There’s Been No Wrong Turns, There’s Just Been Detours: An Interview with the All-American Rejects
by Evan Sawdey
PopMatters Associate Interviews Editor

All-American Rejects guitarist Nick Wheeler doesn’t care about matching the success of his last album, what other people think of him, or what album covers he lands on. All he cares about is his music.

Maybe we’ve all been wrong about the All-American Rejects.

The Rejects, lead by songwriters Tyson Ritter (vocals) and Nick Wheeler (guitar), were always a bit hard to categorize. After all, though their emo-ready looks made them instant Alternative Press pinup stars, the sound of AAR was always closer to pop than rock, as if the band just couldn’t resist a good melody when it hit them. When recording their eponymous 2002 debut, Wheeler & Ritter often used tinny drum machines to flesh out their dual-guitar attacks, soon expanding into the full-band format with 2005’s mega-hit Move Along, a soaring guitar-pop disc that spawned hits like “ Dirty Little Secret” and the title track. Now, with their new album When the World Comes Down having come out in December of last year, the Rejects are ready to once again conquer the charts and possibly the world.

There’s only one problem: they don’t really care.

When interviewing guitarist Nick Wheeler, I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. When I mentioned burgeoning alt-rock acts like AP-darlings Forever the Sickest Kids, Wheeler responded simply: “I was gonna say ‘Who?’ but then you said AP and I’m like ‘Oh—yeah, I don’t really give a fuck anymore.’” Instead, he got excited by the mention of sugar-pop maestros Fountains of Wayne, noting that FOW bassist Adam Schlesinger wrote the Oscar-nominated theme song to the 1996 Tom Hanks film That Thing You Do! Instead of trying to categorize himself into any particular genre, all Wheeler would admit to is that “I like upbeat rock music that you can sing along to: that’s it.” Even when I asked him if he felt like he was selling out given the Rejects’ multitude of cross-promotions with the likes of Pepsi and Honda, Wheeler said that he didn’t care what people thought, instead asking, “Who wouldn’t want to design a Pepsi can and get 500 million of ‘em out in fuckin’ every Wal-Mart across the country?” With his celebrity, he’s presented with opportunities that most of us will never have, and instead of worrying about his standing with the rock community, he instead seizes every once-in-a-lifetime moment that he can, never once looking back with regret. When you take all of this into account, the band’s acoustic cover of Britney Spears’ “Womanizer” starts to make sense.

Though this interview was conducted a few weeks prior to the release of When the World Comes Down, it didn’t stop Wheeler from discussing how the band is terrible at picking out singles, how little he cares about matching the commercial success of his past albums, and how he’s only now overcoming his sudden and inexplicable two-year loss of love for music.

Click here for the interview.

Source: www.popmatters.com