Taking Back Sunday singer Adam Lazzara goes 'Behind The Setlist'

On the latest episode of Behind The Setlist , Adam Lazzara , frontman for Taking Back Sunday joined Label Logic ’s Jay Gilbert , and Billboard's Glenn Peoples , to talk about their latest album 152 , how to create the perfect setlist, and more.

LISTEN NOW: Behind The Setlist - Adam Lazzara (of Taking Back Sunday)

Starting off with the story behind 152 , Adam clarified the meaning behind the album title, to the curiosity of Jay and Glenn, who admittedly “read different things online.”

“Chances are with the internet, you’re getting very mixed signals. So… the whole band’s from Long Island, but I’m from North Carolina. I grew up in Alabama, raised in North Carolina, and then moved to New York to join the band.”

He continued, “and the town I grew up in in North Carolina is a town called High Point, which up until recently was considered the furniture capital of the world. But with where High Point is… anything coming through, shows, it either went to Chapel Hill in Raleigh or down to Charlotte. So at the time it was mainly Chapel Hill, like Cat’s Cradle and all that stuff. So, for us to drive there it took like an hour, an hour and a half… So exit 152, there’s a stretch of highway, it’s 85 and 40, they come together, and there’s an exit there, and that was like the halfway point, or like the meeting point for us. So then, when we were able to like put a record out… I asked the guys” knowing “it was a thing for just me and like my friends from back home.”

Honing in on what the title truly represents, Lazzara expressed, “touring is the only thing we ever wanted, but with that comes the reality of” missing a lot. “So that was a way to just kind of let our people know like ‘hey you’re still a huge part of it.’”

About to head out on tour, Adam also delved in to how Taking Back Sunday goes about creating the perfect setlist.

While in the early days, “it used to be ‘here’s are whole first record,’ cause it’s all the songs we had,” Adam shared. Nowadays, “it has become a lot more difficult cause there’s…,” now as Jay previously posed it… “an embarrassment of riches.” "Cause we don’t want to to bum anybody out that is going out of their way to go to a show. But then at the same time we want to be doing things that we’re most excited about.”

“So like the big thing is," Adam added, “we just look at the show the same way as sequencing a record… Or like in the way a movie runs, you want it to have that ebb and flow.” But of course all of that changes when creating a setlist for a festival, which Taking Back Sunday recently did for Coachella , noting that was “the longest setlist conversation we’ve had in a long time.”

Adam also discussed Taking Back Sunday merch, revealing the story behind the “LOOK AT THIS BOOT” shirt, the concept behind the album’s visuals, and more. To hear it all, listen to the entire episode above.