Life is crazy for indie songster Howie Day
By KELLY WILSON
Get Out

He’s single, ladies, but cutie-pie singer/songwriter Howie Day wants you to know he’s one of the world’s worst people to date.

“I don’t live anywhere and I’m always traveling and it makes it difficult to have a relationship,” he says. “And long-
distance relationships suck.”

Day, 23, laughs off his heartthrob status.

“It’s funny when you’re in ‘YM’ magazine and girls you went to high school with see it,” he says. “I haven’t seen them for awhile and I’ll come home and they push it in my face and go, ‘Ha-ha. Look at you. Ha-ha.’ (Being a heartthrob) is very much not me, but it’s very funny.”

Since Day signed with Epic Records in 2002 and re-released his self-financed debut “Australia,” life has been “pure craziness,” he says.

“I used to have control of everything and it was very do-it-yourself, indie kind of thing,’’ says Day, a native of Bangor, Maine. “It’s a lot busier now. We play every day. You sort of wake up in these cities and you have no idea where you are. It’s craziness!”

Day — who became known for his unique one-man performances utilizing live loop sampling and delay pedals to create harmonies while he played guitar and sang before adding a backing band last summer — found himself in the middle of a whirlwind in March. He was arrested for allegedly locking a woman in the bathroom of his tour bus and breaking her friend’s cell phone after one of the women supposedly spurned his sexual advances in Wisconsin.

“All I can say about that really — it’s not completely resolved so I’m not really sure how much I can say about it — it was made a way bigger deal then it really was,” he says. “It was a tough couple of days. My grandmother got up and read it in the paper. To me, it wasn’t that big of a deal. It was one of those media things that sort of exploded and got blown way out of proportion.”

Now Day is in the midst of promoting his sophomore release, “Stop All the World Now,” which focuses on a different theme than “Australia.”

“Every single song on (‘Australia’) was about this one relationship that I had, which is cool because it kind of gives the album like this theme, but obviously that’s a pretty small box to be writing songs in,” he says.

So what was Day’s theme on his follow-up to “Australia”?

“I kind of have the ‘Have fun while you’re young because you’re old for a long time’ mentality,” he says. “I try to live by that a little bit. That is sort of what I ran with a little bit on this album.”