An email buzzes the phone in my pocket. “Gimme a few minutes to change and then come around the back. - matt” 

The Get Up Kids just finished playing the Santa Ana show of their 20th anniversary tour, and I’d set up an interview with the emo legends roughly 30 minutes before they took the stage. Rather than going through a publicist, the band’s management instructed me to email the lead singer directly—not exactly what one would expect from a band with six charting albums (and one other that’s considered an influential classic by many). 

After I navigate through a crowd ranging from 14-year-old emo kids to drunk 35-year-old former emo kids (emo adults?), Matt Pryor meets me just inside the gate to the outdoor backstage area. 

“Would you like anything? Coffee? A beer? Water?” the 37-year-old vocalist asks as we walk toward a picnic table. 

For a self-described “part-time band” that never had a big radio hit, the Midwestern quintet certainly has some dedicated fans. There were few audience members who didn’t loudly sing every word to nearly every track the band performed live (albeit, they’ve only released one full-length album since 2004), and a woman comes up to Pryor asking for a photo with the entire band before I can even get the voice recorder on my phone ready. 

“All five of us? That might be tough. If you can get everyone together, then yeah, we’ll take a photo,” Pryor says just a few minutes before the fan wrangles guitarist Jim Suptic, bassist Rob Pope, drummer Ryan Pope and keyboardist James Dewees for her dream photo. 

Part of the appeal of the Get Up Kids might be that seeing them together is a bit of a rarity. Since first parting ways in 2005, they get together once every few years for a tour (sometimes an album) and to bring out the nostalgia for their fans. If you ask Pryor, the whole “breaking up” thing is overrated though. 

“We broke up for a while in 2005 because we didn’t realize you could just like get away from each other,” Pryor says. “I quit the band in April 2004. We’d been broken up for a year before we started our farewell tour. Bands don’t break up—it’s almost like a marketing gimmick. Trust me; we’ve done it. There’s no point. I really had no intention of playing with these assholes again, but I like these assholes again now.” 

Of course, while the Get Up Kids haven’t exactly been together at all times for the last 20 years, the band’s musical longevity can’t be denied. They’ve been helping people through their high school and college years for two decades now, and it’s not lost on Pryor that generations of emo bands have now looked up to him.

“I’m kind of stoked on it now more than I was ten years ago,” Pryor says. “We’re ‘second wave,’ so it’s us, Promise Ring, Texas is the Reason, stuff like that. And then there was ‘third wave,’ which is the Warped Tour and eyeliner kind of thing, which was kind of ehhh to me. But now it’s these new bands like Into It. Over It., Modern Baseball, and the Hotelier, where they’re just hard-working indie rock band. They don’t act like pop stars; they’re like punk bands. If they’re influenced by what we did, then I’m really stoked about that. To me, I’m almost as proud of that as my kids doing stuff. I will not speak ill of anyone like My Chemical Romance—I actually think they’re really nice guys—but that whole eyeliner and Alternative Press kind of thing, I didn’t relate to that at all.”

Suptic walks past the picnic table on his way to the tour bus. “Hey, Jimmy, you want to do this interview with me?” Pryor calls to the guitarist.

The 38-year-old changes on the bus before coming back, silently interrupting Pryor’s response about the secret to the band’s lengthy tenure near the top of the second-wave emo world. 

“What’s the secret? Spending time apart,” Pryor says. “The last time we played shows was in 2011, so that’s like four years off to get away. I always liken it to a high school or college reunion where we get back together, we drink beer, we sing the old songs, and then we get the fuck away from each other for a while.” 

“The secret is breaking up for five years,” Suptic adds. “Well, more like three or four because our band was broken up but we were still doing tours. We toured with Dashboard Confessional and put out a live record after the band was done.” 

Pryor fills in Suptic on the basics of everything he’s said so far, and Suptic agrees with all of it. Even if the key to keeping a band together is spending time apart, it helps when the members are on as similar of a wavelength as these two are. Although families, jobs, side projects, and the rest of life has changed, the dynamics of the Get Up Kids are more or less the same as when the group formed half their lifetimes ago. 

“Obviously you get older and wiser and you learn how to communicate better and be more patient, but I don’t know that we’ve really evolved any,” Pryor says. “We still fall into the same sort of roles. James is the goofy one. Jim is the one who talks too much. Rob and Ryan are the hipsters in the band. I’m the dad.” 

Dewees, as if on cue, strolls up to his two seated bandmates with the most important question of the night. 

“What do you guys want from Del Taco?” 

After a moment of trying to come up with a Del Taco order, Pryor and Suptic agree that they need to eat In-N-Out at least once before leaving SoCal. I point out that there’s one just down the street on the other side of the freeway, and it’s the most excited the Midwesterners have seemed since they left the stage. There’s a brief pause when concern arises over Dewees’ ability to eat anything from the burger chain following his recent dental procedure (“I can take a burger apart, and then have fries and a milkshake”), but everyone ultimately agrees it’s the best option and the keyboardist shuffles off to grab everyone’s orders. 

For the next 20 minutes or so, Pryor and Suptic alternate between making masturbation jokes and riffing back and forth with each other about everything from their conscious decision to mix slower tunes into every record and live show (“It’s hard to play that many rock songs in a row! We’re pushing 40… Our set has hills and valleys”) to the differences between the problems they faced when they got together and what issues new bands in 2015 have to deal with (“Now you can’t make money doing it. I wouldn’t even know where to begin. I don’t know the first thing about social media. Back when we started, people were still buying CDs and gas was $1.25 per gallon“). It’s not unlike the give and take vibe of their live show, which also gets discussed since people both moshed and threw beers toward the stage in excitement (“It throws your head out of the game. You’re rocking out and singing these songs and then all of a sudden there’s a projectile thrown at your head and you’re just angry. It’s like the drunk guy at the party who puts a lampshade on his head and takes his pants off”).

As even the most diehard (and well-connected) fans begin to file out of the backstage area and the band members are anxiously awaiting their Double-Doubles, I ask a question that typically gets a generic response. Tonight, it’s the biggest question left (now that dinner is decided).

“So what’s next for the Get Up Kids?” 

“I just graduated from college,” Suptic says. “I’ve been working for the USGS (United States Geological Survey), so I don’t know what I’m going to do. I kind of saw this as our last major tour. If we made new music, it’d just be for ourselves, we’re not trying to get on the radio or anything. I’m happy being a nostalgia act.” 

“If he ends up going into the private sector and having a job job, then we’re going to be a weekend warriors kind of thing,” Pryor adds. “It’s hard to even schedule stuff.”

Of course, it’s not the first time the band’s future has been up in the air. A decade ago, it would’ve seemed unlikely that the Get Up Kids would be around in a year, much less 10. They’re still playing shows through next summer, so if you’re a fan, it wouldn’t be a smart idea to miss them (just in case it really is their last time around). Regardless of when the Get Up Kids play their final show, they’ll always be the same little band from Kansas City. 

“For better or for worse, one thing we can say is we still have our integrity,” Pryor says. “It might’ve cost us some money, but we still have it. I think that’s a good thing.”