Silverstein. Photo Credit: Anna Lee

For the members of Canadian post-hardcore outfit Silverstein, they are spending their summer once again in a familiar place, known as the Vans Warped Tour. They are promoting their latest album I Am Alive in Everything I Touch and are taking part on their sixth time around on this well documented tour.

Vocalist Shane Told shares his thoughts on the tour. “We did it two years ago. It’s a hard tour. It’s very, very hot and it’s a lot of dust and dirt and moving stuff around. Very far distances between things and you have to push gear and walk and everything, so it’s very grueling. It’s amazing we are able to do it every day and they move the entire festival, every single part of it setting it up and it’s always on time. It’s amazing they’re able to do that.”

Their trip out west to the first date in Pomona, CA from their homebase of Toronto, ON went quite smoothly. Being veterans of the road, they understood what they were encountering. “It was good,” he said, about their journey. “We took our time. We did two shows on the way out in Des Moines, IA and Omaha, NE, and we had a couple of days off in Denver and Las Vegas just to relax a little bit. We know what we’re getting into.”

Silverstein has celebrated 15 years of existence, which is a milestone within itself. After releasing their eighth full length recording, four EPs and one live album, Told talked about what makes their band work internally and externally.

“None of us have kids or anything, so I guess that helps. We don’t know how other bands work. This is the band we’re in, but we know we treat each other with respect and genuinely like each other and like each other’s company. We know how to stay out each other’s way when people aren’t in the best moods. We’ve always done that and musically, we have a lot of diversity within our music so that helps. We don’t get bored of what we do musically. We all have the same kinds of goals, so it helps.”

He also shared his thoughts on 15 years of memories within his time with the band. “It’s all a blur. It’s funny too because now at 15 years and there’s certain times when stuff feels like it just happened. Then I’ll think back and go ‘whoa that was eight or nine years ago!’ Then some stuff that happened just the other day, and I won’t remember. It’s really weird the way you remember things are sometimes different than how they were. That’s always an interesting part of it. We have so many great memories and we made so many great friends. We’re really proud we’ve done it this long and enjoyed it this long. We’re not going through the motions like you see some bands just totally jaded. We still genuinely love music, Warped Tour, festivals and love hanging out. It really feels good.”

Legend has said for the bands being on the Vans Warped Tour is hard work under extreme weather conditions on various stops along the way. But Told and the Silverstein guys knew from past experience what to expect and were able to dive in head first without any real surprises.

“It’s nice because you know what to expect going in. One of the amazing things is how little the tour has changed. Literally the first time we did it in 2004, it’s all the same people, a lot of same venues and the way they run it, the set times being you don’t know what time you’re playing until the morning…plus it’s the same it’s always been. The familiarity is really nice coming in to it, but at the same time we sort of know how we’re going to feel halfway through. The sun’s beating down and we’re like ‘oh man…we still have three more weeks of this!’ There’s always that…I don’t want to say breaking point but there’s always that moment where it’s like ‘oh man we know what we’re getting into’ that could make it harder too.”

Told shares who he is looking forward to seeing while he’s on the tour. “We have so many friends on this tour. Walking around yesterday, it’s the first day, it’s like ‘hey man! Hey man…hey man…’ everywhere you go. Some of our friends like Beartooth and there’s this new band called As It Is from the UK. They’re a really good new band and we’ve done some shows with them recently. Those are some newer band we should go check out.”

A 20 year anniversary for Silverstein is around the corner and another milestone for them. While Told denies ever thinking about it, some ideas began floating about.

“We have not thought about it. I know it’s going to come up fast. It’s amazing how fast these things go by.“

“We’ll get a cake. We love cake so much that any excuse we have to buy one…we’ll buy one – anyone’s birthday, our guitar tech gets a girlfriend [and] we’ll buy them a cake. We did one for our millionth Facebook Like! We’re ridiculous but…”

Ironically, no songs about cake were ever written, but another one about food belonging to another band member did get mentioned.

“We did write a song about stealing Bill’s [Hamilton, bass] food from the bus once, because he’s got the best food. It’s called “See Ya Bill” [on 2012’s Short Songs]. It’s about seven seconds long. It might be about a vegan cake. I’m not sure specifically about the food items but he does have some good cake kicking around once in a while. Check it out. It’s on Spotify.”

By Rei Nishimoto