It’s fitting that Taking Back Sunday will spend one night of its tour reclaiming its glory days in Pittsburgh. With a newly installed lineup straight out of fan fiction, they’ll revisit a city that hosted a huge moment in the band’s early career.
But much has changed.
Taking Back Sunday broke out of Long Island and into the millennial mainstream with 2002’s “Tell All Your Friends” and its pop-friendly singles “Cute Without the E” and “You’re So Last Summer” on the allure of the caustic canon created by the charmingly raw, if boyish and sincere dual vocalists Adam Lazzara and guitarist John Nolan. Nolan left soon after and was replaced by Fred Mascherino.
Together, each of the pairings belted youthfully confident and angsty quick-draw, call-and-response lines of bite-sized bars perfect for passive-aggressive AIM away messages.
It led the then-Victory Records act to early triumph — and a breakneck touring schedule.
“I was very unprepared for the amount of success Taking Back Sunday had right out of the gate,” remembered original bassist Cooper, now on a 16-year second stint with the band. “Your life changes basically overnight. I was 22 when ‘Tell All Your Friends’ came out and I’d already been on tour for like a year at that point. This whirlwind, I was not prepared for it.”
“I don’t think you can really convey how it feels to leave your parents’ house and then you don’t go back there for years at a time. You’re sleeping in hotels, you’re sleeping on tour buses, you’re flying on planes and things. People want your attention here and there and you just feel like you’re being spread thin as a person when you haven’t grown up yet.”
Cooper left with Nolan the next year, in 2003, to focus on themselves and the less-demanding Straylight Run, behind “Existentialism on Prom Night.”
For TBS, after their departure, there was a music video to be filmed for “You’re So Last Summer” that would become infamous for Nolan’s conspicuous stand-in.
“[The band was] like: ‘Well, it’s kind of awkward because it’s other guys [now]. We don’t want Fred singing for John. That’s kind of a little weird,” said Cooper. “What if Flavor Flav sang? Because that’s kind of — all bets are off then.’”
A full 22 months earlier, on March 26, 2002, Taking Back Sunday had been slated to play the now-defunct Club Laga in Oakland on the day “TAYF” debuted. The band received boxes of CDs from the label to sell at the show, but vocalist Ian Larrabee of tourmates Reach the Sky, a road-life mentor for TBS, had other ideas.
“Ian walked down the block to the record store and he bought our album there to give us the plays,” Cooper said. “I thought that that was one of the coolest things you could do.”
On 2006’s “Louder Now,” the band’s lyrics aged out of staring down youthful melodrama, their energy reharnessed into a bigger rock record that unleashed more intentionally composed, produced and building hits like “MakeDamnSure” and “Liar (It Takes One to Know One).”
Now, 20 years removed from that effort, TBS will embark on a 44-date North American run with Bayside on May 29 and land at Stage AE on June 1. They’ll headline Red Rocks for the first time in October with a 20th anniversary celebration of the album.
“We said, ‘Like, you think we can? You think we can sell out all those tickets?’That is a major milestone in our career and some place I never thought we’d be.’”
Cooper and Nolan returned to the band in 2010 after finding time and space to grow up at their own pace.
“I took my path, they took theirs, and we all merged back together,” said Cooper. “By the time I came back to Taking Back Sunday, it seems like the band had kind of leveled out too and everyone had kind of grown up and matured — and didn’t want to be in the same kind of crazy schedule.”
This time around, the lineup will feature both Nolan and Mascherino (who departed the band after “Louder Now” in 2007 ) in a three-vocalist, three-guitar assault. Mascherino returned to the group in 2024 to fill in for Nolan on tour while he underwent major neck surgery. As Lazzara, who once clashed with Mascherino, had put it, “I don’t know if it works with anyone but Fred.”
“It’s been really cool. I didn’t really know what to expect. I’d never played in a band with Fred,” said Cooper of the new three-show-old lineup.
“[John and Fred] just have this really good chemistry and this really good back and forth when they’re figuring out the songs. And we’ve kind of reconstructed a lot of the songs now that we have three guitar players on stage with our guy, Nathan [Cogan], who plays keys and sings. So we have all these amazing vocal harmonies. We have all these amazing guitar harmonies going at the same time. It’s just a lot of fun musical talk, watching things go.”
Though they “always have ideas,” Cooper said the band is currently “not even thinking about writing” and noted that any recording “will probably have to wait until next year.”
“We haven’t made any decisions on anything other than Fred will be with us this year,” said Cooper. “We’ve gotten really good at taking our time with things. I think that’s something we’ve learned with age. We don’t want to rush things. We don’t want to force things. We’re going to do what feels natural. And so far, this feels really natural and great.”
Feeling natural was not always part of the equation for Cooper when it came to touring. Four years before returning to the band, he found a level of grounding and community outside of music in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu— what the band characterizes as “Shaun’s dorky thing” — after being inspired by a Forrest Griffin and Stephan Bonner fight.
“It’s such a fun thing where it just keeps you in the moment,” said Cooper. “You’re getting tired, you’re getting winded and all that stuff, but it doesn’t really matter because you’re having so much fun and you’re thinking about the next thing and where you’re going to go — where the next move is. It’s living in the moment and working out without knowing you’re really doing it.”
These days, the father of two also frequently jams with his kids.
“They always get surprised,” said Cooper. “‘Oh, that’s daddy on stage. He seems like a different guy.’”
And from that stage, Cooper sees multiple generations of fans of the music he remembers every second of creating, looking back at him.
“All the songs, I find new meanings in every night. You might lock eyes with somebody and think ‘Oh, man, that reminds me of me when I was 16. Holy cow.’”
He hopes everyone gets the chance to slow down, just as he does every time he hits the mat.
“Our shows are all about just getting lost in the moment.”