with producer Eric Valentine (Queens of the Stone Age, Good Charlotte) — whom Wheeler says “is not a slave driver, but makes you want to work hard and not give up after eight hours.” But after an album’s worth of songs were finished, the Oklahoma four-piece still felt something was amiss. Enter the tour bus.

“We had went in and did preproduction on several songs,” says Wheeler. “But after four months and 10 or 12 songs, we didn’t think we had the record done yet. So we pressed pause and went on a bus and just wrote. We just wanted to get a hold of ourselves and get our heads straight and just do what we needed to do. We came up with another song or two and came back to the studio and wrapped it up after another month.”

The postponement was worth the effort, says Wheeler, who believes the new disc is truly the band’s best yet. It’s a labor of love and something the band will treasure regardless of its success.