Five days after Derek Sanders got married, he left for tour.
That’s life for the frontman of Mayday Parade, a beloved emo band that first found its fame in the Myspace era. Having already completed a celebratory 20 year anniversary tour this year, Mayday Parade is back on the road to support All Time Low.
Despite this, Sanders says his schedule is moving at a slower pace compared to his initial days with the band.
“We don’t tour quite as extensively as we used to,” said Sanders. “I think the longest stretch that we have ever done at once was seven months, where we had one day off at home in a seven month span.”
Sanders is more thoughtful about how much time he spends away, now that he’s a husband and a father.
“Back then it was easy because we didn’t have as much going on at home. We were excited to just be out doing this and building the fan base. But I’ve also been on the other side of it for a long time, being gone and having family at home, and having to balance those two things,” said Sanders.
“It is difficult and it’s sad, but I think we all appreciate that this is what we get to do. It’s hard to imagine doing anything else.”
Having just played their largest headline shows to date, Mayday Parade is releasing three albums in 2025–Sad, Sweet, and Sugar–as a capstone on their twentieth year as a band.
“We definitely didn’t plan to do the three part thing at first. It wasn’t until we were in the middle of creating it essentially, that we came up with the idea to go for something bigger and more grand,” said Sanders.
They originally planned to theme each album by writing songs that lyrically matched the album titles, but as the creative process unfolded, the band chose to let the songs speak for themselves.
“At the end of the day, no matter how much we attempt to do something like that, the songs that are the strongest are gonna raise their hand and get picked,” said Sanders. “I’ll write a song that I’m pretty excited about, or someone else will bring in a song that I really love, but you never know until we’re all together in the control room at the studio listening through everything.”
This selection process is part of what has earned Mayday Parade such a loyal fanbase.
“Sometimes my tastes can be a little weird. Maybe there is a song that would mean a lot to me personally, but might not connect as well with an audience as a Mayday Parade song,” said Sanders.
“You can feel that energy when you’re listening to a song, and when getting everyone’s thoughts afterwards. That’s when it makes it a little more obvious.’”
The band’s twentieth anniversary has prompted Sanders to reflect on Mayday Parade’s accomplishments.
“So much has changed from what it was in 2005,” said Sanders. “We’ve been doing this for so long. It does make you go like, ‘Well, what will the next 10 years look like, or 20 years? How long are we going to be able to do this?’
“I don’t know.”
Sanders even dug into Mayday Parade’s online archive, finding pockets of nostalgia he’d long forgotten about.
“I went back and tried to look up the earliest videos I could find of the band playing early live shows, or early interviews, and that really kind of puts it into a perspective of just seeing how young we were,” said Sanders.
Sanders was just 19 years old when Mayday Parade began. He spent his adolescence selling the band’s CDs in the parking lots of Warped Tour before touring with the festival himself.
“In high school, we had our group of a dozen people that were the scene kids, or whatever. We’d wear girl jeans to school and paint our nails. We were kind of outcasts,” said Sanders. “Going to Warped Tour and seeing tens of thousands of people that felt like we fit in with was something that I didn’t know existed. It even further entrenched us.”
Like most teenagers, Sanders and his bandmates weren’t thinking about what life was going to be as an adult.
“There was a video of us at Warped Tour in 2008, I believe, where [our guitarist] Brooks said, ‘Well, I’m not gonna be 40 and still doing this,’” said Sanders. “Of course, now Brooks just turned 40 years old, and here we are still doing this.”
It’s that kind of irony that makes Mayday Parades’ success all the more celebrated today. From misfit kids to married adults, they’ve crafted a legacy through their music.
“I don’t think I had the foresight to imagine that we would be able to go as far as we have and do it for as long as we have,” said Sanders.
“Obviously it’s kind of a cliche thing, the whole ‘It’s not a phase.’ But it seems to be abundantly clear now.”
Mayday Parade & All Time Low
GLC Live at 20 Monroe
Nov. 2, 6 p.m.
glcliveat20monroe.com
