It’s 2006. Punk music was the vibe. Thousands of people flocked to Merriweather Post Pavilion in Columbia to see performers such as Panic! at the Disco, Kayne West and The Strokes at the last HFStival, which happens to be making a comeback this year.
Opening the two-day festival was a local Green Day and Blink-182 cover band who released their first original album the year prior. The four Towson teenagers in the pop-punk band All Time Low won a competition that allowed them to open the popular festival.
Now, 20 years after becoming a band, the four are headlining on the very same stage and performing their largest and longest-ever hometown show on Saturday.
Lead singer Alex Gaskarth said coming back to Merriweather feels like a crazy, full-circle moment.
“For us to be on that stage felt very validating and was starting to actualize this whole dream for us,” he said.
Gaskarth said he was recently scrolling on an old iPhone that happened to have photos from the day he and his bandmates — Rian Dawson on drums, Zack Merrick on bass and Jack Barakat on guitar — performed at HFStival. In 2006, things were new. Feelings were shiny. But some career decisions might have been different.
“When we signed our early deals, we were young, we were excited, and we wanted a record deal so very badly,” he said. “And you know, in hindsight, we might not have signed a deal that didn’t involve more ownership of our music.”
So, two decades later, All Time Low reclaimed their sound.
The band on Friday released “The Forever Sessions, Vol. 1” under their own independent record label, Basement Noise Records, in advance of the Merriweather show. The label’s name is “an ode to where we started, which was in Rian’s parents’ basement in a suburb in Baltimore,” Gaskarth said.
Basement Noise Records, in partnership with Photo Finish Records, will serve as a vessel to house their new music, he said.
The album features updated and polished versions of nine of All Time Low’s greatest hits, spanning from their inception to 2005. Their most well-known song, featuring the sound of Gaskarth’s cough at the beginning, “Dear Maria, Count Me In,” is the album’s single — but this time it’s titled “Dear Maria, Count Me In (ATL’s Version).”
The 2007 recording has more than half a billion Spotify streams. But when Gaskarth hears that version in a bar or restaurant, he said, it’s just “not me anymore.”
He said offering a fresh take on their songs is a way for the band to grow with their music.
Back in that Baltimore basement, Gaskarth said they weren’t trying to be refined musicians. They wanted to get out there, play shows, create a community and have fun doing it.
“I think with time, we’ve just become a little more sharpened and a little more focused,” he said. “And I think that’s sort of what we wanted to have reflected on these rerecords, while also threading that needle of staying true to what made the song special to begin with and what people are used to hearing.”
He said the band didn’t want to over-update or overcorrect their songs, but instead bring new skills and musicianship more representative of who they are as musicians today.
The Merriweather show culminates the band’s “Forever” tour: a celebration of 20 years as a band. Their performance will span their catalog of nine albums, lasting almost three hours — like All Time Low’s version of Taylor Swift’s Eras tour, Gaskarth said.
“We’re treating it like a little chronological adventure through our music,” he said.
Saturday’s show is selling “incredibly well,” said Jordan Grove, senior communications manager for Merriweather’s promotion company, I.M.P.
The venue has a capacity of 18,000 people. The band announced the shows alongside a pair of others at two smaller venues in Washington D.C., on the nights leading up to Saturday’s show.
Grove said several local artists who made it big have come back to Merriweather for milestone performances, such as Maggie Rogers, Animal Collective — which has an album named after Merriweather — and O.A.R.
The band’s run has not been without controversy.
In 2021, allegations began circulating on X and TikTok that the band members had behaved inappropriately with underage female fans, and guitarist Barakat was accused of sexually abusing a fan when she was a minor.
The band posted a statement on X and said the allegations were “absolutely and unequivocally false” and they didn’t want to rob “actual victims of abuse of their very real and very important collective voice.” But multiple bands dropped out of a tour with them amid the scandal.
The band filed a libel lawsuit over the accusations in 2022. Rolling Stone magazine, citing the lawsuit, reported that one accuser’s allegations were refuted by another X user and that the band had not been able to identify the central accuser in the case. The judge overseeing the lawsuit set a follow-up hearing for Nov. 13.
Gaskarth told The Baltimore Banner there are no updates on the libel lawsuit. “What we said initially is still what we would say now,” he said. “There was no basis to any of it, and it was all completely fabricated.”
Looking at the music scene, All Time Low is significant, especially locally, I.M.P.’s Grove said.
“They kind of became the torch bearers for that whole genre of music and were also coming up and out of Baltimore at a time when maybe there weren’t that many other bands that people could pin on the map as being from Baltimore,” he said.
In their 20-year-plus career, the band has toured the world, sold 3.5 million albums in the U.S. and has had more than four billion streams worldwide. Despite traveling the world, Gaskarth said when he gets home, the first thing he craves is an Old Bay bagel sandwich from THB Bagelry and Deli.
“Success is measured in a million different ways,” Gaskarth said. “But I think our greatest success, in the way I really view our success, is that we’ve managed to sustain and continue to have a really amazing community of fans around the world that still come together 20 years in, and still want to come to the shows and still want to be a part of this.”
After they complete their celebratory show, Gaskarth said he’s leaving the stage and promptly jumping into Merriweather’s backstage pool for the first time.
“You kind of have to, right?” he said with a laugh.
