The All-American Rejects don’t put up with bullshit. So when they announced their new album and played it to a crowd of industry people in Los Angeles, it was too much inauthenticity to handle. “We were like, ‘Man, this is what everybody does, and I fucking hate that this is what everybody feels obligated to do,’” lead singer Tyson Ritter tells Rolling Stone.
The next night, the band played a free show for a local college radio station at the University of Southern California, just a few blocks away from their last gig. It felt like a whole different world. “It was feral, alive, and vibrant,” Ritter says, recalling the young, boisterous crowd.
That was early May. Since then, the All-American Rejects have tried to redefine live music with their DIY house party tour. The band put on impromptu live shows in six U.S. cities, including Los Angeles, Chicago, and Midwest flyover stops like Ames, Iowa, and Columbia, Missouri, before wrapping the whole thing up in Nashville. They’ve made stages out of backyards, bowling alleys, and cornfields with videos of their system-defying speeches and raucous crowds going viral. In just a couple of weeks, the All-American Rejects’ house parties became the hottest show experience of the season.
“These are the best shows we’ve ever played in our lives,” Ritter says. It’s the morning after their biggest bash yet in East Nashville the night before. The lead singer is an early riser and ready to share his reflections on the past week, the band’s no-bullshit approach, and what fans can expect next — including more house party shows.
How was last night? I saw some videos, and it looked like a great way to cap things off.
We were just kind of hoping it didn’t get shut down. We had Grace Bowers coming out with us, and she’s such a young promise for people who play guitars and rock & roll, and coming out of this younger generation realizing there’s that spirit of wanting to stand in front of a live audience that’s feeding off of something that’s happening in real time out of your hands. We were just hoping it would go off.
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And it did. People were reportedly renting ladders from neighbors next door and paying 150 bucks.
You’re shitting me. That’s incredible. Apparently, these kids broke through the fence, made a little hole Alcatraz-style, and were funneling in through the side neighbor’s fence. Nashville’s usually so music spoiled, like Los Angeles, so to see a crowd actually engaged, that made me actually feel like I would want to play Nashville again. You usually just don’t get that connection.
The thing that we’re realizing on this run is that when we’re at eye level with people and seeing kids go up on the shoulders of their peers, it shows that the carnal community connection over the last seven years has just been so fractured and detached from, because of every reason post-Covid. It just felt like we unknowingly created something that resonated with people in a communal sense.
It seems like each show has gotten crazier and crazier.
The last three days have been so incendiary as far as just realizing what happens when the word gets out in 2025. In Iowa, people were running through the cornfield because there was no way that we could barricade off any sort of line. We couldn’t hold and they broke through our little partition of people, which were just volunteers banding together and holding hands. That show was actually scary. The line at that was 300 deep and I was like, “This is going to be a bad Warped Tour.” That night rattled us because it was an overwhelming amount of people in a space with a very feather-fragile infrastructure. The next night was Missouri, and the cops came to that one.
The cops let you keep playing, though, since they were fans, right?
That saved our ass. It was funny. I don’t think they even saw the bus. They just saw the crowd and my manager pulled me off stage and was like, “They’re going to arrest me.” And I go, “OK, OK, we’ll stop.” Our guitarist stayed onstage and he just goes, “Boo.” [Ritter holds two thumbs down.] The crowd went up in arms, and I walked back to the cop and I go, “Hey man, if you want these kids to get out of here in a nice peaceful order, just let us play one more song.” And he goes, “I didn’t know it was you guys. Go play another song.” That was a really cool moment.
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So how did this whole concept begin, and what was the intention behind it?
When we played USC, it reminded us of when we started playing, when we would drive around in a van playing VFWs, playing student-promoted backyards, playing basements. With this new record, we wanted to go back and find where we fell in love with doing what we did, to sort of connect to the why the fuck are we doing this?
When was the moment that you realized the house party shows were catching on?
The next day after the USC shows. I told my manager, “You were right.” We owe all the flowers to the brilliant team that we’ve surrounded ourselves with. The incredible manager we have now is a 29-year-old named Megan [Kraemer] who was ripping VIP tickets for us two years ago. Our managers at the time were dinosaurs who didn’t believe in the youth and the way that the world has changed. The music business is still packed full of gatekeeping dinosaurs, so it was important to bring in a young, hungry person who loves this band. She’s definitely our unicorn goddess.
I told her, “We got to do these again.” My wife’s pregnant and literally about to pop the first week of June. We had this window this week, and I told [Kraemer] to fill it. Let’s see if people come out. I definitely didn’t expect it to turn into this. I was like, “Maybe we’ll get a few hundred people, just show kids a good time for a cheap date.” [Kraemer] was so hesitant to spend our money. I was like, “I’m not going to go pay creators on TikTok to put my song and embed it into some meme thing to program children across the world into thinking a song is great.” It’s a false approach, and so why not just make a bet? Worst case, we lost the money. Best case we made something that felt real.
How did your wife respond to the idea?
I asked her. I go, “Babe, he’s got a birthday. It’s fated. So he’s coming when he’s coming, and the last thing I would want to do is miss that birth, of course.” She said, “You got to do it.” She gave me the blessing and I was like, OK, babe, let’s dance.
How does it feel to be rejecting the mainstream way of things with DIY shows as an independent band?
It feels great to flip the bird to the giant titanic music industry. I only hope young bands can see this as an inspiring way to disrupt this market. People are tired of being force-fed everything. Music is seen before it’s heard. We’re in the age of celebrity-defining success. If you’re a popular artist, you could literally fart on a microphone and have a hit song. That’s a shame. But luckily this tribal culture of humanity still knows what smells like shit when it looks like shit.
Last night you revealed that the band is using a lot of this footage to make the music video for your upcoming single “Easy Come, Easy.” When did you make that decision?
We already have a music video for it. But I was on the bus the other day day and was like, “If I was a kid at one of these shows, I would want to see myself at this show as a little trophy memory.” So we thought to shoot every one of these for “Easy Come, Easy Go” and let these kids come back and try to find themselves.
Everything with this whole new record we’re putting out was because we wanted to have something to say and to feel like we were doing something that was true and authentic in our music. A lot of people emulate some sort of legacy in order to shake the purse strings of their audience.A lot of people emulate some sort of legacy in order to shake the purse strings of their audience. But my question for us as a band was, can we evolve? And I think it’s been that sort of natural intention of let’s just do something that feels right every step of the way and we’ve been following that guiding intention.
I know you said you were surprised by the huge audience that came out at your When We Were Young set in 2022. Did that make it so you were less surprised by the reaction you’ve been getting at these backyard shows?
It was a really conflicted decision for me because I didn’t know the intention when we played that first year of When We Were Young. It was a beautiful show experience, but when I looked out at the infrastructure, I was like, “This looks like the most corporatized thing.” All I smelled was new plastic, brand-new carpet. I saw branding everywhere and I’m like, “Is this what all this shit’s becoming?” We are all beholden to this capitalistic world, but to be able to disrupt it with something that felt honest this last week has been just soul food for this band.
We’ve always been the songs that had that band and whatever happened this week showed everybody, we’re the band that has all those songs. I feel like we released successful music for a 12-year period in the 2000s, but we didn’t do it year after year after year. We tapped into that bridge between younger millennials transitioning into Gen Z. It was a fractured sort of presence throughout a transitional generation moment. This is the first time where we’ve actually found our culture by way of the music. We aren’t the people that wore the emo badge of courage. We didn’t march in the black parade. We weren’t operatic Fall Out Boy. We were the Rejects. That band name had been a curse in the beginning. Now, it’s finally married itself to our rebellious Oklahoma spirit. I’m just so happy that we found our place, even all these years later in music.
Maybe a lot of these kids think the view is cool from where they’re standing, but the view from where we’re playing is sweeter. I’ll never forget this week my entire life. We’re getting ready to go play at MetLife Stadium with the Jonas Brothers, and it won’t even hold a candle to last night in Nashville. I already know it.
People online are still begging you to play their backyards and graduation parties. Will there be anymore house party shows?
There will be more house parties. And I can’t wait for ’em, man. No one wants to be IOUs, and I feel like when we go out on JoBros, there’s going to be some time to skate around to maybe go to Susie Q’s backyard and make her parents put something on the barbecue and actually have an infrastructure that will ensure everyone has a great time. We want to make it sustainable.
You can expect a lot more disruptive behavior from this band. We’re here to be disruptors in this market. That’s one thing that this thing has awakened in us. How else can we fuck with things? How else can we make the Rejects even more reject-y?
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Do you have ideas you’re working on to accomplish that?
Oddly enough, we do. Everything about this has just been this pool of ideas from this incredible little engine we have behind us, and there’s been things that we’re like, I can’t believe we have this coming next after this because it’s equally disruptive and kind of naughty.
I’m so excited to see what’s going to happen.
I can’t tell you just how genuinely happy that I am to speak with you about this because there’s moments in your life, if you don’t write ’em down or if you don’t remember them, it’s like looking at a photograph and it tells you a different story. I don’t know if in five days I’ll be able to remember it as well as I do right now.