Ryan Key of Yellowcard on their reimagined album with post-rock duo Hammock.
Photo credit: Acacia Evans
Yellowcard released their first album in 1999, just before the turn of the century. Now in 2024, they have taken another turn in the band's consistent reinvention to pair with post-rock duo Hammock to reimagine their classic songs. “A Hopeful Sign,” released February 9th, reimagined songs from their large body of work. With each song chosen by fans, Hammock pulls Yellowcard’s fast-paced guitar, bass, and drums, and remasters the songs to a softer dreamlike backing. Yellowcard is a longstanding band, their path has been full of twists and turns, and yet there is a final consensus: their cult fanbase will support them through it all.
We spoke with Ryan Key ahead of the release of “A Hopeful Sign” where he shared some background information about their latest album.
Where did the idea come from to pair with the duo Hammock to reinvent your classic songs?
So we've been working on this record for three-and-a-half, almost four years. It started during the pandemic. When Yellowcard split up in 2017, you may know, you may not know, but it's out there. It was very permanent. There was nothing left hanging. It was like, goodbye, this is over. Door is closed. So I transitioned pretty quickly into making my own music and touring on my own and really trying to hustle and keep music as my occupation. By 2019 I had worked out a lot of re-imagined versions on my own that I was performing live. The music I was making on my own lived in a different universe than Yellowcard. It was very originally sort of like singer-songwriter, almost folk. A lot of finger-picked acoustic guitar, but it also had some of those kinds of Hammock ambient post-rock guitar swells in it and stuff that was so, anyways, very different from Yellowcard.
The vocal range I was singing in was much, much lower down in my range, much more relaxed and kind of breathy and just softer. I didn't have enough music to fill out a whole set of my own. So I worked on Yellowcard songs, and I reimagined them into these new sort of stripped down, more chill versions. When I get off the road in 2019 and the pandemic hits, I'm in the studio. I started a Patreon, and I was just recording and streaming and doing all the stuff to try to keep working when we couldn't tour and play shows. One of the things I did was record some of these re-imagined Yellowcard songs and give them to patrons when I had a Patreon community at the time.
And that led me to think this would be cool to make an album or an EP or something. And then that led me to think, what if I reached out to my friends and see if they wanted to come and do vocals on said EP. Everyone was really interested in it, but when you get guest vocals, you very often have to jump through a lot of hoops the label has to let it happen, it has to work with their schedule, the fee that you have to pay for the recording, all that kind of stuff. So there was a lot going into organizing and trying to get all these guest vocals on a record outside of the scene, outside of our genre. I had this one off-the-wall idea to reach out to Mark from Hammock and see if they wanted to do a song.
I connected with Mark via Twitter because I tweeted something about how much I love Hammock and how they were getting me through a tough time back in 2017 when the band was breaking up and I was really kind of going through it. They're one of my favorite artists on the planet. And so getting a message from him was rad. And then we realized that we both lived in Franklin, Tennessee at the time, so we linked up and we got lunch. We kind of started to become buds and spent some time together. So I had this idea in 2020, this is now two years later or so, but I had an idea, what if Hammock did one of the songs? So in the time that it took everybody to figure out whether or not they could do a guest vocal, whether their label was going to license it and all those things, Hammock just sent that song back.
They did it right away. They did a song called “Empty Street,” which is on the record. And for that track, what I did was just a piano and vocals. I mapped out the chords on a piano. I sang the song sort of in that lower register fitting with a more meditative, ambient, post rock kind of energy that Hammock brings. I sent those two tracks to them, and I said, “literally, do whatever you want. You don't have to use any of it, just do what you want. Make it a Hammock song.” And they did. I mean, I literally wept when I heard it because it was so moving. It was so intense to hear that song in that way. I think it's my second favorite on the record.
So what's your first favorite?
“A Place We Set Afire” is my favorite. But anyways, when I got that back, I talked to my manager at the time who's a good friend of mine that was helping me navigate the world of being a solo artist and post Yellowcard life and everything. And I said, "Hey, this has taken forever. What if I asked Mark if they just want to do an EP?" This would've come out William Ryan Key and Hammock. There was no Yellowcard. And we agreed it was a good idea. And so I reached out and I asked Mark if they want to do some more, and he was like, “yeah, let's send me some more tracks and we'll do it when we can get to it.”
But it was very chill, very relaxed, very like no timeline kind of thing. So in 2021 I was working on those songs, and Yellowcard got the offer for Riot Fest, later in 2021. And the Hammock guys were already working on these other three or four songs that I had sent them. When Yellowcard went in to do some pre-production together. This was the first time we've all been in the room together making music. At that point, six years or something, six-and-a-half years, and over whiskeys one night. I was like, “I got to play you guys this shit. You’ve got to hear this. I have this thing that I've been working on with Hammock, it's Yellowcard songs. It's crazy.” So I played it for them.
Everyone obviously was like, "What? This is amazing. Where did you get this?" I was like, "Well, I made it. We made it. What if we did more? What if we asked them? What if we made more of a release out of this?” And everyone was interested in that idea. So I went back to the Hammock guys again and I was like, "Hey, how about some more? You want to do more?" And we talked about Yellowcard now making the record a little bit more of a big deal as far as the amount of people who would hear it and the label we would have behind it and things like that. So they were excited. We were excited. I worked up a few more songs, just piano and vocals again. And fun side note, the songs were all chosen by fans on my Twitch channel. With the exception of “Ocean Avenue” and “Only One” because we had to do those two.
I was just about to ask how you chose the songs to be reimagined from your discography.
I would do polls and chats with five songs. So they're fan chosen, which is really cool. When I say they were fan chosen, I did have to sort of whittle it down. But I would give them ten and we'd whittle it down, and then I'd pick five more and we'd whittle that down, and they would kind of vote until one was the winner, and that's how we got the other seven songs. I mean, once we got going, we really didn't hear anything for a long time because they wanted to have it finished. When they sent it to us, I had heard some rough mixes that didn't have real drums on them and stuff. But then the sort of second half of the album once Yellowcard was really involved, I didn't hear any of those until they were done. They were like, "all right, the album's done. Here you go. Mixed. Master. Here it is." And we wanted it that way. We really just said, take this vocal and do Hammock. It's wild. I remember we all heard the newer songs for the first time, and they had the real drums and they were all mixed and it was just so gorgeous and moving. It gives the songs just this whole different meaning. It's like you take a pop punk song like “Ocean Avenue” and all of a sudden it's this heartbreaking song about loss and pain.
Listening to all of the songs and comparing them to the original ones, it's such an interesting example of how sonically different a song can sound when you remove a factor of it. When reinventing these songs, were you the one who creatively chose to really slow them down and make them more dreamlike? Or did that just authentically happen with Hammock doing it?
Well, I guess the initial, the tempo and the range of my vocals were chosen by me. So they would technically be sort of locked into the tempo of the song and the key of the song. But creative choices beyond what I sang, we, the band made no choices whatsoever. It was completely done by Hammock.
Granted, everyone's only heard one song, but I think people's response to the music is so much better than I was expecting. When you try something different like this, it's not that people dislike it, it's just that you do get a lot of responses that are in line with, “it's just not for me. I just prefer the original." We put “Ocean Avenue” out first and that's the most classic, most signature song for Yellowcard. But we're getting the exact opposite of, “nobody asked for this or we don't need this.” We're getting the classic social media response of, “I didn't know I needed this.”
That's amazing. That must be such a good feeling.
It is. It's such a good feeling because I do think that people, especially our most supportive and devoted fans who have been through it all with us. All of our different genre-bending records, and when we tried to do different things and when I went off on my own, they were going to be so moved by this record I think. But because we put “Ocean Avenue” out, the most recognizable song to sort of test the waters, it has certainly reached beyond that core fan base. I hope people are going to be really moved by the work that Hammock put into this, because I can't take credit. We the band, we're not taking credit for putting work into this thing. I literally cut some vocals and sent them over. That was work. But nothing compared to what they've done by completely building full, multi-track songs, mixed mastered up from the ground up. I mean, they basically made a new album from the songs. From scratch. It's amazing.
Well, when people are listening to all these new songs, much slower, much more dreamlike, I feel like there's a really strong nostalgic factor to it. At least that's how I interpret it when I listen. What's something that you really want people to take away?
Honestly, discovering Hammock. I think is my biggest hope for fans of our band, to have their ears opened and their minds opened to the post-rock and instrumental genre. It's changed my life as I'm getting older. I think that there's a lot of fans of Yellowcard that have never really experienced that kind of music. I really hope that people discover how nurturing and healing Hammock's music can be for your mind and your life. It has helped me through so many downturns in my life to listen to their music and just feel the emotion and the hope that they emulate in their songs.
Where did the name of the album come from?
Way back in 2020 when I was planning on doing it, I had that from the very beginning when it was just going to be a little EP. That's what I wanted to call it. It comes from a line from a song from “Lift A Sail,” which is my favorite Yellowcard album. The song is called “Illuminate” and the line is "climb a ladder up and hang a hopeful sign." And I just thought of this energy, I want it to feel uplifting.
After so many phases of being in a band, doing your solo project and coming back together, what does this specific album and project really mean to you at this phase of your life?
This is a passion project of mine that I never imagined would be releasing at the level that it is. The assets that we have to promote the album, Equal Vision Records, our partners in making music these days, supporting the album. Just immediately being on board with, "yes, this is incredible. We want to put this out." The vinyl record sold out. They sold out in two days, all of them. It's a project that I believed in so much. Again, my passion for these different genres of music and my love of Hammock and getting to share them with our fan base, it's so cool. I never thought that this little thing I was doing in my bedroom studio in 2020 would reach the heights that it has. I'm really grateful to the guys in Hammock for believing in Yellowcard and taking a risk to do something like this, because I know it took a lot of their time and energy. I wept when I heard it. It was just so incredible to hear a song that wasn't one of our huge songs by any means, move me in that way. Move us all in that way. So I just can't wait for the world to hear it. I really think now that we've put "Ocean Avenue" out and we've seen how excited people are that any kind of fear or worry about how it's going to be accepted has washed away. And now it's more like, "how far can this thing go?"