This summer, All Time Low have been commemorating 20 years together by revisiting some of their favorite venues around North America. Aptly titled the Forever Tour, the celebratory trek gave frontman Alex Gaskarth a revelation: his entire adulthood has been with the band.
"There's a lot of crazy things to fathom in getting your head around that concept," he tells GRAMMY.com. "We became the people we are today with the band being our primary focus. It doesn't always feel like it's been 20 years, but at the same time, it obviously feels like it's been 20 years. It's been my whole adult life, and it couldn't be anything else."
Gaskarth and his bandmates — guitarist Jack Barakat, drummer Rian Dawson and bassist Zack Merrick — started All Time Low while still in high school in 2003. For the first 10 years, they were mainstays of the pop-punk scene thanks to multiple Warped Tour stints and their 2008 classic, "Dear Maria, Count Me In." The next 10 years saw a commercial breakthrough, first with 2015's Future Hearts and then with their 2020 smash, "Monsters."
When thinking about the next decade of All Time Low, Gaskarth insists they've hit a new stride. Not only are they selling out some of the biggest venues of their career, but they're playing longer shows than ever. "We're those veteran athletes that, like, their bodies have been through so much punishment that now the scar tissue and cartilage buildup is holding them together," he says with a laugh.
Though the Forever Tour wrapped in their native Baltimore, Maryland on Aug. 24 — their biggest hometown show to date — All Time Low are continuing the celebration with The Forever Sessions Vol. 1. The nine-song project features re-recorded versions of some of their signature songs, including "Dear Maria" and beloved deep cut "Jasey Rae."
As the first release on their own label, Basement Noise Records, Gaskarth hints that The Forever Sessions Vol. 1 is the start of an exciting new chapter. "We made this year about celebrating the legacy," he says, "but we've also teed up a bunch of things to knock down in the future."
Below, hear from Gaskarth about some of the band's most memorable milestones — from playing their first Warped Tour to feeling like true rock stars at Red Rocks Amphitheater.
Signing Their First Record Deal With Hopeless Records
The Emerald Moon Records phase of the game was pretty loose in terms of what a record deal was. It was this guy — his name is Matt — he took us under his wing. He just saw a bunch of ambitious kids that wanted to give music a real go. He basically fronted the cash for us to do some real recordings and press a real record. I don't think we ever signed a piece of paper; it was done on a handshake deal. And then as we sold those records [2004 EP The Three Words to Remember in Dealing with the End and 2005 full-length The Party Scene], we paid him back.
I have to give Matt and Emerald Moon Records a ton of credit, because I don't think we would have signed a more national, international record deal without it. He helped us legitimize ourselves and be taken a little more seriously.
There were lots of bands around at the time that were a lot better than us, so it kind of took the right fit. We didn't even do a true showcase for Hopeless Records, so they took a leap of faith. I think what they loved was our ambition and our self-motivation, and [that was] maybe more important than how good we sounded.
I don't think we realized at the time that our career was starting to take off. I think we were just starting to scratch the surface of having a career, and this becoming our livelihoods. Signing the deal felt like confirmation we're doing the right thing. It was making it all real.
[Hopeless] basically encouraged us to repurpose the Emerald Moon full-length. That was our first point of contention with the label. We were pretty insistent that we were going to go in and re-record those songs. In that batch of songs, we also wrote "Coffeeshop Soundtrack" and "Jasey Rae." Looking back now, I'm really happy that we pushed the label to let us make something new, even if it was some re-recorded songs. Because as the career got more serious, that EP, Put Up Or Shut Up, felt like the first stepping stone.
Playing Their First Warped Tour
We weren't even significant enough to [be] assigned a stage. It was kind of like we would show up and then take what we could get. At that stage of the game, it was like, "We'll find a place for you, but you've gotta wait. Come talk to us in the morning." There was a stage called the Kevin Says stage, which was [founder] Kevin Lyman's chosen baby bands. You had to help build that stage. It was like a circus — it came in on the back of a truck, and if you wanted to play it, [helping build it] was almost like a rite of passage to be taken seriously.
I remember showing up at 7 [a.m.]. Two of us would split off, carry our merch to our merch tent and start building the merch area close to some bands that did good numbers — we wanted to be around where the big crowds were. The other two of us would start wheeling our gear in and help put this damn stage together so we could play the show.
It was really intimidating. We would see people from bands that we loved walking around everywhere, and we were suddenly part of it. Then you're also trying not to fan out too much. And we were like, "Yeah, no, we belong here… but also, that's Patrick Stump [from Fall Out Boy]."
I had a lot of moments where I'd walk around with our CDs and be like, "Hey, like my band!" It was a funny juggling act of imposter syndrome, not feeling like we belonged yet, while also learning to hustle ourselves to the crowds that were showing up. It was about establishing grassroots foundations and building a fan base. Had we not done it that way, I don't know that we would have made it 20 years.
Working With Blink-182's Mark Hoppus
I don't think we'd be a band without blink-182. Over the years, as we got a little more recognition, Mark reached out and asked to write together for All Time Low. It was either for [2009's] Nothing Personal or [2011's] Dirty Work. We worked on a song that didn't make a record, but it was the start of that friendship.
Mark's super funny and sarcastic; blink-182 are funny guys. So I would always try to be funny, but then I'd cringe at my own attempt to be funny, and he'd just roll his eyes. I have to give him so much love, because he saw whatever it is that people see in us, and took a shot on us. And even though the songs didn't come out, he continued to be a supporter in the wing.
Fast forward a little bit, and we were working Future Hearts. At this point, we were texting buddies. I was like, "Hey, I think we have this song that you'd sound really cool on. Would you be open to doing this together?" He came on board for "Tidal Waves," and that was another special moment for us as a band — Rian had started engineering and producing a bit, and he engineered the session.
Mark's a really good friend of mine now, and we've gone through a lot together. I don't know that I really think about it, but if I zoom all the way out and think about our career and the way things have gone, yeah, I absolutely pinch myself. It is a dream come true for who I was when I started doing music, but now I just feel lucky to know the guy, because he's a really good dude. Sometimes you can meet your heroes.
Touring Europe With Green Day
I would say that blink and Green Day are the two powerhouses [that] shaped All Time Low. It was blink's friendship, and their antics, and the lightheartedness while still being a rad punk rock band. And then it was Green Day's performative value. Billy [Joe Armstrong], in my opinion, is one of the best frontmen. They're so polished. They're so perfect every time they play.
When [Green Day] asked us to come out with them in Europe and support some shows, it was another one of those boxes checked, like, Hell yes — our heroes are seeing us for what we are, and they're seeing the fact that we're growing, and it's connecting.
It was some of the biggest shows we've ever played overseas. But for me, also, being a UK native and getting to play Emirates Stadium for all these people in England — especially being on the bill with Green Day — just a lot of special moments came along with that [tour].
As the front person in my band, it was really cool to share that stage directly and get to watch them every night and really focus on what makes Billy special and why he's so good at what he does. I've taken a lot of that from what they do, and I think it's made me better as a performer. I'll never forget Billy saying to me one day, "It's really awesome to see a band that works the crowd." It was this full-circle moment of being recognized for that.
The guys were so nice. Mike [Durnt] gifted Zack a bass on that tour. All of them made an effort to come and watch our sound checks. Down to their crew, the people that they worked with — everybody they kept around them was just cool. We walked away from that tour being like, "If we ever get that big, we've got to make sure that we're just as cool to the people that we bring out."
That tour helped us overseas tremendously. We went back after that and headlined, and all of the shows doubled in size.
Headlining Their First Sold-Out Wembley Arena Show
Wembley is such an iconic venue. It's such a special and memorable place, and the fact that our band made it to that level to where we could headline that show was a huge milestone. A bunch of my family that lives over there came down for the show. It was just a special moment, and it felt like a celebration of what we'd accomplished up to that point.
I'd just watched the Foo Fighters documentary where they headlined Wembley Stadium. That was such a crazy moment for them, and then we had this sort of parallel doing Wembley Arena for the first time. It made things feel as they were meant to, that we were on the right track.
We've gone back and done it again. We actually did a show pretty recently there, when our last album was coming out, we kicked things off with a show, and people came in from all over. We had fans from Europe, from up north in the UK, and people from Ireland. It was really rad.
Landing A No. 1 Album With 'Future Hearts'
A bunch of [our albums] up to that point had charted top 10, which was always really exciting, especially for an independent artist. But knowing that we were in contention for No. 1 was absolutely nuts.
In the UK, it hit No. 1. In the States, it also debuted at No. 1 based on sales, but it was the first week in history that they started counting single streams to weigh debuts. So we actually lost out to the Fast and Furious soundtrack. There was a lot of tragedy tied to that movie, and the whole moment [with the song "See You Again"].
I do think some of it was timing. We were riding a high from our last album, [2012's] Don't Panic, which did some really incredible things for us. That was our recovery record after having a pretty tumultuous major label album with [2011's] Dirty Work. We did the deluxe version of that [that included a song] with Vic [Fuentes] from Pierce the Veil. And we did this amazing tour with them in the States that did really well for us.
There was a huge amount of buzz for All Time Low coming off of that last record. And we came out swinging with what I think is one of All Time Low's bigger non-radio songs with "Something's Gotta Give," and things hit the right way. We had all this hype going into [the album].
I don't think we even perceived that we were having that kind of moment then. It was exciting to work with John Feldmann — that was the first time that we did a full record with him. We were kind of just riding this wave that was already crashing.
Earning Their First No. 1 Song At Alternative Radio With "Monsters"
When we were making [2020's] Wake Up Sunshine, we were living in this rented house in Palm Desert. We wrote ["Monsters"] and recorded the demo, and we were listening back to things that night. One of our writing collaborators on that song — he goes by Sweet Talker, his name is Kevin [Fisher] — looked at everyone and went, "That's a different level of special." We all felt like there was something about it.
The next time we were reminded was when blackbear recorded his part for the song. We got that version back, and went, "Oh, that's something we didn't know we needed." And then it wasn't really again until the song came out — because it wasn't the lead single, it was the single when the album itself dropped.
It was deep in lockdown, so the world was really odd. We weren't touring, so it was kind of really hard to gauge what was happening with the album and that song, other than that it was streaming well. But then we started seeing numbers rise and rise. We started to get calls [that] it's moving up the charts, and people are trying to find out more about the song and more about the band.
Then we started getting phone calls that we'd never gotten before: "Good Morning America," "Ellen," these late night shows. Then the song went on to do what it did — it hit No. 1 and maintained No. 1 for a really long time. I look at that and go, Wow, what a wild accomplishment to have happened 18 years into a career.
The nostalgia wave that happened with the genre that we came from, the Warped Tour world, and that whole thing, it felt somewhat tied to COVID and everything that we went through as a society. I think there were people seeking comfort from core memories. It was this perfect storm of people longing for something that they missed and weren't getting at the time, so that whole weird TikTok thing with "Dear Maria" happened. It was bizarre, because we had this brand new song that was radio's biggest alt song of the year, and also had "Dear Maria" going double platinum. We were like, This is a bizarre moment for All Time Low, but we'll take it.
It's funny that it happened that way. It speaks a lot to the way that this band operates. We don't shy away from where we came from. "Dear Maria" has always been the last song in our set. So it was a nice moment for all of us — the current version of All Time Low was popping off, and also the version of All Time Low that we started out on was popping off, too.
Selling Out Red Rocks — Not Once, But Twice
We hadn't done a ton of that size venues in the States headlining. So coming out of lockdown and everyone just getting back on their feet in the world of touring, but realizing we were doing some of our best numbers, we were kind of like, Can we do that kind of show? We had no barometer for how to measure that, other than to try and swing for it.
We went into it with really humble expectations. Red Rocks looks good if you do 5,000 tickets. We were like, we'll just have a great time. Then it blew through and sold out. It was just a holy s— moment in every respect.
It kind of set the tone for where we felt like we were going. We have worked so hard to get this band to that point, and it feels like we've earned it. Those are the places we belong as a band now. It sounds a little cocky, but, as much as we can do the small rock clubs and love doing it, I've always seen this band as an arena band. This should be a f—ing stadium band. Why not?
Going back and doing it for these Forever shows, the fact that we got to do it again, it solidified it wasn't just a moment. The second one was almost that much more special, because it was the longest show we've ever played to date. But it was also this confirmation that we've attained it, and it wasn't just luck. I think sometimes this band has been very lucky over the years, but more so, we've just worked our asses off to get things to happen, and that was kind of proof in the pudding — that we can rock with the best of them.