Shout Out Louds on keeping the band together for two decades and the 20th anniversary of their debut album: Interview

It was May 2003 and I happened to be in Stockholm to meet up with people I hadn’t seen in years, and since I was a bit early I did what I always do when I have to wait for someone: surf through record stores. The beginning of the 2000s was the peak for the Swedish indie rock scene and while I was looking for singles and EPs by Swedish band Laakso, the record store owner told me, ‘You’re into Swedish indie rock, right? Let me show you something new and exciting’, and he put on Shout Out Louds debut EP 100◦.

I left the record store that day with a copy of Shout Out Louds debut EP. A few months later, in the fall of 2003, I sneaked in at my first Shout Out Louds gig (it was sold out but I got inside help) when they were out touring their debut album Howl Howl Gaff Gaff, a record that would later become a massive breakthrough for the band after its release in the US two years later and a performance on the Late Show with David Letterman in June 2005.

After two decades, and a bit, as a band, Bebban, Ted, Adam, Carl, and – back in the band for the first in ten years – the original drummer Eric, decided to embark on a 20th anniversary Howl Howl Gaff Gaff tour. Starting off 2024 by releasing an EP of re-recorded songs off their debut album, Shout Out Louds set off to play smaller venues across Europe to ‘relive how it used to be’ when they had released Howl Howl Gaff Gaff twenty years ago and did their first gigs.

When the band passed through Hamburg for a gig at Molotow we sat down with Adam and Ted and chatted about sticking together as a band for two decades, their relationship to their debut album today, and their interest in food on tour. But the interview starts off somewhat confused – have they played at Molotow before or not?

Retrospection: Summarizing 20 years of band life

“Fun story, we have played at Molotow before but when we loaded in an hour ago it was like ‘I’ve never been here but I know we have played at Molotow before’, and then someone told us they moved house a long time ago (laughs). We played here in 2004 – well, the other Molotow.”

Welcome back to Molotow then, but the new Molotow for you.

Adam: ”Thanks! It will be a full house tonight. I don’t think we have played anything this crowded in years but we wanted it like this and planned for smaller venues on this tour. Our idea, in the band, for the anniversary was a small celebration at a bar in Stockholm with all the people that have been working with us since we started, but our bookers, especially Filip [the manager], wanted something more and bigger, and just like that we were booked for a sold-out tour.”

Ted: ”To be honest, we didn’t think it would be such huge interest and thought it would be fun to do smaller shows like we did when we toured the album in 2003 and 2004 before all hell broke loose, but apparently we’re still an interesting band and have sold-out gigs weeks in advance. We would probably have sold-out bigger venues, but it’s also fun to do it like we used to and play intimate and crowded gigs.”

Adam: ”Let’s call it exclusive shows for this whole tour.”

But it’s not likely that your fans will forget about you. I mean, you continuously release new records. When was the last one released? House was in 2022, right?

Ted: ”Yeah, you’re right but on this tour, I think many older fans come out for our gigs. You know, people that were young when Howl Howl Gaff Gaff was released in 2004 and haven’t been to many shows in the last years because life happened, like starting families. That’s what I’ve seen at the gigs so far.”

Shout Out Louds are one of the very few bands I’ve followed since the first release. I was in Stockholm in May 2003 and passed by a record store and bought the 100◦ EP a month after its release, and to see that you’re still here 21 years later is kind of impressive.
But being in a band for two decades while much happens in life outside the band, like starting families and having normal day jobs must be quite a challenge. What’s the secret for keeping it together for over 20 years, especially during the latter part of the band career when most of you started families?

Adam: ”It has been tough and we have been through periods when we haven’t toured as the original band. Some of us had to stay at home while the rest embarked on tour, it just wasn’t possible.”

Ted: ”On this tour, all five original members are back in the band for the first time since 2013 or 2014. Erik, our drummer, took a few years off and we toured with different drummers for many years. In some periods we’ve only been three original band members, but we have always been flexible and allowed people to have those periods. They’re still band members.”

Adam: ”The secret, I guess, is that we were friends long before the band started, it’s an important part of our story – and we still love to hang out as friends outside the band. Sure, you start a band to play shows and have fun on tour but we find it equally fun to go out for a bite or just hang out in a bar together, that’s what friendship is about. It’s important to have fun together and not only do it to play gigs.”

Ted: ”But you’re right, it isn’t easy to tour anymore, especially not being away from the family for a few weeks and returning with no money in the pocket and being super tired for another week. You know, going away to have fun and leave your family living the normal life at home can be challenging and a bit unfair to be honest.” (laughs)

I guess that’s the reason you don’t do those kinds of tours you did between 2004 and 2010 anymore with 80 or 90 gigs.

Ted: ”Exactly, it only worked until 2010 when all of us had the band as our full-time job, but after 2010 much happened in our lives and it hasn’t been possible to do it. Well, we didn’t want to tour that much anymore as well.”

“I can miss it at times but we all have kids and it has changed our priorities in life. If we had earned heaps of money like some bands do, it may have been different. Maybe we could’ve taken a year off between tours then, but being in a band isn’t a well-paid job for most musicians.”

Adam: ”But didn’t we do it like that and took a year off after releasing a new record? After we toured it? We had breaks where we didn’t do much at all. Both Ted and I moved abroad for a while which helped us recharge a bit and get back to being creative, and those breaks have been very important for the band when we start working on new music. We always find a way back because we miss each other, and when that feeling turns up it very often comes with new energy and new creativity.”

”This 20th anniversary happened to fit perfectly in time because we wanted to meet up for rehearsals again even if we often see each other outside the band, it was just time for the band again. But we didn’t have any new music and then these reworks of songs from our debut album were a perfect fit, and I hope it will spill over and get us started to work on a new album. It feels like a start.”

But when your lives outside the band change you also tend to see band life differently. For some bands it becomes more like a job because you need to have schedules for rehearsals to make it work with family life, for others, the band is a space of freedom where you get some time off from your daily chores and don’t need to plan anything. How has it been for you?

Ted: ”It’s definitely a place where I can relax, like going on a ski trip with friends. It’s that type of feeling but more intense.”

Adam: ”On this tour, we had to work quite much before we left as well, like getting the artwork done, planning the tour, and book gigs, maybe because we like to be part of the whole process surrounding the band. But although you get the feeling that you’ve put down lots of work you get so much in return when the tour starts and you’re on the road, it’s a reward for all the work you’ve put in. That feeling, of being on the road, is about absolute freedom and lust – the lust to continue doing what we do. It’s easy to forget that between tours.”

This tour is kind of a retrospective look at the band’s history and how it all started. I watched a video from your performance at David Letterman show back in 2005 and I guess that’s when it really took off for you.
If you look back on memories like that and reflect on what expectations you had when you just released Howl Howl Gaff Gaff in Sweden in the fall of 2003, how much did your expectations tap into what happened later?

Ted: ”Let’s think about how it started. As I remember it we recorded a promo CD and were at our manager’s office to put records in envelopes to be sent across the world when Filip suddenly burst out ‘We have a chance to play in London!’. That was the first time I thought ‘Maybe we can play shows outside Scandinavia after all’.”

Adam: (laughs) ”That was a fun period. We went around indie clubs in Stockholm and gave promo records to DJs and hoped anyone would play it, and that it ultimately would get us gigs as a support act for some bigger Swedish bands. But I also remember that Filip and many people working with us quite early wanted to squeeze us into the London and New York scenes to see what would happen. Filip believed in us a lot and it panned out really well.”

”It didn’t take long for us to get gigs abroad, maybe a bit too quick because we were not done with Sweden when it happened, but both Filip and the band saw that there was a rising interest in our music and we decided to go along with it.”

Ted: ”Much of that is Filip’s hard work, he was always pushing us, ‘Come on, let’s go out and play shows’. He wanted it to be as big as possible very early into our career.”

Adam: ”Many of the bands we listened to, our role models, were American or English bands and we kind of hoped to get a chance to share stages with them.”

”Early on we got a good network in New York, especially bookers, and they booked us at great clubs that worked well with our music. You also need to remember that it was a great time for indie rock and there were lots of clubs and venues for our kind of music. In the US it’s also quite common that you work with a music lawyer who deals with the legal part of your music and we got in touch with Craig who liked us a lot and put in lots of work to help us out.”

”But we had quite much luck as well, like everyone needs. Albert Hammond Jr, the guitarist of The Strokes, got his hands on our CD on tour and called Filip to say that he liked our music, and we were stoked. He happened to turn up at our gig when the label was onsite to sign us and I guess it helped us get the hype around the band going a lot (laughs).”

Ted: ”Being signed to an American label helped us quite much when we started touring over there already during our first year after the album was released.”

Living with ‘Howl Howl Gaff Gaff’

As Howl Howl Gaff Gaff was released in different versions over the course of three years, starting off in Sweden in 2003 and ending in being released internationally in 2005, the band were on a never-ending tour for almost four years playing the same songs over and over again. For any band that has been touring their debut album as extensively as Shout Out Louds, not every song will have the same resonance over decades of concerts. So how do Adam and Ted feel about their debut album today?

It’s two decades since you released your debut album and you have lived with the songs off the album for a long time now and played them live heaps of times as many songs are fan favorites. Sometimes you grow tired of older songs when you’ve played them too much. What’s the relationship with the album today?

Ted: ”When we started planning for the anniversary and dug up the old songs again, it was fun and I felt, ‘It’s a very good album’. It’s many songs on Howl Howl Gaff Gaff we haven’t played in years because we’ve mostly played the singles, ’Please Please Please’, ’The Comeback’, and ’Very Loud’, but now it was fun to rehearse the full album again.”

“But sure, I was quite tired of it around 2007 and just wanted to play something else. It got a bit too much for a while.”

Adam: ”We released it in Sweden first [2003] and one or two years later internationally, and it led to that we toured the album for quite many years. As soon as the tour ended we were almost done writing our second album, Our Ill Wills. We got home, dropped our bags, and went to the studio to record it.”

”I can get nostalgic when I hear songs from the album [from Howl Howl Gaff Gaff], lots of memories resurface and those memories are good. But as Ted said, some songs we haven’t played live in 18 or 19 years, like ‘Seagull’, the last song on the album, and that’s the type of songs you appreciate more to play now. And they’re still in the hands, it’s muscle memory.”

Ted: ”Yeah, that’s what’s fun, you just know how to play them. Take ’A Track And A Train’ for example – we haven’t rehearsed it much at all but it works perfectly live.”

Adam: ”I find it hard to sing many of the songs today though because I did it differently when I was young, it was quite challenging back then. Today, I have a more relaxed way of singing and it has an impact on the songs, they will sound different than on the album.”

Just a couple of weeks ago you released a retake of some of the songs off the album, basically all songs off the 100◦ EP plus ‘Please Please Please’, and it sounds like dream pop versions. Is it age and experience that slowed down the new versions of the songs?

Ted: ”Wait, is it really like that? It’s ’Please Please Please’, ‘100◦’, ‘The Comeback’… (laughs) Hold on, you’re actually right (laughs). I haven’t even thought about it.”

”Maybe experience and age were involved to some part, but we also felt that if we were to re-record some songs we can’t do it in such high tempo again. ’Please Please Please’ turned out just like we wanted it to be but the rest unfolded as we were in the studio.”

Adam: ”Yeah, we couldn’t do them in any other way. There are teenagers today doing chillwave and playing slower music than us (laugh). Our music taste has changed as well. But it’s mostly about the arrangement of the original versions, they’re just too fast for us. Tonight, we’ll play ’100◦’, ‘Hurry Up Let’s Go’, and ’Shut Your Eyes’ straight and it’s going to be a marathon for us (laughs).” 

Ted: ”Do we have anything as fast as ’Shut Your Eyes’? We don’t, right?

Adam: ”No, we don’t. We slowed down quite much already on Our Ill Wills, the second album.”

Ted: Our Ill Wills is fun though because there are many songs on it that we haven’t played since. With the debut album you naturally play all songs over and over again because you don’t have anything else to play, but from our second album there are songs we haven’t played at all.”

Touring is a food adventure

A less serious question; I’ve seen from older interviews that you are interested in food and you, Adam, even complained once that you never get any questions on food. So here’s one. How has the band’s culinary adventure evolved during two decades?

(laugh)

Adam: ”We always try out the local cuisine and we’re good at keeping track of good restaurants and pubs with local beers at the places we pass by on tour.”

Ted: ”On the way here today we talked about currywurst and it felt a lot like Hamburg. But maybe it’s a Berlin thing and not Hamburg?”

[Our photographer breaks in and explains the local cuisine and traditions like Franzbrötchen and Fischbrötchen, and that currywurst is a Berlin special.]

” As Adam says, we check out the local cuisine wherever we go”

Adam: ”But we put some time into looking up where to eat before we arrive somewhere, it rarely happens that we set off spontaneously to see if we find a good restaurant – we do some really good research (laugh). It’s just a huge food interest that runs in the band, and that makes touring fun.”

Ted: ”Once when we played in Frankfurt, we were at something called Schlachtplatte where they have this restaurant Apfelwein Wagner that doesn’t serve any beer, just some sort of apple cider. ‘Kein bier hier’, that was a bummer (laughs).”

Adam: ”Tonight, we don’t have time to go too far from Reeperbahn, the schedule is quite tight. But there’s not much fun to eat around here. There’s a great Asian place close to Gruenspan [a venue about 500m from Molotow] but we won’t have time to go there.”

Ted: ”But I want wurst [sausage] today! Don’t you have any good local wurst place nearby?.” [as vegetarians we couldn’t help out at all, unfortunately]

Adam: ”When we did our first tours we always went to the same places in Hamburg to get the same breakfast and the same coffee. It was a sort of routine and gave you comfort to know where to eat when you arrived. We’re far more adventurous today.”

Ted: ”Oh, I remember the first times in Hamburg when we shared a flat close to Knust [venue in Hamburg] and always had breakfast at the same place close to the flat – and it was a really good breakfast. There’s lots of good food memories from Hamburg (laughs).”

To wrap it up with a question about the future; is there still energy left to release new music? Maybe you even started working on a new album?

Ted: ”Most definitely! Recording the retake EP and heading out on tour has recharged our creativity and I look forward to starting on something new.”

Adam: ”Ted spent one and a half years abroad and even if I write most of the music he’s the one making sure the process restarts.”

Ted: (laughs) ”Maybe I am. I’ve always been like, ‘Come on, let’s meet up on Tuesday to get it started!’. I just want things to happen.”

Adam: ”He’s always been like that, but I also need to get into the right mindset today, like ‘Let’s do this record, let’s start’, and force myself back to the studio to meet up with everyone and not just meeting up as friends on the outside, that happens frequently. It’s when we meet up for rehearsals most of the ideas turn up and ignite our creativity, that’s how it works best for me. After that, I can write music somewhere else, like at home, but we all need a start together before it can happen, and we haven’t had that type of kickoff yet.”

”We won’t be back for rehearsals until May again, all focus is on touring now, but when we have restarted I think we can be ready to write new music in September.”

Ted: ”We always had quite many years between albums, maybe a few too many, but it has worked out best like that for us.”

Adam: ”Yeah, our families have time to forget how hard it was when we were gone for a few weeks the last time and will be very supportive, ‘Amazing! Of course, you should go on tour’, and then we’re back in that loop of touring and disappointing our families again – it’s a cycle (laughs). I just realize how bad it sounds (laughs).”

Ted: ”But it’s a problem today because it’s more than doing a tour, we also need to rehearse 2-3 times a week which always has to happen in the evenings because of our day jobs. It’s not always a shared passion (laughs).”

”But we definitely got new energy from working on the anniversary Ep and touring. It can’t stop here.”

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Photographer: Julia Schwendner
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About J.N.

Music researcher with an unhealthy passion for music and music festivals. Former studio owner, semi-functional drummer and with a fairly good collection of old analogue synthesizers from the 70's. Indie rock, post rock, electronic/industrial and drum & bass (kind of a mix, yeah?) are usual stuff in my playlists but everything that sounds good will fit in.
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