Alkaline Trio - Handsome Devils (by Emily Zemler)

Music journalism and music fandom are not supposed to mix. Even if you are invited onto the tour bus of your favorite band, one that has seen you though thick and thin the way no human being ever could, you have to remain calm, act aloof and pretend that you don’t want to scream out with every fiber of your being, “Holy shit! I am on Alkaline Trio’s tour bus!”

If someone had told me four years ago, when the song “Bloodied Up” catalyzed a descent into the cult of the Trio, that I would be welcomed by the band’s tour manager onto the cleanest tour bus I’ve ever seen, I would have told you to lay off the hallucinogens. But as I settle into the far back of the bus with drummer Derek Grant and bassist-slash-singer Dan Andriano on the final day of The Bamboozle festival in Asbury Park, a mere three weeks before their latest album, Crimson, will be released, the mind-altering drugs certainly aren’t pumping through my blood stream. In fact, they are nowhere to be found. On the back of the bus where a few lone sneakers and a Playstation2 decorate the floor, Grant and Andriano appear surprisingly calm considering that hundreds upon hundreds of teenage fans are eagerly awaiting Alkaline Trio’s set later that evening in the town’s crumbling convention center. The album had not yet been laid upon record store shelves and their nationwide tour had yet to commence, making this an opportune time to catch the boys before the inevitable road weariness could set in.

Andriano insists that they aren’t nervous about the impending release of Crimson, the group’s fifth — or sixth if you include their self-titled singles collection — full-length album, because after almost a decade’s practice, he feels they have gotten it right for, perhaps, the first time ever.

“So far I’m not sick of it,” Andriano says. “Usually before the record’s out I’m unhappy with a laundry list of things but I feel like we finally made the record that we wanted to make. There were a couple corners we had to cut here and there because of budget but we pretty much got everything done that we wanted to get done.”

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