Anthony Saint James
Justin Pierre (center) and his bandmates will stop touring later this year.
Saying goodbye is never easy — particularly when you’re saying it to several million fans after doing your thing for nearly two decades.
But buh-bye is on the front burner for Motion City Soundtrack, who announced an indefinite hiatus in March and bring their “So Long, Farewell” tour to the Barrymore Theatre on July 28. It’s one last raucous Moog-stand for old times, if you will.
You’d be hard-pressed to get crazily coiffed frontman Justin Pierre to admit it, but it’s been a tremendous run for MCS, who formed in Minneapolis way back in 1997 and were one of the underappreciated cornerstones of the power pop-punk wave of the early to mid-2000s, eventually releasing six albums and becoming the poster kids for the Warped Tour.
Although they never scored a bona fide breakthrough radio hit, tracks like “Hold Me Down” and “The Conversation” are still two of the most heart-punching breakup ballads you’ll ever ache to hear, and “Everything Is Alright,” their most recognizable tune, is OCD encapsulated in three and a half minutes. The band’s songs, a bittersweet mix of the self-deprecating and the experiential peppered with clever turns of phrase and plenty of pop-culture references, still bounce and kick as hard as ever.
“I always saw it as a nice creative shortcut,” says Pierre of Motion City Soundtrack’s fondness for pop-cult name checks like Will and Grace, Veronica Mars and Captain Picard. “If you reference something everyone knows, it gives you 50 words by only using two.”
For the first time in his lengthy musical career, Pierre’s found himself taking to heart some of the observations found in Girl in a Band, the 2015 memoir written by Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon, about the nature of the link between a band and an audience.
“I tend to be in my head a lot when I perform,” says Pierre. “I’m counting out all the parts. Am I going to hit this note? I’m constantly doing math equations.”
Now, he says, he’s trying to focus a little less on the particulars and a little more on the crowd and the moment.
“I’ve gotten a little sloppier, but I’m having more fun,” he says.
Pierre is uncomfortable talking about the band’s impact on fans and ensuing generations of musicians — Boston’s Modern Baseball is one oft-cited disciple — even though he went through the same cycle himself, growing up burning through Sonic Youth, Superchunk and the Flaming Lips before synthesizing what he heard into what he created with MCS.
“I just never thought I’d be in a band that would have that effect,” he says. “It makes me feel awkward, but I can accept it.”
It wasn’t creative burnout that brought MCS to its current farewell pass. Several of the members, including Pierre, have young kids and want the chance to fully experience that part of their lives. Pierre had to catch his toddler daughter’s first steps on a YouTube video, and he doesn’t want to repeat the experience.
“Continually being half in and half out of our families’ lives, it hit us all at the same time [that] we can’t tour anymore,’” he says.
Lest MCS fans despair utterly, Pierre confides that the musical production may continue, even if the touring gigs don’t. The band still has plenty of material stockpiled, including alternate versions of tunes dating back to I Am the Movie, the band’s 2003 full-length debut.
Says Pierre: “As far as anything else goes, it’s wide open.”
