Yellowcard brings '90s rock, nostalgia to Gilford this July

GILFORD — The pop-punk band Yellowcard is coming in July to open the show for Third Eye Blind, making for a fun-filled trip down musical memory lane.

“Having an audience full of '90s kids that are now my age coming to see a show, I really want to showcase that side of our band for Third Eye Blind fans,” Ryan Key, lead singer of Yellowcard, said in an interview. “We’re excited about doing a bit of a different setlist and pulling all of those influences in.”

The concert is set for Thursday, July 11, at BankNH Pavilion. Tickets for the event are still available. 

Yellowcard, which finds its origins in Jacksonville, Florida, was formed in the 1990s by students from Douglas Anderson School of the Arts and were one of the bands to define the post-Nirvana era of punk music that took the country by storm.

Third Eye Blind, another titan of late 1990s and early 2000s rock ‘n’ roll, selected Yellowcard to come with them on this summer's nationwide tour.

“I’m not sure if there were 50 bands in line ahead of us and they all said 'no,' and so we got picked or if they just said, ‘Yellowcard is the band,’ I really don’t know,” he said. “We just got a phone call.”

Key, who cites Nirvana and Third Eye Blind among his greatest artistic influences, said after Yellowcard broke up in 2016, seemingly for good, he didn’t expect to ever play professionally together again. But now that they’re back, the band is selling out concerts across the country, sometimes achieving six or seven times the number of tickets sales than in previous years in the same markets.

“I wish I knew how or why, but I’m very grateful — we all are,” Key said. “It’s safe to say that the band is bigger than we’ve ever been in our whole career.”

Looking back on a career marked by over 20 years of smashing success, Key said his roots in Jacksonville are a major contributing factor. 

“There’s a strong music scene here in Jacksonville, there always has been. A lot of very successful artists have come out of Jacksonville for many decades, and particularly I think in rock 'n' roll or whatever sub-genre of it,” he said. “I grew up a '90s kid, Nirvana 'Nevermind' came out when I was 11 years old and it changed my life, I’d never heard anything like it.”

Growing up in Jacksonville, Key was exposed to punk rock and rock ‘n’ roll at an early age and said those influences informed his musical style and his writing.

“I was a pop music kid, as a little kid I got all of my music from MTV or the radio. I didn’t grow up in a household that was spinning Beatles music all the time, I had to kind of find my own music and I had to find it through kind of the mainstream outlets,” he said. “I’m very grateful [Nirvana] got so popular because it really opened my eyes to what rock 'n' roll really means and obviously just kind of changed the face of popular music as the world knew it that year and the couple of years following while they were kind of on top of the mountain.”

Key said Lakes Region residents and visitors who come out to the show, especially those in Generation X who grew up with the music of MTV in the 1990s, will be up for a huge shot of nostalgia the whole night through. 

“I love [Third Eye Blind’s self-titled 1997 album], I cannot believe we’re going on tour with them and I think we, as a band, are taking this opportunity with our setlist this summer to lean a little bit more into some of that '90s trending music that we’ve written and recorded on some of our later records,” he said. “This summer the show is much more mid-tempo and flowy, kind of rock 'n' roll. We have a really cool production planned, so I think it’s going to be a little less running around and getting in the crowd's face and a little more performance-based, if that makes sense.”

The shift back into '90s-style rock ‘n’ roll was in part motivated by the band breaking up, Key said. Toward the end of their first run, they went back to what they knew and loved since the beginning.

“Later in our career, on our last couple of records, before we broke up for what we thought was going to be for the rest of our lives, we really leaned hard into our '90s kids' hearts,” he said. 

But even on some of their more varied recordings, the band always kept a flavor of that 1990s style present.

“If you listen to Yellowcard’s music, that I’ve been a part of writing, I think you can hear everything I just said across our catalog. Most of our records do lean more into the faster, more melodic pop, pop-punk genre, but I think even on those records you can hear some of that '90s alternative influence,” he said. 

Key said young people who love Yellowcard’s music and hope to make a career out of performing in their own right should practice hard and become undeniably great.

“I think that it’s hard these days to give the best advice because I’ve been through it all, from cassettes to CDs, to illegal downloads to streaming, to TikTok — I’ve seen it all in my career,” he said. “The formula for us, when we really decided to take this seriously and quit our jobs and make a run at this, was live performance. I want to believe in my heart that that still matters. And I would tell a young band: Hone your craft, learn how to play your instruments, learn how to perform together. Develop an energy on stage that is uniquely yours, that people want to come back and see again.”