Thursday’s Geoff Rickly on Reissues, the Future, and Selling Crockpots

In 2011, Geoff Rickly, the lead singer of Thursday, told The A.V. Club this while talking about what would ultimately end up being his band’s final album, No Devolución: “There are some good bands out there that love us, and that is awesome. But there are a lot of bad bands out there that love us, too.”

Reminded of as much in 2015 over the phone as he’s walking to a nearby studio, the singer laughs. “We definitely did,” he says. “For an era, yeah. I think saying that Thursday in particular inspired a lot of bad bands … I think that any band that sort of breaks through the zeitgeist and has a real moment will inspire a lot of copycat bands. There’s something in the nature of a band that’s just trying to copy another band. I mean, they’re not going to be very good. 

“I think for a while,” Rickly continues after pausing, “I really saw how many bad bands liked Thursday, and I would take it personally. Like, ‘Oh maybe there’s something in us that inspires people to be shitty.'”

He chuckles a shy sigh. 

“But that’s not it at all,” the singer concedes with humble empathy. “It’s just the fact that we were out there, inspiring people at all. … It was just the hot thing of the moment.”

The moment about which he is talking would be the post-emo/post-pop-punk/post-hardcore/post-anything-you-bought-at-Hot-Topic era of popular music in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Thursday, who were the much cooler, much smarter and much more interesting answer to pop radio bands like Fall Out Boy or New Found Glory, went on hiatus in November 2011. In January 2013, Rickly went public with the fact that the band had essentially called it quits. 

Which was a shame for more reasons than some might consider. They weren’t just a product of an uber-lucrative time for the major label distribution system; they were an exciting alternative to an era of rock music that felt particularly watered down with Cookie Monster voices, cut-time breakdowns, and increasingly unfortunate haircuts. They were poets, inserting occasional spoken-word verses in front of spastic grooves and angular guitars. You and your girlfriend easily fell in lust with Taking Back Sunday. But it was only you and your musician friends who loved Thursday.

And now, perhaps for some, you can fall in love all over again. On Collect Records, Rickly’s own imprint, is reissuing Waiting, the group’s 1999 debut LP, complete with remastered recordings, repackaged, all-new artwork, liner notes written by the singer, and, of course, three bonus tracks. The decision to mark the album’s 15-year anniversary came when the Thursday leader found out that the record had fallen out of print once Eyeball, the label that released it in the first place, went under. 

It wasn’t until recently, however, that Collect began ramping up its operations. Once that venture became a full-time job, Rickly says that it was obvious a Waiting reissue would happen, despite already thinking that there must be, “plenty of copies out there” due to it having already been in print a handful of times.

“I thought, we never released the demos, and it sounds pretty bad, so we should probably get it remastered,” the singer now explains, the tones of walking the city serving as background noise. “And at that point, it was almost 15 years since we put it out, so we thought that maybe we should put it all together as a nice thing for people to want.”

He looks back on that time in the band’s history with fond memories, noting how those recordings marked the first time Thursday ever played together as a band. As Rickly tells it, the songwriting that went into the production of Waiting was a process that single-handedly gave the group its footing and focus. And of all the set’s nine songs, there’s only one that the singer continuously goes back to while reflecting on the early days of his old running mates. 

“‘This Side Of Brightness’ particularly had a magic,” Ricky says with subdued enthusiasm. “It was easily the best thing we had ever done. I think ‘Porcelain’ live is a really incredible song, but ‘This Side Of Brightness’, though — I keep going back to it, but it’s an amazing little song.”

Which, for what it’s worth, is not exactly a sentiment he echoes while taking the time to dissect Waiting as a whole. When asked if there were things about the record he wishes he could change, Rickly bristles at the question before responding with immediacy. 

“Oh, I think it’s pretty terrible,” the frontman says matter-of-factly. “I think it’s pretty bad, actually. I’m clearly tone-deaf back then. I don’t know how I learned how to sing because clearly I couldn’t sing at all. Now, I can actually sing. I can carry a tune. It’s like, ‘I’m like a decent singer now!’ so, it’s really weird to hear it. 

“Mostly, it’s being surprised at the moments that did work,” he continues, swinging his criticisms around. “I think that record foreshadowed a lot of we would come to in the next 10 years, music-wise. I think Full Collapse was the one that influenced all the other bands, but we start shifting toward that on this record. We had moments where we showed a combination of what was going to come later.”

Still, getting to the “later” in that equation didn’t come easy. Alex Saavedra, founder of Eyeball, initially wanted to re-release Thursday’s demos, which the band were selling at shows to help get their name out. According to Rickly, he was so determined to make a full-length LP that he threatened the Eyeball CEO by telling him he would take his band elsewhere if it meant they would be given an honest shot at recording. 

Fifteen years later, the singer looks back on those negotiations light-heartedly, repeating how appreciative he was that any imprint at all was willing to take a chance on Thursday. 

“I was like, ‘Holy shit. I’m not going to waste our one chance to release something by putting a demo out; give me a record!'” Rickly recalls. “He was like, ‘Really? You’re going to look for another label if we just put out a 7-inch?’ But he was super-supportive. We have something in the liner notes about what it’s like to have somebody believe in your band when there’s not really any reason to. I just thought nobody would ever want anything from us again.”

He couldn’t have been more wrong. In 2001, Thursday would release Full Collapse on Victory Records. An album that would ultimately inspire those aforementioned copycat bands, both good and bad, in the years to come, it broke the group into the mainstream on the heels of singles “Understanding In A Car Crash” and “Cross Out The Eyes”. 

One fulfill-the-contract EP later and the band singed with Island Records, putting out 2003’s War All The Time, which climbed as high as No. 7 on Billboard‘s Top 200. All told, they would sell more than a million records before disbanding in 2011, not bad for a band who thought nobody would ever want anything from them after their 1999 debut. 

The victories (no pun intended) didn’t come without turbulence, though. There were countless reports of dissatisfaction with Victory during their time under that umbrella. They might have never even signed with them if Saavedra hadn’t seen bigger stages and brighter lights in Thursday’s future and forced a meeting between the band and a friend he knew who worked at the larger record label. 

“He had heard all the songs that would later become Full Collapse,” Rickly explains, “and I was like, ‘I don’t know if this is as good as Waiting.’ He was like, ‘You’re fucking crazy. I don’t even want to put this out because it’s so good and if the right people hear it, it will change everything.'”

And even though it did change everything for a sizable portion of the popular music lexicon in those days, it didn’t necessarily bring Rickly an everlasting sense of comfort. Having produced the first My Chemical Romance record and finding bands like Murder By Death to sign, the frontman was expanding his reach as far as he could, aiming to carve out a sustainable career in music. 

But then he put out a record by Midnight Masses on Collect. Featuring members of TV On The Radio and …And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of The Dead, Midnight Masses had all the ingredients for a successful venture. The project was met with tragedy, however, when TOTR’s Gerard Smith passed away at age 36 of lung cancer, and, as Rickly admits, nobody really knew what to do with the record from that point forward. It would quickly fade into obscurity. 

The development ultimately cost the singer somewhere between seven and nine thousand dollars, he estimates, which, as he explains now, is a large chunk of change for a touring musician in a band that never quite made it to rooms much larger than clubs. Ricky was forced to shut down Collect until only recently, when he was approached by others to jumpstart its existence. 

These days, the leader of Thursday sounds genuinely thankful as he sheds light on how he’s been able to keep a career in music for nearly two decades. There was a point, right after Thursday broke up, when he was forced to pick up a day job for about $11 an hour at a kitchen store. He enjoyed his time there, he insists, but it came with an ample amount of perspective that he could only gain by coming face to face with the reality of making ends meet financially. 

“The most important thing to me with having a career in music,” he says, “is thinking, ‘Is there anything else I could do that would matter to me as much as music? And if not, am I ready to do whatever it takes to remain in music?’ And once you answer those questions, all things can come and go. 

“You have to really humble yourself sometimes,” Rickly continues. “And that’s kind of it. The commitment to be a part of art has never wavered for me. It’s just been harder sometimes. What I live on is music and art; it just makes life worth living.”

Yeah, but does he plan on sticking with music forever now, even if it sometimes means selling crockpots by day and rocking stages by night?

“If I can,” he responds quickly. “Everybody has to make a living. I didn’t come from money and I certainly didn’t make enough with Thursday to not have to worry about it. But if I can, I always will. In some shape or form, I’ll always try to be involved, even if at some point, I have to take a totally different job somewhere in Iowa or something, doing office work, I’ll try to get back to music. I always thought of it as a stream. You jump in the stream and it carries you along. While you’re making music, you’re adding to the water in the stream. It’s sort of always flowing, and you’re just part of it for a second, you know?”

There’s still one question for which so many fans will forever hold out hope: could Thursday ever make a comeback? Will Rickly’s most popular music venture ever decide to hop back into the stream one more time, somewhere down the line? 

“Man, I wish,” the singer responds. “The door’s not slammed shut, but every so often, I see some of those guys, and it’s like … the other night, the two guitar players from Thursday saw each other and it was the first time since our last show. Like, it’s just not a thing. I think we could plan for another five years and we would get about that close. I don’t really know how that happened, but it seems to just be the way it is. 

“It’s different,” he asserts. “With the label, I have the chance to do some really important work, still, but it’s not the same as Thursday. It doesn’t have that thing that Thursday had. And even No Devotion (one of his current bands) is very, very near and dear to my heart and the songs are amazing, it’s just not …”

He trails off before composing himself again. 

“Thursday was a moment,” the singer concludes. “It was a thing. I’d love to have that thing back because I know that it will be the most important musical thing that I’ll ever do, so I’d love to do it again. But I don’t see it happening.”

And with that, Geoff Rickly hangs up his phone to step into a studio, Waiting for what might, or might not, come next.