The Daily Orange had the opportunity to speak with Matt McGinley, drummer of Gym Class Heroes, before the band’s show Friday night. McGinley founded the band with frontman Travis McCoy, after the two became friends in gym class – and math class – in high school in Geneva, N.Y.

The Daily Orange: You guys have been touring a lot. You just got off the one with Gwen Stefani (The Sweet Escape Tour in Australia and New Zealand). How was that?

Matt McGinley: That was awesome. Like, I remember me and Travis watching her show – I felt like a kid again, going to a show for the first time. That’s how over the top her show is. I mean, we’re starting to get to the level where we’re getting more used to playing really big venues – such as tonight. You know, big halls or big arenas. So for us, when we look at an artist like Gwen doing these over-the-top things on stage but also having her music come across really well, so she’s not sacrificing any of that, it’s really a great learning experience for a young band like us to see something like that.

So is there any difference between playing a college campus and playing a regular stop at the show?

I think there is. … The thing that I like about campuses, I feel like a lot of the stuff, especially like content-wise a lot of the stuff in Travis’ lyrics, or the message, or the banter in between songs, is geared more towards college kids and kids our age. Sometimes you can just see it go over kids’ heads at all-ages shows, but I feel like the college kids actually dig it a little bit more, it’s a little bit better received. And that’s cool.

So how’d you guys go about developing your style, with the combination of live music and rapping and samples, too?

When we started the band, we really had no idea what kind of music we were going to play. We knew that we wanted to start a band. I think the hip-hop side of things sort of poured out of us. I know it sounds kind of lame. But a lot of our influences at the time were groups like KRS-One and Company Flow and Wu-Tang (Clan) and The Roots, but also stuff like Rage Against the Machine and Green Day and Nirvana. At first it was like, ‘here’s our hip-hop song,’ ‘here’s our rock song,’ ‘here’s our jazz song and funk song.’

As we developed, it sort of meshed. It’s to the point were it’s definitely rooted in hip-hop, but it has all these other arms and branches that extend into R&B and funk and rock music. So it’s a little more seamless.

So as time goes on, it sort of welds together?

I think with any band, the more recording you do and the more you hear yourself, the more you can sort of almost hear your sound and define your sound. I think that happened for us. We started to hear in our music what we liked about our music.

Published on October 14, 2007 at 12:00 pm