A Utah pop-punk band’s latest track has become its most meaningful to date, and it came about by accident, according to the band’s drummer, Jonathan Hoopes.
The band, The Last Gatsby, was getting ready to record its third album back in 2015 when “Life Lessons” was created. The song, officially released Friday, marks the band’s comeback after a six-year hiatus.
(Tim Burton) The Last Gatsby, a band from Provo, Utah, is making a comeback.
Hoopes said the song was originally meant to “close the book” on the band back in 2018. Now, the new release seeks to usher listeners back into the group’s catalog.
“The song never came out … for [almost] 10 years, it’s just [been] sitting there. It was really painful,” Hoopes said. “Once we put it out, it’s like, ‘Oh, this wasn’t closing the book.’ This was literally starting a new chapter.”
The song is 3 ½ minutes long, a nostalgic nod to early 2000′s pop-punk. It’s a transportation device of sorts, with an amped-up bridge featuring a harsh, screamo touch, with lyrics such as, “Life’s chances are slim, not always the best. But you give what you’ve got ‘til you got nothing left.”
Bassist and secondary vocalist Chase Gerber said he would describe the band’s sound as a “more aggressive” version of Blink-182.
In the almost decade since its creation, the song has been dusted off and has taken on a new, more meaningful life. In 2018, lead vocalist Josh Paul was diagnosed with oligodendroglioma, a rare type of brain cancer. Since then, Paul has gone through two surgeries to remove the tumor, but in June, he learned that cancer had returned.
With the understanding that time is “more precious than ever,” The Last Gatsby is set to return to the Utah music world.
“At that time, I had no idea I had cancer,” Paul said of originally creating the song. “A lot of the lyrics I wrote really kind of speak to the struggle that it’s been for me. …. I wrote lyrics that really kind of connected to who I am and what I was going through in the future at this time without knowing it.”
Origins and the road to a comeback
The band’s journey began in Provo in 2012, and the group now consists of four members: Paul, Hoopes, Geber and guitarist Garrett Samuelson. There also is a ghost member, West Winner, whose recording of rhythm guitar is on “Life Lessons.”
Paul and Hoopes met while serving missions for The Church of Jesus-Christ of Latter-day Saints in Paris.
“Josh and I knew we were going to be friends because I was sitting at a desk, and I’m always tapping my fingers or something, and I tapped a specific pattern,” Hoopes recalled. “[Paul] said, ‘Hey, is that ‘First Date’ by Blink-182?’ And I’m like ‘How did you know?’”
Originally, Paul started the band with other individuals who are no longer involved. Hoopes ended up settling down in Arizona, and when he saw the previous band members leaving, he messaged Paul and offered to play drums.
Paul met Samuelson through work, and Gerber joined the band a little over a year before the members went on hiatus. During the height of the band’s career, The Last Gatsby performed on the Vans Warped Tour in 2014, and with other bands like Tiny Moving Parts.
After two albums and five years of performing, they went on hiatus, but not because of any tough conversations or conflicts between members. In fact, according to Gerber, when a show in Denver got canceled, the band simply didn’t play after that.
“Life was pulling us all in different directions at that time, too,” Paul said.
Epitomizing the sound of The Last Gatsby
Paul said before he wrote the song in 2015, he’d been thinking about the concepts of the lyrics for “Life Lessons” — particularly the idea of falling asleep at the wheel in life, which makes up the beginning of the chorus.
When they met for band practice and everyone else tuned their instruments, Paul would listen to the other members.
“If I heard something that was played by someone that I thought could be a song, I would stop everyone and say, ‘OK, let’s work on that,’” he said. “This particular day, I was sitting there listening, and Garrett played this bit that is the actually the intro and main rhythm guitar part to ‘Life Lessons.’”
“Everyone brought their own little kind of parts,” Samuelson said. “We didn’t even want to stop that practice until that song was finished.”
In that way, Hoopes said the song came together in the way all the best ones do — they “write themselves.”
Paul said it only took an hour and a half to write the whole song.
“‘Life Lessons’ to me,” he said, “epitomizes the sound I kind of always wanted The Last Gatsby to have.”
A song with a cause
The band played the song a few times at some gigs over the years, but recently, it was Paul who messaged Hoopes with the idea to officially release “Life Lessons.” The original recording of the song was only a demo, so Hoopes worked on remastering it for three weeks, sending about 45 different mixes.
“I couldn’t believe it,” Paul said. “It just kept getting better and better, and all of a sudden it sounded like a professional song that was recorded in a good studio.”
Samuelson worked on the composition of the song, and said it was actually supposed to be played an octave higher originally.
“We started singing with it, and it turned out to be a little bit too high for Josh, so we actually tuned it down,” he said. “That’s the version that we hear today.”
Hoopes said “Life Lessons” has become a platform for the band, one its members want to use as they move forward with their comeback.
“We want to do our part to motivate our fans, listeners, audience and other people to engage in something that matters,” Hoopes said. “For us, there’s a lot of things that matter, but Josh really matters, what he’s going through matters.”
Going forward, Hoopes said a percentage of every ticket sold to a Last Gatsby show and purchase people make of the band’s merch will be donated to The Huntsman Cancer Institute.
“Before, when we were releasing music, sometimes we got a little too caught up in the fact that it was about making it, so we could make money playing music and not have to worry about things,” Paul said. “This time is very much not about that. It’s just about the music and about writing good songs; songs that matter.”
