Part 1

I'm sure you've gotten this question a thousadn times, but how exactly did Reported Failure start?
Well, me Matt and Adam had been in this band in I think it was sophmore year, but it fell apart after about a month. Then we were in another band without Adam but with these other kids at our highschool. Both of them weren't very serious. The songs we wrote were absolutely horrible. Then it was the summer after senior year and Me and Matt decided to finally start a serious band. At that point I think we did it simply because we loved music and wanted to spite our parents who were pressuring us to go do something real withour lives and get real jobs and go to college. We had Adam join on drums. At first we were a three piece and Matt was doing vocals. Then we saw Billie playing this acoustic set. Even then he just had a quality that was both full of swagger and power but was also extremely sensitive. I think we asked him that night if he wanted to join. By the end of that summer we had begun writing songs that would become some of the songs on I've Know You.

So at this point you were still very unknown outside of your town. What did you do at this point to promote yourself?
Over summer we were able to get some small gigs easily because we could attract thirty of our friends from highschool. Once they all went off to college and what not we were kind of stuck. Our solution was to all pile into my van and play across from schools during lunch hours. We would also do every open mic show we could find nearby. Eventually we did things like drive to San Francisco for the weekend and just play music on the streets and hand out flyers. We did that basically until we finally could book decent local shows.

Did you release anything before I've Know You?
It was a quite bizzare thing. We somehow heard about this guy who had really nice recording equipment. He would let local bands use it in exchange for favors. So we went and recorded a few songs. Then we found out the truth behind this guy. He would accept little jobs from people for howe er much money he was getting, and then he'd have these bands just do it for him. It sounds like something ridiculous out of a movie but he had us walking about tn dogs through the streets of Sacramento. In the end we made a little self titled EP and we burned it onto some CD's and sold them at shows.

The story that I've foind says that you were playing a gig and someone from a record company went and you were eventually signed for two albums. I that basically what happened?
Yes. It's really not an interesting story.

So, did you have anything specific that you wanted to accomplish when you went in to record I've Known You?
At that point we just wanted to make great music. It wasn't a concept album, we weren't trying to do anything very progressive, we just wanted to make music that kids would connect with and that we liked. The result was basically a pop punk album.

Then, the story goes that you wrote Flux of the Run while on tour. How exactly does the story go?
We were basically on tour nonstop from the time we recorded I've Known You to the time I decided to start Nomad Records. So yes, after I've Known You was released we wrote Flux of the Run at the time we just wanted to slow down. I think it really shows on the album. Most of the songs are really about that want to just slow down.

You have a song called "The Call" that is going to be on the best of album, but what is the story behind it?
It was going to be on Flux of the Run. I honestly don't know why it wasn't. I think at the time we were looking at the songs we had and decided that we wanted to have the more experimental songs on the album instead of another song that could easily be a single.

Flux of the Run is great. It is very different from your other albums. It has a very 1990s early grunge meets some sort of Dashboard Confessional emotional acoustic thing. Why did this sound arise,and why do you think that it isn't present on the other albums?
I think that it was just the sound that seemed like the next step for us. We were feeling darker at that point with just frusteration and anger which is where the grunge sound came in. At the same time there was a heartbreak factor which resulted in the acoustic more emotional sound.

Part 2

What was your original mindset for starting Nomad Records?
I basically looked at everything that our label was doing for us and decided that I could try to do it just as well on my own.

Not to turn this into your acceptance speech at the academy awards, but is there someone, or a group of people that without them Reported Failure and Nomad Records wouldn't be where they are now? And what did those people do?
I am incredibly lucky to have a legidimate friend who really knows the business side like the back of his hand. Without him Nomad Records would probably be bankrupted by now, and Reported Failure as we know it wouldn't exist. Mostly, how Nomad got started was me calling up any friend who knew somebody who knew somebody who knew how to do stuff like get a record distributed, or how to do a headlining tour. It's also incredible that some of these people believed in the music enough to help out for what was practically minimum wage. I could go on forever. Basically the only reason that everything exists how it is today is because people believed in the music and invested their time and money into making, promoting, and selling it.

Obviously Disarm did rather well. But how long did it take for you to actually make any money off of it?
Well, everything was a big operation. Basically if Disarm hadn't done well then Nomad would have been broke. We put every penny we had into it. Off of the album and merch we got our money back I'd say it was sometime during the Disarmed Tour. Basically there were about 20 people who put every penny they had into my crazy idea. In the end they got their pennies back plus a few extra, but even after that there was still a struggle.

How did the Disarmed Tour idea come around and what made it possible?
We definately were very aware of the size of the Reported Failure fanbase. We looked at other artists that were doing headlining tours and basically said that although we weren't number one on every chart we could still attract as many kids to go to shows. We had basically a week of meetings just to figure out if we could do it with what was our budget. It was definately taking a leap of faith that we would seel the amount of tickets we needed to in order to turn a profit.

You turned a profit after all of this, but when did you actually realize that you were ok and the risk of having to sleep on the street was greatly diminished?
I know we'll get to more of this later, but thank god for Riot! in the Boulevard. I'll tell the story about living in my car later but basically Nomad Records was going nowhere and then suddenly we sign Riot! and mainstream audiences connected with it. We'll get to all of that later though.

What were you forced to learn the fastest after starting Nomad?
If you want to make a big production record and sell it in as many places as you can it gets extremely expensive extremely fast. Distribution costs kill.

So, in the begining, why didn't you sign with a major label?
We met with a lot of people. Flux of the Run got some attention, but the problem was that although it is great we didn't want to make version two of it. We already had this big idea in our heads and most of the songs were written. Everyone told us that Reported Failure was going to be the next big thing, that we were going to play this festival, go on these tours, and basically make an album full of songs that sounded like Short and Hope to Get Out. Although most of that sounded great, it all seemed very phony. Then one night we were all starting to work on some demos and we realized that there was one radio friendly song on Disarm.

Speaking of Disarm, why a big concept album, and why was the time right for it? Because if you look at someone like Green Day, they didn't make a concept album until ten years after they broke through.
I think maybe we just got bitter at the world or hit sort of an activism phase faster than they did. What I've noticed about Reported is that we either just want to write catchy punk songs or we want nothing to do with that and we want to write something deeper. With Disarm we wanted to go deeper and it shows. The songs are more subtle. We just all felt like we wanted to make what was essentially an anti-war album. The details and full concept came through more brainstorming.

Billie Beckett recently did an interview and was asked what his favorite Reported Failure song was and he said it was Disarm. So my question now is what is your favorite Reported Failure song?
That is tough. I can say with confidence that my favorites to play are I Know You and The Cure to Growing Older. My favorite to listen to might be something off of the new record. Maybe Manufactured Radio or Everything We've Done.

The breakup. For the sake of people who don't know the story, how did it happen?
Everyone wants to hear me say that so and so was just a dick and I couldn't stand to be around anyone in my band anymore, but that isn't the case. We never said that Reported Failure was over, just none of us knew. We stopped touring after we did one tour for Flux of the Run and then we dealt with all of the label stuff as we were writing Disarm. Then we all had to stress about the fact that we put all of our money into this reord label, and then we had to record Disarm, then it was released we did the Disarmed Tour and we were still somewhat broke. At that point Billie said he was going to make a solo album that he had been writing. Adam basically was done with Reported Failure. I'm not going to talk complete shit about him but at that point we could tell he wanted out. Matt obviously was struggling with his bipolar disorder, and I was trying to figure out where to go with Nomad Records. So after that tour we just all went home. We only brokeup in the sense that none of us at the time had intentions of getting the band back together.