PLAIN WHITE T'S // Inside Their Parallel Universe

Over 20 years into their tenure, the Plain White T’s have made their biggest sonic departure to date.

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As its tongue-in-cheek title suggests, Parallel Universe shows a whole new side of the indie-pop stalwarts, trading their signature soft-rock hues for a bright and bounding chasm of synths and effects. With the album now out in the world (finally, after two years of writing and the journey of getting themselves back on a record label), we caught up with frontman Tom Higgenson to learn a little more about its backstory.

Parallel Universe! Congratulations on yet another massive release! How have the past few weeks been with this album finally out there in the world?
Thank you man! It just feels so good to have the album out. We finished it months ago, but then of course you have the mixing process and the mastering process, and you’ve gotta shoot the videos—y’know, all these things to lead up to the release of the album. So I’m just thankful that it’s finally out and we’re able to play a lot of the songs live.

The crowds seem to really love the new material—they’re singing along to all the songs already, so it’s just… I don’t know, we haven’t really put out a big release like this in a while. Our last album was self-released, and I don’t even know if it made it over to Australia, so this is a really exciting release for us. We’ve kind of rolled up our sleeves and we’re ready to just fight and tour and push this album with everything we’ve got, because we’re really proud of it and we’re really happy with the way it all turned out.

Do you have a favourite song from the record to play live?
It’s tough, because it’s seriously just so fun to play, like, every song. We’ve been closing all the shows with the last song on the album, End Of The World, and that’s a really fun closer because it gets everybody dancing. But I love playing all of the songs so far! One of my favourite songs on the album is called Lying About Me And You, and that’s one that we’re almost ready to play—we’re probably going to start playing that one in a couple of weeks, once we’ve rehearsed it a few more times, and I’m really excited to play that one. I think that one’s gonna really slam live.

This album saw you re-sign to Fearless Records after ten years apart. What brought you back?
So we went from Fearless up to a major label at Hollywood Records, which is owned by Disney, which is… It was great, y’know? It really was a perfect fit for us for a while, but they had a whole big management shift, our A&R left and all the staff was getting cut. It was like all the horror stories you hear about major labels—whenever there’s a big personnel shift, everything kind of gets shaken up.

And so we made this album with that they didn’t end up releasing; we had to fight for the rights to take the album, which was called American Nights, which we self-released a couple of years ago. We tried to release that one on our own and it just didn’t… We just couldn’t do it on our own. It wasn’t as easy as we hoped or anticipated. So with this new batch of songs, we knew that we needed to get back onto a record label, and Fearless was just the obvious choice.

We tried to find our own kind of sonic path, y’know? We experimented a lot in the studio to try and break new ground.

They were the first label to ever believe in us, they were the first label to ever take a chance with us, and we’ve remained friends with a lot of the label since we left that first time—Bob Becker, the head of the label, y’know, I went to his 50th birthday surprise party a few years ago! There’s always been a really a sense of family there, so it just made complete sense to return back to them—right back to where we started from.

Going into your eighth studio album with Plain White T’s, where did you want to take this sound and style that you’d established thus far? Like, would you say Parallel Universe took you guys very far out of your comfort zone?
I would say so, and intentionally too. We wanted to… I don’t know, I don’t want to say, “Shake it up,” because it’s like, music has just come so far since we started, y’know? We started the band playing in pop-punk shows, so we just cranked up the distortion and just went out and played. But music has come so far since then! You can make records that sound like the best thing you’ve ever heard, on a laptop in your bedroom. The way music is made has changed, the way it sounds has changed, and there’s been so many innovations and so many artists that we love who have come out of this new generation of music.

So we just wanted to say, y’know, “We don’t have to be this Hey There Delilah band.” That song got so big that for a while, we were kind of in the shadows of it. We were like, “Well, shit, we need those acoustic love songs on the album!” It was a bit of a mind-fuck because we didn’t know what it was about that song that made it click. We write those songs anyway! We love the love songs, y’know? But we kind of felt like we were forced to do that or to be that band because that song got so big.

And there’s nothing wrong with it – thank God that song got huge, y’know? It’s a huge milestone and a huge thing for us, so it’s great, but for the first time, we were able to really look at the band and say, “Hey, people didn’t fall in love with that song because it was on the acoustic guitar, they fell in love with it because it’s a great song! We don’t have to worry about fitting into some box. Let’s just write the songs that we think are great, and then let’s record them in a way that doesn’t sound like anything we’ve ever done, and hopefully anything that anyone else has done.”

We tried to find our own kind of sonic path, y’know? We experimented a lot in the studio to try and break new ground. We wanted to combine a little bit of a retro, ‘80s kind of vibe, with almost like a futuristic vibe. And we didn’t stop in the studio until we were like, “Holy shit, that is super cool! That’s it. That’s the sound.”

2019, we’ve gotta get our asses back [to Australia], for sure!

Did bringing a new sound into the mix give you an out to approach the writing in a different way?
I mean, a little bit. Y’know, a lot of the songs were written and demoed just on the acoustic guitar, like we always do, and were fleshed out in the studio. But there was definitely a few of the tracks—I’d say almost half the album—that we demoed up lot closer to being a full arrangement, musically. Bury Me was one of the first songs that we demoed, and we actually demoed that song twice, two different ways. And then in the studio, we actually took a third route with it, and that’s the route we ended up taking on the record.

Because we wrote… Light Up The Room was one of the first songs that Tim and I wrote together for the album, and that was towards the time we were done with the writing and about to record—we wrote Light Up The Room and demoed it with our friend Brandon Day, and y’know, we really had fun making that demo and pushing ourselves out of our comfort zone. And that was the demo that paved the way for the whole album.

We were like, “Okay, this is badass. We’ve set the bar here—every song has to be at least this cool or better now.” Once we had that kind of production model, we just were able to kind of bang them out a little bit. Call Me, Your Body, No Imitations and End Of The World—those all came within the last few weeks of writing before we went into the studio.

When can we expect to see you guys back in Australia?
Dude, let’s do it! I mean c’mon, we’ve only been there once, and that one of the coolest tours we ever did. I don’t have an answer for you, but I would say 2019, we’ve gotta get our asses back there, for sure!