Brian Logan Dales of The Summer Set Reflects on Getting Older, & The Joy of Not Fitting In

There was a time when Brian Logan Dales was questioning his place in music, and in life.

That time was 12 years ago.

The Summer Set frontman remembers, “We finished Warped Tour, and did some shows with Carly Rae Jepsen right off the tail end of ‘Call Me Maybe,’ and I remember on Warped Tour, the commentary was like, ‘Oh, they’re the pop band,’ and then on Carly, we were like the rock band. So it was like, where do we fit in? Like, I don’t understand.”

The question lingered in Brian’s mind, and would lead to him writing the song “Figure Me Out,” which led off the band’s 2016 album, Stories For Monday, with the lyric, “I’m a bit too pop for the punk kids / But I’m too punk for the pop kids / I don’t know just where I fit in.”

Reflecting on that lyric, and the feeling that inspired it, he says, “Now, if you ask me 10 years later, I don’t want to fit in anywhere, and I love that.”

A decade after penning “Figure Me Out” – and one band breakup, and reformation later – Brian has figured quite a few things out, and many of those revelations are on The Summer Set’s latest album, Meet Me At The Record Store.

It’s pop punk from a grown up POV, and he isn’t the only one who’s grown up.

Many fans fondly remember the song “Chelsea” from the band’s 2009 debut album, Love Like This. Brian has an update on the subject of that song – “Chelsea surprised us at a Summer Set show in Phoenix recently. She just got married.”

If that makes anyone feel old, that’s OK. There are many great aspects of reaching a new phase in life, and that’s what a lot of Meet Me At The Record Store is about.

I caught up with Brian to find out more about the album, including what he and the band are doing differently this time around, as well as how a song about aging became a centerpiece, and his discovery of the most toxic relationship he’s ever been in.

With Meet Me At The Record Store how are your goals different this time around? 

The goals are different because, and I don’t mean this in a lazy way, but the goals are different because there aren’t any.

I mean that in a healthy way.

I want the best for this. I want to make the biggest album in the world, that would be awesome, but I actually think what’s been best for us, at least with this album, is – I want to make the best thing we can, and service the people who already listen to us, and if that’s all that happens, job well done. I’ll be very proud.

If doors open, and we get to run through them at full speed, and say yes to everything, then that’s great, too, but lowering my overall level of expectation has been one of the better things that’s ever happened to me. Just not setting myself up to fail, because you end up kind of never being satisfied with anything that happens.

I think when I look back at the 10 years we were a band before we broke up, so many really cool things happened to us that I didn’t really fully appreciate in the moment, because I was so hell bent on figuring out what’s next, like how do we keep going? How do we go forward? Not really being able to see the forest for the trees.

The year we did the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, and the iHeartRadio Festival, and all that stuff around Legendary, I didn’t really stop to smell the flowers at all. I just kind of was like, OK, let’s keep going.

That said, this time around, it’s like – hey, I want to just enjoy every moment. I want to enjoy the process of making this. It was the single best process we’ve ever had making an album.

I’m just so happy that it’s out in the world, and people really love it, and I just hope inch by inch, day by day, it reaches more people.

You always have both hilarious lyrics, and remarkably touching, deeply confessional lyrics. How have you seen the balance between the two shift over the years? 

I don’t know if I’ve seen a shift. I think it’s less about a shift, and more like refined.

I think it’s something I take a lot of pride in.

In my off time I’ve done a lot of theater, musical theater, as a writer, and as a performer. My wife’s an actor, and I don’t remember who said it to me, but in so many ways I learned that sometimes the funniest thing is actually maybe the saddest, and sometimes the saddest thing is also maybe the funniest. It just kind of depends on how you look at it, and how there’s beauty in both.

I remember when Legendary came out, we were on tour with All Time Low, and I remember one night being on like being in a bar with (All Time Low frontman) Alex Gaskarth, and him talking about the song “Legendary,” which is, “I spent too many nights watching How I Met Your Mother alone.” I don’t remember exactly how he phrased it, but he was basically like – man, it’s really impressive that like, don’t take this the wrong way, that you can say sort of the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard in the entire world, and make it like really important, and heavy, and profound.

I remember that being really impressionable on me.

I love a pop culture reference. I love a lot of hip-hop, and hip-hop does that very well, and I think being able to refine the combination of sarcastic, cultural, and confessional/emotional, if I can nail all three at one time, then that’s my sweet spot. So it’s more like I’ve spent a lot of time refining.

You have all three of those with the song “34.” 

Yeah.

Other than turning 34, what inspired you to share what you share on that song? 

Well, it’s crazy, because I’m about to turn 36.

I didn’t think that song would come out. I wasn’t even planning on finishing that song.

The story of that song is we were on tour on my birthday (November 19th), so that would have been almost two years ago, in the UK. We were playing in Birmingham, England. That time of year in the UK, every city has like a little Christmas village. The city centers are all decorated with Christmasy stuff. So I’d wake up every morning on the bus, and I would get a coffee, and walk around these Christmas marts, and just look around, and I think I’ve had a better appreciation – this goes back to what I was saying before – like really appreciating, or really taking stock in what we were doing.

I didn’t even, when I was younger, really appreciate the fact that to wake up every day in a different city, that’s really cool. Like go see what the people of the world are like in their everyday lives. I remember on this UK tour really taking that in when I would wake up, and every morning I would just walk these Christmas marts, and see these people doing Christmas shopping, and the joy, and the cheer.

So I’m walking around the morning of my birthday and I was kind of writing it in my head as like a silly little jingle. Like, “I turned 34 today, the hair in my beard is turning gray,” The Shaquille O’Neal thing, these were all just silly things in my head, and I was like, you know, it’s kind of funny, maybe I’ll write a verse and chorus, and I’ll surprise play it in the middle of our set when I normally sit down at the piano, and I won’t even tell the band. I think that’ll be really fun.

I played it, and it went really well, and I remember afterward (guitarist) John (Gomez) being like, “What the fuck dude, where did that come from?”

I just kind of thought that was it, and John was like, “No, you should finish that song. That’s the thing. That’s your new ‘Legendary.’”

I think I’ve tailed off the actual question here, but what I love about that song is it was just a commentary on the life around me, and getting older.

There’s the moment in that song where I remember realizing I have now been in The Summer Set for longer than I’ve not been in The Summer Set. Like in my life, on this earth, I have spent more time in this band than I have not in this band, like. That’s crazy.

Then there’s the second chorus – “I’m scared that I’m not any closer, and all the best songs have been sung, but as long as I keep going forward, I’ll find another one” – that moment summarized the whole thing to me. It’s like, hey, you know what, sometimes I feel like there’s no way to get ahead, every good song has been written, but you just keep going, and sometimes it’s a silly little song like this one.

I think that really made me understand what that song was really about, which is being grateful for every day, the gratitude of age. It’s been a privilege getting to grow up in this band.

Continuing with lyrics, on “I Don’t Want To Party” you sing, “Tell Phish to play Shania Twain. Please tell me you, or someone you love, once actually yelled to the band Phish to play Shania Twain. 

No, unfortunately not.

There’s a guy who lives here in L.A. who works for idobi Radio named Mike Fishkin. Everyone just calls him Fish.

He’s a radio DJ, but there’s a bar that I’m talking about on “I Don’t Want To Party” called On The Rox that’s above The Roxy here in L.A. It’s a scene. It was my regular night out for a long time, and Fish would DJ most nights of the week there. So that was a shout out to him because he always liked to play, “Man! I Feel Like a Woman!”

That’s cool, but I had this great vision of someone yelling to the band Phish. 

I’m going to do that now, too. Yeah, let’s see Phish.

You also have some callbacks to previous songs. You have the line about “Boomerang” on “Algorithm & Blues,” and I feel like you’re really close with “the monster under your bed” to “the monster in your bed.” Are these a wink to the hardcore fans who’ve been there from the start? 

There’s a monster in bed reference on almost every Summer Set album.

At first it was an accident, and now it’s kind of a fun running theme.

And the song, “Algorithm & Blues,” I really wanted to write a song that on its surface level looked like it was about like a relationship gone toxic, but if you combed through each lyric, that toxic relationship for me is the music industry itself.

(The “Boomerang” line) was about a night I was at an up an coming band’s show, and this A&R was in the room from a different label who I had known. I won’t name any names. I didn’t know him well, but he kind of played too cool, and I went to talk to him, and I was like, yeah dude, I know you know this song (“Boomerang”).

It was kind of this moment of – man, you keep inviting me to the party, and asking me to leave. Like that sort of relationship.

I remember in 2013, when we put out “Boomerang,” it was going to radio, and it was doing pretty well. We were getting invited to the big radio schmoozy sort of dinners and parties. Then one day, overnight, the song got pulled, and it was over.

It took me a long time to unpack that without even me really realizing.

We almost broke up making Stories For Monday because I spent so much time when the rug got pulled out from under us thinking – well fuck, now we just need a better song.

Stories For Monday almost never happened because I just didn’t think any song was good enough.

I spent a long time unpacking the feeling that the politics of the pop radio industry pulled the rug out from under us, and that song (“Algorithm & Blues”) was a callback to that period. “I’m trying to get inside of your head” – that’s me trying to write a song that sticks with you.

You’re about to hit the road again. At this point you could probably fill six or seven hours with your music. How are you going about choosing a set list, and is it going to vary from city to city? 

It won’t vary a ton on on the Marianas Trench tour, because we’re going to try to keep that pretty locked, and dialed. We’re playing mostly new songs.

I think we’re going to play for, obviously, some people who know our band, but for first time in a long time we’re touring with a band that has a bit of a different fan base than us that we haven’t fully been in front of, and we’re going to try to put our best foot forward, and play a lot of new songs.

What we’ll do every night is there’ll be two spots in the set, and we’ll rotate between five older songs every night, and rotate a new song every night, as well. So if we play nine or ten songs, seven or eight will be the same every night, and then two or three will be a little rotation. But we’re making a choice to play a lot of new songs.

Finally, one of my favorite questions to ask, and it may not apply to you because you may have always had GPS, but what’s the most lost you’ve ever been on the road, and how did you find your way to where you needed to be? 

This was early in our life (as a band), and we might have had the Garmin, or TomTom GPS thing by then, but I’ll never forget it. This was back in 2008, maybe like our first year being a band. We were supposed to play in Flagstaff, Arizona, and we were coming down from Las Vegas, or Colorado, or something like that. We went the wrong way on I-40, and ran out of gas going the wrong direction in a part of Arizona where you have no cell phone service. So we were stranded, freezing cold in the dead of winter Northern Arizona.

We were 18, and we were really stupid.

Those two things go together. 

Yeah, it was brutal. We couldn’t get enough service to call anyone.

I don’t actually remember how we managed to get out of it, but we survived.

I remember our van ran out of gas, and then our battery dying, so we couldn’t keep the heat on, so we’re just freezing, with no phone service, and no gas.

We missed the show. There was a whole can of worms that happened.

But you somehow survived. 

Yeah, I don’t even remember (how).

For more of The Summer Set, including where you can see them on tour, check out thesummerset.com.