The year was 2006. Punk music was hot. Thousands of people flocked to the Merriweather Post Pavilion in Columbia to see artists like Panic! at the Disco, Kayne West and The Strokes at the last HFStival, which just happens to be making a comeback this year.
The two-day festival was opened by a local Green Day and Blink-182 cover band that had released its first album the year before. The four teenagers from Towson’s pop-punk band All Time Low won a competition that allowed them to open the legendary festival.
Now, 20 years after forming a band, the foursome are headlining the same stage, performing their biggest and longest show to date in their hometown on Saturday.
Lead singer Alex Gaskarth said his return to Merriweather feels like a crazy, full-circle moment.
“Being on stage was a huge validation for us and started making our whole dream come true,” he said of HFStival.
Gaskarth said he was recently scrolling through 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 Brakat on guitar – performed at HFStival. Everything was new in 2006. Emotions were bright. But some career decisions could have turned out differently.
“When we signed our first contracts, we were young, we were excited and we really wanted a record deal,” he said. “And you know, looking back, maybe we wouldn’t have signed a contract that didn’t include more ownership of our music.”
Two decades later, All Time Low have rediscovered their sound.
The band released “The Forever Sessions Vol. 1” on Friday under their own independent record label, Basement Noise Records, ahead of the Merriweather show. The label’s name is “an ode to where we started, which was Rian’s parent’s basement in suburban Baltimore,” Gaskarth said.
Basement Noise Records, in partnership with Photo Finish Records, will serve as a platform for their new music, he said.
The album contains updated and revised versions of nine All Time Low’s biggest hits up to 2005. Their most famous song, known only for Gaskarth’s cough at the beginning, “Dear Maria, Count Me In”, is the single from the album – but this time it’s called “Dear Maria, Count Me In (ATL’s Version)”.
The 2007 recording has more than half a billion Spotify streams and keeps coming back to the band’s catalog, Gaskarth said. But when he hears this version in a bar or restaurant, it’s just “not me anymore.”
He said that reinterpreting their songs was an opportunity for the band to grow with their music.
Back in that basement in Baltimore, Gaskarth said, they didn’t want to be sophisticated musicians. They wanted to go out, play shows, build a community in the music scene and have fun doing it.
“I think over time we’ve just gotten a little bit sharper and more focused,” he said. “And I think that’s what we wanted to reflect in these re-recordings, while also staying true to what made the song special from the beginning and what people are used to hearing.”
He said the band did not want to overly modernize or correct their songs, but rather to bring in new skills and musicality to make them more representative of their current musical personality.
The Merriweather show is the culmination of the band’s “Forever” tour: a celebration of their 20th anniversary. Their performance will span their nine-album catalog and last nearly three hours — something like All Time Low’s version of the Eras tour, Gaskarth said.
“We treat it like a little chronological adventure through our music,” he said.
Saturday’s show, a celebration of the band and its local history, is selling “incredibly well,” said Jordan Grove, senior communications manager for Merriweather’s promotions company, IMP.
The venue has a capacity of 18,000 people. The band announced the performances, along with two others at two smaller venues in Washington DC, on the nights before Saturday’s show.
Grove said several local artists who made it have returned to Merriweather for milestone performances, including Maggie Rogers, Animal Collective – which named an album after Merriweather – and OAR
The band’s performance was not without controversy.
In 2021, allegations began circulating on X and TikTok that the band had behaved inappropriately toward underage female fans, and guitarist Barakat was accused of sexually abusing a fan when he was a minor.
The band has published a statement on X and said the allegations were “absolutely and unequivocally false” and that they did not want to “rob actual victims of abuse of their very real and very important collective voice.” But several bands canceled their tours with them in the wake of the scandal.
The band filed a defamation lawsuit over the allegations in 2022. Rolling Stone magazine, citing the lawsuit, reported that an accuser’s allegations were refuted by an X user and that the band could not identify the lead accuser in the case. The judge overseeing the lawsuit scheduled a follow-up hearing for November 13.
Gaskarth told The Baltimore Banner there was no update on the defamation suit. “What we said initially is what we would still say now,” he said. “None of it had any basis and was completely fabricated.”
In terms of the music scene, All Time Low is significant, especially on a local level, Grove said.
“They became sort of the torchbearers for this whole genre of music, and they also came out of Baltimore at a time when there were maybe not that many other bands that you could put on the map as being from Baltimore,” he said.
In their 20-plus year career, the band has toured the world, sold 3.5 million albums in the U.S., and garnered over four billion streams worldwide. Even though he tours the world, Gaskarth says the first thing he loves when he comes home is an Old Bay Bagel Sandwich from THB.
“Success can be measured in a million different ways,” Gaskarth said. “But I think our biggest success, as I see it, is that we’ve managed to maintain and have a really amazing fan base around the world that, even after 20 years, still comes together, still comes to the shows and still wants to be a part of it.”
After they finish their victory show, Gaskarth said he will come right off the stage and jump into Merriweather’s backstage pool for the first time, which was added in 2018.
“You have to, right?” says Gaskarth, laughing.
