In the midst of a month-long road trip touring through medium-sized cities throughout the country, the Bayside boys have been performing almost every night since late January. But the four New Yorkers keep trekking, just like the title of their latest album, “The Walking Wounded,” suggests.

“It feels good to be back on the road,” said the band’s bassist, Nick Ghanbarian, who took some time out of his uneventful Mardi Gras to chat.
Ghanbarian, a Long Island native, said though the quintessential Long Island sound is that of the emo kids who make up Taking Back Sunday, his hometown music scene kept him in tune with fresh sounds. Bayside takes a more Midwest approach with its punkish, alternative rock melodies, he said. “We don’t want to live the Long Island life,” he said.
The band has seen a considerable amount of reshuffling – nine members have come and gone since the band’s 2000 inception – but its current lineup has been together for two solid years. The late drummer John “Beatz” Holohan died in an early-morning bus accident in 2005 after the band had left a Colorado show and was making its way to Wyoming. Ghanbarian was seriously injured.
“The Walking Wounded” reflects the band’s healing process to overcome these setbacks. “We want to keep moving forward,” he said. “Bad things will happen, but we muscled through it. We just figured out what we needed to do. The biggest things is that we wanted to continue with the band.”
The album’s theme diverges from that of Bayside’s second album that dealt primarily with an apathetic view of the growing pains that seemed to plague the band.
“The whole album is about perseverance,” he said. “We certainly want to be a positive influence in peoples’ lives.”
Ghanbarian also said the musicians took chances with different instrumentation, experimenting with piano and an oboe in the album, which peaked at 75 on the U.S. Billboard charts.
“It kind of sounds a little Showtunes-esque,” he said, adding that the band aimed to not produce the “same Bayside song over and over.”
As the music industry struggles to adapt to the ever-growing amount of illegal downloaders, Bayside stays grounded. The band is not necessarily in a position that its CD sales matter more than concert attendance. “We’re more concentrated on people coming out to our shows,” Ghanbarian said.
“I think our music is pretty powerful. It’s certainly not something that someone from the ages of 10 to 50 can’t listen to. If anything we’re just learning how to write better songs. We’re going with the formula we’ve found.”
Until his Eugene show Monday, Ghanbarian is just focused on moving forward to the next city on the map, and hoping for a hotel room and hot shower.
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