Home Format: Valley's favorite pop sons return
By CHRIS HANSEN ORF
Get Out

There's no place like home.

After nearly 15 months of constant national touring, local pop heroes The Format will play Tempe's Marquee Theatre on Friday.

“We can't wait,” guitarist Sam Means says. “We haven't played our own show here since June — all of the other shows have been supporting bands like Switchfoot — so it's going to be a lot of fun. Those are always the best shows. We've been sitting home for two and a half months just writing songs, and we haven't played any shows since then, so it's going to be a lot more exciting.”

Though tiring, all the road work in support of the band's brilliant major label debut disc, “Interventions and Lullabies,” has paid off.

“In the last year and a half, I'd say we've hit pretty much every city at least three times and some of them even more,” Means says. “We did a really big tour right after the album came out, and then every time time we came back to a city the crowds got progressively bigger. That was the best way for us to measure what we've been working for, and a lot of those shows were sold out.”

Means and Format singer Nate Ruess have just sent demos of their latest collaborations to their new label, Atlantic Records — which swallowed their previous label, Elektra — and have gotten positive feedback.

“The new songs are not so conventional as they were on the first record,” Means says. “Not so much power pop, but pop music in the sense that it was in the ’60s, more laid-back pop. Everything is kind of different, they all have their own feel. We warned the label that the new songs were weirder than our other songs, and they said, ‘If that's weird, that's fine with us.’ ” The band hopes to land a new album in stores this year.

“We're going to go into the studio in February and March and hopefully have the new album out in August, and we're actually going to start touring again this summer,” Means says.

The guitarist says that Friday's show will feature some of the new tunes.
“We've been playing a few new songs the last few months,” Means says. “So we'll probably play those and possibly another new one. We'll see.”

The Format
When: 6:30 p.m. Friday
Where: Marquee Theatre, 730 N. Mill Ave., Tempe
How much: $15, all ages
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