Written by Logan Barleen
Often, the best parts of life are the most unexpected. Those were the words echoing in my head as I found myself sitting on the couch of a dimly lit tour bus alongside our marketing director, Bria, as well as multi-platinum recording artists, The All-American Rejects. The band had just wrapped playing the fourth show of their pop-up house tour at the Blue Door, a DIY music venue built in an old barn on a dirt road, just south of Ames, IA, sponsored by KURE.
Their management estimated that about 5,000 people showed up to this event, with only a six hour notice via social media postings by the band and KURE. News of the tour has since made national headlines in major outlets across the country, leaving people with one question: Why?
It turns out, the answer is pretty simple: to give fans who may often get passed over a special experience!
“We’re four guys from[…] ‘Nowhere, Oklahoma,’” said lead vocalist, Tyson Ritter. “The thought of it was, ‘what are these places that[…] people are used to having to get in a car and do a day’s drive and spending a thousand dollars on an experience that has now become so unaffordable and so unattainable?’”
When asked what brought them to Ames in particular, guitarist and primary songwriter, Nick Wheeler, enthusiastically stated, “It’s a cool vibe, man!”
“The town we’re from is in Oklahoma, it’s a college town and it definitely has a similar vibe all throughout the Midwest. I don’t know, it feels cool to kind of visit those places and come back to those places.”
During the tour, the band has found themselves playing in odd locations all across the Midwest, partnering with local college radio stations to aid in the endeavor. While the tour has proven fruitful for the band, it has had as many ups as it has downs. “[It’s] f*cking scary, but in an exciting way,” Ritter said.
During the day of their Chicago show, there were severe weather conditions that included a tornado warning and a lightning storm. “It could’ve gone real south,” Ritter sighed.
However, other instances saw their luck turn things around for the better, such as their show the previous night in Minneapolis.
“We got rained out of our first place but that was like this crazy godsend that put us in this bowling alley where we could play not only one but two shows for like 1,200 people,” Ritter explained. He also expressed how dangerous their original venue, a basement party, would have been for their fans.
“They were trying to put us downstairs, it was horribly unsafe. There was only one exit, there were electrical conduits everywhere, and there was an HVAC in the middle.”
“[They could] probably only fit a hundred people down there,” remarked Wheeler.
“Somebody could’ve got horribly hurt, but you know, the world kind of pointed us towards this bowling alley,” Ritter added.
They also made note of how by the end of the night, the owner of the bowling alley was crying to their manager, Megan Kraemer, about how their show “saved his summer.”
Even Ames didn’t escape the whirlwind of unpredictability surrounding the tour, as the show in Ames was cut one song early, due to a medical emergency out in the crowd. In spite of this, Ritter and the band only had praise for the crowd and volunteer staff for how they handled the situation.
“The spirit of this tour has been so good natured, and even tonight, somebody went down, the whole crowd stood still, two registered nurses raised their hands. Some brutes carried this woman who was in duress over to the side, got her help, the ambulance was there in like 10 minutes. It’s kind of been like that this whole run, this good spirit has been charging this whole thing forward, and I’ve never been in front of such a generous, hospitable, and conscious crowd before, like tonight. And I know that we’re coming off the stage with this sort of rattle from the experience, but if this was in a big venue, man[…] You see these stories where people get stepped on, people walk out, and people don’t see people, and that we were fortunate enough to be in front of a crowd like that tonight was such a godsend.”
The Rejects have always taken pride in their fanbase, and emphasize that nights like this only reinforce their feelings on the matter. When asked what it was like coming up in the music culture of a small town like Stillwater, OK, the band never even believed they had a culture around them to begin with, and it never seemed to bother them.
Wheeler first addressed that looking back, “A lot of bands we were compared to came from like scenes, like Chicago bands or New York bands, or whatever[…] We’re from Oklahoma so there weren’t like any bands or peers really, like the only music scene Oklahoma has, you know, is like country and red dirt, so we didn’t really see ourselves fitting in there.”
Guitarist Mike Kennerty added, “Everyone was trying to box us in, and it was always a struggle… not to say that it was a bad thing necessarily, but it’s nice to be up on our own accord now. It doesn’t matter about anyone else.”
Ritter, building off of his bandmates, cited how the band never had a real sense of conformity within their scene, like many other groups. “We never had mascara, black hoodies, this sort of uniform you wear when you rep this band, so it’s really cool to be the ‘rejects’ and finally own our name.”
The culture surrounding the band isn’t the only thing they believe has changed since starting back in 1999, as the band also took time to reflect on the way they, specifically Ritter and Wheeler, create the music that has connected with so many people over the years. According to Ritter, their process for their first four albums was relatively set in stone.
“Nick and I would go into the woods and we would sort of stay in this space together at opposite ends of the room, and I would be over in my cobbler corner and Nick would be in his, and we’d sort of start this process where we were having conversations through songs, and Nick would get ahead, so I could be able to kind of catch up to him from behind, so we had this real cycle of a process of just output.”
The band cites two major influences in how they’ve been writing for their latest album to how they produced their previous work: technology and independence.
Ritter states, “The beauty of connection through the digital age of being able to have conversations over Zoom and being able to kind of send it along in the same way we approached it initially, but Nick now has this sort of beautiful home studio in Nashville where he’s excelled at engineering and he can sort of help really realize the sort of shape of the song for himself.”
“I think that just comes with time, too. That’s just trusting each other more and trusting ourselves more, too,” Wheeler adds. “The only thing that’s changed about the process is the technology; what the technology allows us to do.”
In 2012, after the release of their fourth album, Kids in the Street, the Rejects left their powerhouse label, Interscope Records, and are now preparing to release their first new album in over a decade in early 2026. The band, especially Ritter, have expressed the joy they feel having unbridled creative control over their own writing as independent artists. This has shone through in their recent single release, Sandbox, soon to be followed by another single, Easy Come, Easy Go, which was played at the show, to overwhelmingly positive crowd response.
Ritter reflected on their relationship with the label, saying, “We got burnt out pretty hard by 2010 on this conveyor belt that we felt obligated to, being beholden to that was as giant of an ivory tower as Interscope Records, and I think that invisible pressure to continue the pace felt like an obligation.”
Ritter continued, discussing a feeling of “self hatred for the sake of not producing something for the sake of some father figure who is representing a record label.”
In hopes of some words of encouragement for young aspiring artists, we asked the band, “what advice would you give your younger selves?” The responses varied from quips about not listening to the “man” and to more retrospective takes, such as Kennerty’s.
“It’s tough because we’re in a good place, so everything has led us to this. So, it’s hard to, you know, diverge from that.”
Ritter also reflected on the experience of finding success at such a young age.
“I think we just didn’t know better. We were signed when we were 17, 18, 20. Growing up in front of a red button is a f*cking harrowing experience that many do not survive.”
Wheeler also added that in this day and age, people often stress every detail to the point of insanity, when in reality it’s not as serious as that, and that things will flow naturally and in time.
“Just trust yourself, and don’t overthink it, have fun, and just do your thing.”
“And don’t smoke so much weed, young Ty!” Ritter added, to the laughter of everyone on the bus. “Man, he smoked copious amounts of weed.”
The All-American Rejects have plans to do another leg of house party shows starting in July of this year, and have received hundreds of thousands of requests on their online campaign for them to appear all across the country. To find out where they will be next, you can follow them on their various social media platforms for their short-notice announcements.
