Derek Sanders of Mayday Parade

The popularity of Mayday Parade has exploded over the last few years. The Tallahassee, Florida band released their major-label debut, Anywhere But Here, in 2009 and have been touring extensively all over the world. In early 2011 the quintet released an acoustic EP, Valdosta, which includes re-recordings of four fan favorites and two brand new songs.

Lead vocalist Derek Sanders, guitarists Alex Garcia and Brooks Betts, drummer Jake Bundrick, and bassist Jeremy Lenzo are collectively looking forward to the remainder of 2011 and beyond, with many exciting things for fans to look forward to. I recently spoke with Sanders about their upcoming projects and plans.

Everything seems to be pretty cool so far. Obviously the one point that is a little weird about it - the thing we were expecting people to judge kind of hard - is that we did a couple songs where Jake is singing the parts that Jason was singing before. But we loved doing it. I always appreciated when bands put out little side things, like B-sides or acoustic things.

We didn't spend a whole lot of time focusing it. We just did it fast in a studio close to hand. The record that we just finished is what we put most of our time into. We're actually playing one of the new songs from Valdosta, "Terrible Things," we're playing that one on the new tour.

Yeah, I'm so pumped. We've been to the UK three times now, we've been to Japan once, we've been to Australia twice. We're actually doing a whole lot more this year. Like you mentioned, we're going over to Europe, then Japan, and some of Southeast Asia. And then we're talking about going back to Australia as soon as we can. It's a lot of fun, a really great experience. The people are just unbelievable. It's great being able to go across the world and have a crowd of people who really just appreciate you being there and are all singing along.