Story Of The Year Celebrates 20th Anniversary of 'Page Avenue' with Tour Stop in Cincinnati

This story is featured in CityBeat's Jan. 10 print edition.

Twenty years after their 2003 major label debut album, Page Avenue, put Story Of The Year at the forefront of an emerging emo scene where bands combined melodic, hard-rocking songs with a mix of screamed and sung vocals and highly charged personal lyrics, the band is once again making noise in the music scene.

After seeing a return to action with the December 2017 release of the album, Wolves, get interrupted by the pandemic, 2023 became a busy year for Story Of The Year. The band released a new album, Tear Me to Pieces, in March, spent part of the summer opening for Yellowcard and have now begun a tour that celebrates the anniversary of Page Avenue.

For fans of Story Of The Year, it’s a welcome return, especially considering the band’s activity had been spotty throughout most of the 2010s, and there were times when it wasn’t clear how active the band would be going forward.

“Part of it was this kind of music just wasn’t as popular for a few years, in the early 2010s. So we slowed down as well,” singer/guitarist Dan Marsala explained in a recent phone interview. “Yeah, there were a lot of years where it was like ‘Okay, are we done? Is this a thing that maybe we’ll just kind of do here and there?’ We never even thought about breaking up or anything because it’s our band and we love what we do. It was just whether or not we were going to do it full-time or not all the time. 

“And then we just started getting more excited and more excited and put out our last record, Wolves. And we were like ‘Okay, people still do like this,’” he said, noting that the recent resurgence of interest in the early 2020s for emo bands has also given Story Of The Year a boost. “It’s such a turnaround from where we were even like five years ago. It’s so exciting and so fun again, and we all 100 percent decided yes, we want to do this forever, as hard as we can until the fans stop showing up and they won’t let us do it anymore.”

Page Avenue was clearly a life-changing moment for the four original and still-current members of Story Of The Year — Marsala, guitarist Ryan Phillips, bassist Adam Russell and drummer Josh Wills. (Longtime guitarist Philip Sneed, who joined soon after Page Avenue was ousted from the band in 2018).

Formed in St. Louis in 1999 under the name Big Blue Monkey, the band released five independent EPs by 2002 and had become a frequent presence in the city’s club scene. But they realized things were reaching a dead end in St. Louis and moved to Los Angeles hoping to land a record deal. 

Funnily enough, the group had already made a contact in St. Louis that would soon put their career on a whole new trajectory.

Just a couple of months earlier, in May 2002, Story Of The Year won a contest to play at Pointfest, an annual all-day modern rock festival sponsored by KPNT radio. The band used the appearance to hand out sampler CDs and videos to virtually anyone backstage who was connected to a band or the music industry.

One of the videos reached John Feldmann, frontman of the band Goldfinger, a record producer and an A&R representative for Maverick Records. He liked what he heard and saw, and soon Story Of The Year got signed by Maverick and Feldmann was hired to produce Page Avenue.

It turned out to be a good pairing, although during the course of writing and recording Page Avenue, the band frequently butted heads with Feldmann over his rather blunt, straightforward assessments of songs the band submitted.

“He just kind of put everything in perspective,” Marsala said. “We had ‘Until The Day I Die’ written pretty early on, so he was like ‘That’s a good song. I can tell that one’s good. We’ll work on that one.’ But most of the other ones, he was like ‘Look, I think you guys can do better.’ And he kind of just convinced us to get in the practice space and write as much as we humanly, possibly can. We would bring songs to him every couple of days and he’d be like ‘Okay, that is a good one. That’s a keeper.’ Or we would bring three other ones and he’d be like ‘Nope, not good.’ He would always say ‘B-side at best. That’s a b-side. It’s not a good song.’ And as kids, we were crushed. We’re like ‘I love this song, dude.’” 

There was enough frustration then, in fact, that Story Of The Year chose a different producer, Steve Evetts, for their next album, In The Wake Of Determination. 

But Feldmann and Story Of The Year remained on good terms, and Feldmann produced some songs on the 2008 album, Black Swan.   

Looking back two decades later, Marsala is far more complimentary of Feldmann’s work on Page Avenue.

“We were still finding our style and finding out what our band was,” Marsala said. “We were just trying so much weird stuff. We were bringing in all these, like, ‘80s metal influences and like the grunge thing, trying to stay up with what The Used and Taking Back Sunday were putting out currently. It was such a confusing time. We had no idea what Story Of The Year would turn into. So I think Feldmann had a more clear vision of what he thought our band was going to be. 

“With perspective now looking back I’m like ‘Wow, he was completely right about everything,’ and that’s hard to take as a young, fragile-ego-ed kid,” the singer/guitarist said. “But he was very influential in the direction of those early days.”

It turned out Feldmann’s instincts about “Until The Day I Die” were correct. It became the lead single and peaked at No. 12 on the charts. A follow-up single, “Anthem of Our Dying Day,” reached No. 10 on the alternative rock singles chart, as sales of Page Avenue climbed to 800,000 copies.

In fact, Story Of The Year wanted to reunite with Feldmann for Tear Me to Pieces, but his schedule never aligned to allow him to take on the project. Instead, Feldmann recommended Colin Brittain, which Marsala said worked out well, both as a producer and co-writer.

“We really wrote probably about seven or eight of the songs in the studio once we got there, just writing with Colin and just being in the studio coming up with ideas,” Marsala said.

Now Marsala and his bandmates are excited about doing the 20^th anniversary of Page Avenue tour — he noted the songs will be scattered throughout the set, but the full album will be performed — and the band members plan to begin work on a new album early in 2024.

Long known for their energetic and athletic live shows, Marsala said that aspect of Story Of The Year hasn’t changed, even though the band members are now in their 40s.

“I’m still a 17-year-old kid in my brain and everything is exactly the same,” Marsala said. “My voice is actually way better now since I take care of it more and warm up properly. I can sing and scream better than I ever could, which is awesome. That’s a bonus. The jumping around on stage, now that’s a lot harder than it used to be.”

Story Of The Year plays Bogart’s on Jan. 25 at 6:30 p.m. Info: bogarts.com.

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