Major League have reunited to celebrate the 15th anniversary of their debut album The Truth Is… with the record’s first ever vinyl pressing. Pre-orders are available now. We have a track by track below; check it out!
Writing The Album
The Truth Is... was recorded in the summer of 2010 in Lancaster PA. We had just spent the last year and a half straight out of high school signed to a major label production deal and unable to do anything without a chain of approvals. We were finally free to be an actual band again and our first order of business was to take all the songs we were quietly writing that we knew would never get approved under our deal and jam it into a 25 minute little ripper. Major League was here.
Track 1. I Don't Like You, Whatsoever.
IDLYW was written as a parody. Around that time (2009-2010) it felt like every band was mixing the classic pop punk sound with the hardcore aesthetic of breakdowns, singing something about being a pirate or a sailor and then slapping "easycore" across it. The intro to this song was the song "Hometown Heroes" which was what initially scored us our production deal but because of the label owning it at the time, legally we couldn't use it, however we could sample up to 10 seconds of it so we decided to do exactly that.
Track 2. What You Make Of It
A pop punk band writing a song about wanting to leave their hometown? Visionaries. Hahaha I'll be honest, when we first started talking again it had been over a decade since I listened to this EP. When this song came on I had an out of body experience. "We wrote this?!" It's your quintessential down the middle pop punk and as much as I cringe when I hear it, I can find the charm in being so young and angsty hahaha.
Track 3. Take Me
Take Me was the first song written for this EP. We had just gotten home from a summer tour playing very early versions of some of these songs and Take Me was the only one from fruition to final recording that never changed. Nick and I were living together and would spend most of our nights up till 4am riffing ideas - most of which got canned or shelved for later uses but I remember Take Me took us all of maybe 30 minutes to write, demo and stamp for approval. It still stands as one of our favorites.
Track 4. Six Ways To Lie
A diss track. hahaha. We were in a really tumultuous relationship with a manager that we kind of got swindled by. He had heard about our potential deal at the time and swooped in with a very used car salesman pitch and - us being naive teens who had only dreamed of such opportunity sunk our teeth right in. It wasn't until we were nearing the end of our deal that we started to realize we were being heavily taken advantage of by both parties and our own manager was the ringleader.
Track 5. Head Up, Kid!
Easily one of our favorites. The instrumentals were from a different song we had played on that summer tour before the album but lyrically we just never really resonated with it. It was a hodgepodge of nonsense and when we came home and began scaling out the record for pre production I felt like this song could use a "tour story". It was the hottest summer of my life in a van with no working AC and three weeks of meeting the most eclectic people you could imagine and that's where this needed to land. It's still one of the most fun to play and Nick and I's back and forth banter on this one broke way for so many vocal dynamics moving forward for us.
Track 6. From States Away
Every so often you write a song that from the jump gives you that "oh yeah, this is it" feeling. It's rare if I don't question or doubt a song's potential even if it's a song I'm proud of or excited about, but that was never the case with FSA. From the moment I brought it to Nick I was like "I have our single, this will change things". It's the song our label was begging us to write all along, it just came a few months too late for them but just in time for us.
Track 7. The Truth Is...
Originally a song written in my backyard over coffee and cigarettes one morning turned into a defining moment for our band. We were just about done wrapping up the record and about to go home and I just felt that what we had written for the last track was not it. It erupted into an all out yelling match in the studio and ended with us all walking away. I thought this was it - I'm out.
I walked around Lancaster PA for the better part of an afternoon and thought about my life, who I was, who I wasn't and whether the was or wasn't were the parts that defined me most. I went back to the studio, we had a long talk, a good cry, and with the last few hours of time we had left there we cranked out a closer that felt so defining, we made it the album title.