A Rocket To The Moon
In 2006, during the peak of Myspace, Nick Santino started A Rocket to the Moon in his bedroom in Braintree Massachusetts. This peak of Myspace helped Santino quickly gain fans nationally and internationally, which in turn led him to get signed to Fueled by Ramen Records, the label he still calls home.
Since their debut full length album ‘On Your Side’ was released four years ago they have released two EP’s, ‘The Rainy Day Sessions’ and more recently ‘That Old Feeling’. They have even been played on MTV’s Jersey Shore and Teen Mom.
Over the years ARTTM have shared the stage with bands like Cobra Starship, FUN. All American Rejects, and Hanson; as well as having performed at the Vans Warped Tour and Bamboozle.
Their new album ‘Wild and Free’ was released on March 26 via Fueled by Ramen Records. They have just announced that they will be on the first official 8123 Nationwide Tour in support of The Maine, other supporting acts are This Century and Brighten.
Interview with Nick Santino. Photography by Eric Ryan Anderson
First off I want to say congrats on the release of Wild and Free, it’s amazing and will definitely be on my favorite albums of the year list!
Well Thank you! Glad you like it!
The album artwork you designed is actually inspired by Peter Pan and Where the Wild Things Are. Are movies a big influence for you?
Yeah, I’m a big movie guy. There’s obviously a lot of big movies out there that I haven’t seen and people are kind of surprised that I haven’t seen The Gonnies in it’s entirely and stuff like that. Any form of art is a big influence for me, especially when it comes to designing and doing my own artwork and stuff.
Before the release of Wild & Free you released a EP (That Old Feeling), what was the decision process like with choosing those four songs to build the momentum for Wild & Free?
Those are just four songs we thought described the whole Wild and Free album as a whole. We just picked those four to show people what the whole album is going to potentially sound like.
Since Wild & Free was 4 years in the making, was there an event or a specific timeframe where a large chunk of the lyricism came out?
No, I mean we wrote pretty much all 2011. We just wrote and lyrics came to us, as we were feeling it.
You immersed yourself in the Nashville scene to create “Wild & Free.” Why Nashville?
Nashville is a good city where everybody in the band loves. The city, the presents of Nashville, we love being there. The people that are there, our producer lives there and the studio that we wanted to work in was there. It just felt like a good place. We could be in this small town and have a big city vibe at the same time. It put our heads in the right place. It was the right move.
To people who’ve never been to Nashville, what would you say is the biggest misconception of this city?
I think everybody thinks it’s just a country music town, but it’s just music in general that grows in Nashville, every genre of music. That’s the one misconception that people get, is that when you go to Nashville it’s just all honky tonks and cowboy hats, there’s a majority of that but there’s everything out there. There’s every type of music, every style of music, every type of person is in Nashville and it’s awesome! I love the city so much.
The songs on Wild & Free have a country pop vibe about them. Was this an organic or a planned out direction?
It was just a natural growth. It came from us being on the road for four years straight and not getting into the studio for a while; and then us listening to certain styles of music and letting it naturally show in our style as we played live. When it came to writing the new record we just let the natural juices flow and out came ‘Wild and Free’.
What’s your writing style? Do you sit down and write an entire song at once or do you write down phrases when they come to you?
It’s a little bit of both. I write down a lot of lyrics ideas in my phone when I’m driving in the car, or I’m tour. When we go into the writing process, when we’re sitting down to write a song, I’ll pull out my phone and see if I have any old ideas, any one liners that I had saved in my phone. I’ll scroll through and try to make one work. That’s how a lot of lyrics on the album started like ’ Lost and Found’ and ‘Another Set Of Wings’ and ‘Wild and Free’, itself. There’s a whole lot of songs that I had started lyrics in my phone and once we sat down and tried to write a song they just came out and finished themselves.
Do you have favorite part of the writing process?
My favorite part is when somebody says something when you’re sitting around in circle, maybe you’re stuck on a certain part of the song and you can’t figure out where to go, and people are just spitting out ideas. It’s cool when somebody says something and you mishear them and you think they say something else so you’re like “Wait, did you say this…” and they’re like “No, I said this but I like your line a lot better.” It’s like happy accidents, you think somebody said something and it ends up being the right lyrics and you’ll get this boost of excitement all over again, you finish the song and you feel great about it.
One of your bonus tracks ‘Call It A Home ‘is a track that looks back at some of the bands highlights. How did this song come together? How long was this song in the making?
Justin and I always had this idea of writing a song about our touring life and trying to do a song like that. That song is definitely influenced by Butch Walker, because a lot of his songs are of his past and he has a lot of details of his tour stories and all that stuff. When this new Butch Walker record came out I was like “I want to write a song kind of like Butch Walker.” We sat there and started writing this autobiography of our band and where we came from, I actually had a bunch of ideas that I gathered over the last couple of years in my phone of different tour stories that would be cool to put into a song and a lot of them came out into that song. It’s a song that when we hear it, it means a lot to us. Maybe people don’t know what certain lines mean, but it’s cool because I know exactly what everything means.
Even though it is a bonus track, would you guys ever make a music video for that song?
I don’t know, maybe like a live video or something. Like a touring video, could be really cool. A tour video based on a song about touring, it could be a cool concept.
Too bad you can’t like re-enact everything out!
I know right! Maybe we could! That would be a cool part of the video, because there’s people that we talk about in there, it could be cool to have them in a cameo in the video.
What have been your favorite bands to tour with?
Every band that we’ve toured with has been awesome! Hanson was a lot of fun. Cobra Starship is fun. The Maine is a lot of fun. Every band that we’ve toured with has been a blast! I haven’t really had any bad tours.
You came up with the lyrics for ‘Another Set Of Wings’ when your dad was going through some rough patches. When you write these personal songs does it ever scare you to perform those songs live, in case you get sucked up in those emotions and lose your composure?
Yeah, definitely! It’s happened before, but that’s how you know it’s a good song. When it could touch you and it could touch other people in an emotional way and move people, that’s how you know it’s a good song. I’m a very emotional person and you can tell in my song writing, so I’m not really embarrassed by that.
I heard that you get still get stage fright sometimes. How would you compare doing radio station performances, to performing live where you can interact with the fans? Do you get nervous for one or the other in particular?
It’s different. When you’re on stage playing in front of a bunch of people with a band, you have the band to back you up; you get nervous but you’re talking to a whole crowd of people so it’s not like you’re talking to one person. When you’re sitting in a room with ten people it’s a little bit more intimate and you feel like you’re talking to every single person individually so it makes it a little bit more nerve–racking, but I power through and make do.
I want to end on this question, what has the best experience been, so far, since being in ARTTM?
Just being able to see the world. I’m 24, I’m going to be 25 this July, and I’ve seen a lot of places and met a lot of cool people and a lot of these places people my age probably haven’t gotten a chance to see yet, so it’s very cool. Very humbling. It keeps me grounded that I’m fortunate enough to see all these places and travel the world with my best friends.
