Why fans of bands like Bayside and Everclear love when they play entire albums at concerts

Sawyer Boyle drove an hour-and-a-half from Connecticut to The Paramount in Huntington one recent Thursday afternoon on a band’s promise they would play his favorite song live.

Out of the previous eight times Boyle caught his favorite band, The Front Bottoms, in the flesh, he only heard his favorite tune, "Ginger," once. Boyle and the hundreds who flocked to Huntington last month knew they would hear that track as well as the other 10 that round out "Back On Top" as the indie rock duo are playing that entire 2015 release from top to bottom each night on their current tour to mark its 10th anniversary.

The next night, Bayside fans crowded under The Paramount’s marquee waiting to hear the emo pop-punk quartet play its entire self-titled album during the group's homecoming and final stop on its "Errors" tour celebrating 25 years as a band.

"When they play an entire album, you get to relive the nostalgia," Bayside fanatic Heather Treaster, 32, of Lock Haven, Pennsylvania, said. "You also get to hear those songs that kind of slip through the cracks on tours that span the entire catalog."

Countless acts have performed entire albums at The Paramount and other Long Island and New York City venues and festivals in recent years. Alternative rock band Everclear will continue the trend Sunday, when the group performs every track off "Sparkle and Fade" to celebrate that album’s 30th anniversary. Fans love the prominent live music trend for the rare opportunity to hear deep cuts and either reconnect with albums they grew up hearing or experience an artist’s era they missed the first time. For some of those in the crowd and on the stage alike, these tours down memory lane can also provide a fresh perspective on older works.

Dusting off deep cuts

For these special shows, artists often craft a setlist that includes a straight run-through of the album either preceded or followed by other hits or fan favorites. Some acts, like Everclear on their current tour, weave additional hits in between every few album tracks. When the band embarked on a 20th anniversary tour for "Sparkle and Fade," they played side one of the album, then a string of other tracks before kicking off side two, loaded with the "all the punk rock songs" like "Nehalem" and "Chemical Smile," plus "My Sexual Life," which frontman Art Alexakis said "people request all the time and we don’t play."

"That seemed a little long," Alexakis recalled. The 30th anniversary format, he added, "mixes it up, because not everybody who’s coming out wants to hear that whole album — the majority of people do — and that’s what we’re respecting."

When The Revivalists brought their tour celebrating the 10th anniversary of their breakthrough album, "Men Amongst Mountains" to Huntington three days after Bayside’s performance, they played the entire album, but shuffled tracks.

"You want to make sure you can fill certain slots with certain energies," singer David Shaw said of rearranging the album for the live setting. "You just want to make sure that the setlist is balanced. ... In terms of flow, it just felt like it was a good idea to switch it up a bit."

Before they hit the road, Shaw said the band went through a "pretty intense" but quick rehearsal period to find older tracks in their "muscle memory."

"It’s been really, really nice to dig into these older songs," the frontman added. "We haven’t played some of them in eight or nine years, so they feel new, there is this fresh energy to them. ... I think people have really been digging on ‘Move On’ and ‘Monster’ for sure. ‘All In the Family’ has been turning the crowd out; it’s been pretty nutso."

New perspectives

Although Conor Calio had seen Bayside 20 times prior to this latest outing at The Paramount, he has not heard many of the deep cuts off the band's self-titled album live since the band performed it in its entirety at Gramercy Theatre in Manhattan in 2015.

"Back then I was a fairly new fan. ... I didn’t really know that record too well," Calio, 32, of East Williston, recalled. "Now I know every word, every guitar lick ... I can scream every lyric and vibe with every second.”

Calio has not only grown more familiar with Bayside's sophomore full-length album, but grown up since he first heard it. Back then, he "was much younger, much less experienced in life," and said he "had a lot of bitter feelings toward an abusive ex-partner of mine."

Those feelings have tempered, but the songs "still resonate with me," as they are "cathartic in a very good way."

"Sometimes an album takes on a whole new meaning for me in those years that I first heard it," Calio added. "It’s cool kind of reliving, but also experiencing something in a whole new way."

It’s not just fans who have a different relationship with albums as the decades pass. Everclear’s Alexakis, 63, said he has "an older person’s perspective" on the lyrics he wrote in his early 30s, While many of the tracks on "Sparkle and Fade" tackle relationship struggles and addiction, the singer, songwriter and guitarist’s matured perspective will inspire the band’s forthcoming album he hopes to release next year, which will explore various aspects of what he described as "a serious sea change of what America is, what this world is, and where we are right now."

"I’m a guy who’s been through a lot of life — divorces, people dying, getting diagnosed with MS, going through surgeries on my back, having kids — it’s been something that when I look back, I have perspective," Alexakis said. "You take the world seriously, but you don’t take yourself so seriously as you get older. I think when you’re a younger man, you tend to think that you’re really smart, you tend to think that your opinion is really important. As you get older, I think you take everything with a grain of salt."

Dose of the old days

Many attendees buy tickets to these anniversary shows for an uncut dose of nostalgia. Such was the case of Bayside and Front Bottoms fans who saw dozens of emo and pop punk bands perform entire albums at the appropriately named "When We Were Young" festival last October in Las Vegas, attended this summer’s Great South Bay Music Festival in Patchogue to hear Say Anything play all of “ ... Is a Real Boy" or ventured to MetLife Stadium on Aug. 9 to catch My Chemical Romance perform its 2006 concept album, "The Black Parade."

"I cried the whole time, it was amazing," Jasmine Rodriguez, 23, of Bethpage, recalled of My Chemical Romance’s "theatrical" performance. "It was, for me, a really emotional experience just to see them play that album front to back."

Minutes before storming The Paramount for a similar experience with Bayside, Rodriguez said she planned to hear the band perform its entire self-titled album "as if I was listening to it again for the first time."

"That will bring up a lot of feelings," she added. "The first time I heard it was in 2016, I was 14 or 15 at the time, and I was hooked ever since."