Life is hard when you’re a reject. Especially an All-American one.
First of all, you’ve got no choice but to spend all day lounging around in your underwear, playing video games, reading comic books and watching movies in your suped-up tour bus. And then your nights! Your nights are just a dizzying blur of screaming girls, sold-out shows, screaming girls, huge radio hits and still more screaming girls.
It’s a hard-knock life. Which is why, at three in the afternoon on a Monday, the All-American Rejects are tucked safely into bed, cramming in a much-needed nap while their driver navigates the highways of Bakersfield, California.
When you’re a young rock star, you’ve just got to get your beauty rest – especially when half of your album sales depend on it. Over the past four years, the band’s shining blue eyes and impossibly high cheekbones, coupled with an innate ability to write stadium-sized pop hooks, have made the All-American Rejects the twinkle in the eye of teenage girls all across America. Any member of the female populous who wasn’t already a fan immediately got on board once the band released its latest monster-hit, “Dirty Little Secret” (also known as the MySpace screen name of every high school girl in the nation).
In short, the Rejects have gone from huge to huger.
“Honestly, when we’re on the road, that’s when things are stupid!” says guitarist Nick Wheeler, waking from his nap to field a few questions from Fly Magazine. “We’re a group of fucking rock and roll-looking dudes, especially on days off when we just roll off the bus without showering or anything. But for some reason we’re noticing it’s not so much, ‘Hey, are you guys in a band?’ It’s, ‘Oh my god, you guys are you guys! Oh my gosh, the All-American Rejects!’”
Does it bother him that he’s now too famous to go to the mall?
Wheeler pauses for a moment, flips over in his bunk and declares, “No, it makes me feel kind of good. At least nobody’s like, ‘Oh my god, it’s Sum 41!’”
Sum 41 can only dream about having the kind of momentum going for them that AAR does right now. On MTV, Fuse, MySpace and just about every rock publication you can think of, it’s been nothing short of a Reject blitzkrieg since the release of the band’s long-awaited sophomore album, Move Along. And just about when you thought the hype couldn’t get any louder, along comes the Black Clouds and Underdogs Tour, which unites the Rejects with current “it boys” Fall Out Boy and Hawthorne Heights. If you don’t know who those bands are, ask your little sister. She’s got their names scribbled all over her bookbag.
Together with Fall Out Boy and Hawthorne Heights (and OK, we’ll throw My Chemical Romance in there too)