The new album, the band's lead vocalist and bassist Tyson Ritter says he had no idea he was going to experience so much life in the three years between the band's last record and this one. “I went from the floor to standing up, and I think the whole record reflects that thematically,” he said. “It’s about a guy losing his way and finding it through reflection and self-realization.
“We started out having two songwriters, Nick [Wheeler] and I. We’ve always just put together collections of songs to compose a record. We would take writing trips, where we’d write five songs at once, in a house in Chicago. That’s been how our songs have seemed cohesive as records [in the past]. This record actually had a story. We realized we weren’t putting together a collection of songs for the first time, but we were actually putting together a record that told a story.”
“[The] music climate has changed so much for bands, especially bands with guitars in their hands… our contemporaries, our colleagues, have burnt themselves out, it seems,” frontman Tyson Ritter told Billboard Magazine during an interview on the set of the music video shoot for “Beekeeper’s Daughter.” “The great thing about our position as a rock band on a major label, we’ve had this confused place for so long, that 10 years later, we’re still sort of making people scratch their heads going, ‘Why am I still loving this band?’
The entire album was produced by Grammy-nominated producer Greg Wells, who is known for his work with Adele, Katy Perry, and OneRepublic, among many others. “Greg was the first producer we’ve worked with who really spoke my language, which translated into the sound of the album,” Ritter commented. “If you really want to know what Kids in the Street sounds like, it sounds like The All-American Rejects finally got their shit together and wrote a record that was going to keep them around.”