Yellowcard: Playing Star Wars

Long before Yellowcard lead singer Ryan Key ever picked up a guitar and rocked out on stage, he was running down hallways followed by invisible Imperial forces in hot pursuit. "The first house I remember growing up in until I was 4 or 5 years-old, was a two-bedroom house with just me, my mom and dad," Key recalls. "Every night my dad would come home after work, he and I would recreate the prison break scene from A New Hope. We'd run up and down the hallway pretending to rescue Princess Leia with stormtroopers chasing us. He would always play Star Wars with me."

When he wasn't acting out his favorite parts of the original trilogy with his father, Key imagined he was aboard the fastest hunk of junk in the galaxy. "My Millennium Falcon was the best toy ever," Key smiles. "It's all beaten up with the antenna broken off. I would play with it for hours and hours."

Of all the films in the saga, the battle scenes in Return of the Jedi resonated with Key the strongest. "To be honest, I don't even remember the first time I saw Star Wars in the theater because I was so young -- maybe three years-old," Key says. "But I know I got the gist of it anyway. It had a pretty profound effect on me. Return of the Jedi probably meant the most to me because that's when I was at an age, around seven years-old, to really get it. It's still my favorite of the films. The double battle montage of Endor and then Luke and Vader is my favorite sequence of Jedi. I love when Vader goes to throw the Emperor into the pit of the Death Star, he has his mask on but you can still see what's happening on his face even though you can't see it. It seemed so epic."

While the action-packed space battles and ground assaults entertained Key as a child, it was deeper message of the films that stayed with him as an adult fan. "Star Wars transcends all boundaries," Key explains. "The environments and the creatures are so unbelievable and fantastical, but the story itself is real and relatable. It's a story of finding yourself and your place in the world. It's a story of good versus evil, and love -- which are all basic concepts used by some of the greatest films ever made. The films are also such a great escape for people. The characters really capture every part of humanity. Each character can represent something in us. And the father-son relationship, to me, is a big deal. Luke rescues his father and then his father rescues him. As much fantasy as there is in the film, there's also reality. The story crosses every genre and every demographic and has something for everyone."

Another father-son story arc that interests Key involves his favorite bounty hunter of all time. "Boba Fett is the best!" Key says. "As much as he is a bounty hunter, he's also avenging the death of his father and I love that aspect of his story. He's got an ulterior motive other than just bounty hunting. In fact, I was really bummed at the way Boba Fett died in the movies. He should have had a more epic death."

While Boba may have died on the big screen, he reappeared briefly onstage along with Darth Vader and an arsenal of stormtroopers as special guests at Yellowcard's September 2006 performance at the Bumbershoot festival in Seattle in front of thousands of fans.

"The band has always been big Star Wars fans," Key says. "As a matter of fact, at the beginning of all our shows we would play the Imperial March, the Jedi theme, or the opening credits theme before we got into our set. So having an official stormtrooper invasion at our show was one of those special moments for our fans that they'll never forget. The stormtroopers came out in the flying-V formation; then Darth Vader marched out and came up to the mic and started his famous breathing. And as soon as he started talking the crowd just went crazy."

"We had the stormtroopers come back out in the middle of the set too, along with Boba Fett, and we played the cantina music over the PA as they brought us our beverages on stage," Key continues. "We always want our fans to see something unique and memorable, and I think Darth Vader and Boba Fett on stage sure accomplished that."

In the same year that launched the Star Wars Trilogy: Special Edition in theaters, Yellowcard was formed by students from Douglas Anderson School of the Arts in Jacksonville, Florida. Soon after relocating to Southern California after releasing the albums Midget Tossing (1997) and Where We Stand (1999), Key joined the seemingly ever-changing lineup of the band. In 2001, the band released One for the Kids and later in 2002, The Underdog. However, their mainstream breakout release came later in 2003 with Ocean Avenue which quickly climbed the music charts and sold over 2.5 million copies worldwide. After over a year and a half of touring, the band went back into the studio to record their latest release Lights and Sounds (2006) which explores the themes of love lost, disillusionment and coping with adulthood.

Touring non-stop and spending weeks in the studio recording would wipe out most mere mortals, but Key wouldn't have it any other way, and he says that being introduced to the Star Wars saga as a child may have influenced him to follow a creative career path.

"Star Wars is something that's been with me my whole life," Key says. "It was a big part of my childhood. The films influenced me to be a creative person and wanting to be an actor which then led me to playing music in a band. It sparked something creative in me at a very young age. I wanted to create a fantasy like that and make people feel something."

"I don't have anything else in my life that I watch now where I'm just as thoroughly impressed and enthralled then as I was when I was five years-old. Most of the stuff you watch when you are a kid like The Never-Ending Story -- as amazing as that movie is, you don't feel the same things now as an adult when you watch it. But The Empire Strikes Back is still a haunting, epic story that at 27 years-old still means the same to you as it did when you were seven. I can't wait to play it for my kids and share that with them when I have a family. I want them to be as inspired by it as I was when I was a kid."

To find out more about Yellowcard visit the band's official site here. Also check out Yellowcard on MySpace to listen to music tracks.

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