Yellowcard Builds 'Paper Walls'

They say you can't go home again. But with Paper Walls, Yellowcard tries.

Yellowcard, the pop/punk band out of Jacksonville, Fla., has wandered the proverbial wilderness the last few years. After scoring big with their 2.5 million-selling breakthrough Ocean Avenue in 2003, the band struggled with its newfound fame and inner-band angst. The follow-up, Lights and Sounds, was a darker, harsher album than Ocean that performed significantly below expectations. Then Yellowcard red-carded founding member Ben Harper, sparking a fan backlash from which the remaining members are, perhaps, still reeling. Friends who had known each other since adolescence had begun to splinter and work apart.

"We set out to find ourselves and got lost," said lead singer Ryan Key during an online interview in the AT&T Blue Room.

Skin and Scar Tissue
Paper Walls, released this summer, is a deeply autobiographical album, filled with both overt and oblique references to Yellowcard's rocky times. According to Key, it's about "what happens when you find yourself again."

"Before we started this record everything in our lives was changing. But after a bit of struggling I finally found a place where I'm comfortable in my own skin," Key said. "We know who we are and who we want to be."

On the album, it takes a while to get there.

Most of Paper Walls is a quest to winnow the wheat from the chaff—determine what's good and beautiful and try to nurture it as best as you can. The journey is often bittersweet; many of the songs are more a lament over what's been lost than what's been found.

The title track sets the tone.

According to Key, paper walls represent a kind of scar tissue bandmates had accumulated: Over the years, they'd all put up buffers against one another. But as they worked on their new songs, they found these buffers were paper thin.

"If you really love each other as much as we do, you want to knock those walls down and get back to the place where you enjoy being with each other and making music together," Key said on Yellowcard's Web site bio. "The song is basically saying let's get back out there and remember why this is important to us, why we love being on stage and why we love making records."

Walking, But Not Running
From that new starting line (but still without Ben), the band explores themes of sacrifice, redemption and what it means to be a family. On "Dear Bobbie" Key has his grandfather read a letter to his wife of nearly 50 years. "You have gray hair now but you are a beautiful woman," Key's grandfather says, "and the years have been good to both of us. We walk slow now, but we still have each other. The glue of love is still bonding us together."

The trip these guys have been on doesn't lend itself to wall-to-wall positivism, though. Yellowcard's message is quite bleak in places, even downright disturbing. "You and Me and One Spotlight," for instance, initially seems to be a song about a final, likely sexual, tryst. But as Key sings about "one last sunset" and how they'll be "just air," the listener realizes this song is about the end of the world—or about the end of these two characters, at least.

Indeed, plenty of anger and hurt are along for the ride here—in a vehicle custom designed for disaffected teens who often feel they have plenty to rail against.

Paper Walls isn't the fan-luring punk/pop of Ocean Avenue. And it's not quite as angry or despairing as Lights and Sounds. Rather, it falls somewhere in between—both melodically and lyrically.