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Mayday Parade to celebrate 20 years with headlining show at House of Blues Anaheim

April 24, 2025

Nearly two decades ago, Mayday Parade frontman Derek Sanders and his bandmates were hustling CDs in Vans Warped Tour parking lots, dreaming of becoming rock stars. Now they’re headlining one of their biggest tours to date.

“We’ve put more effort and love into the set for this tour than any set we’ve done before,” Sanders said in a phone interview. “We’ve put a ton of work into trying to make this a really special moment, and I’m very excited and anxious about it, but I know that once we get the first couple of shows out of the way, it’ll feel great.”

Mayday Parade kicked off its Three Cheers for Twenty Years tour on April 22 and has an upcoming stop at the House of Blues Anaheim on Tuesday, May 6. The shows will feature career-spanning sets filled with fan favorites, deep cuts and new material.

“It’s such a crazy thing because in the 20 years that have passed, I feel like I’ve always been so focused on what’s coming up, the next six months, and the next year,” Sanders said. “This tour has given me an opportunity to pause and look back at the very beginning and reflect on everything that we’ve done in this band.”

L-R: Brooks Betts, Jeremy Lenzo, Alex Garcia, Derek Sanders and Jake Bundrick of Mayday Parade will headline the House of Blues Anaheim on Tuesday, May 6. (Photo by Eli Ritter)

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L-R: Brooks Betts, Jeremy Lenzo, Alex Garcia, Derek Sanders and Jake Bundrick of Mayday Parade will headline the House of Blues Anaheim on Tuesday, May 6. (Photo by Eli Ritter)

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Sanders’ love for music began when he received an acoustic guitar for Christmas when he was 10. He soon met longtime friend and Mayday Parade guitarist Brook Betts when he was 12. The two childhood friends connected over their passion for music and spent time in numerous bands, dreaming of making it big.

In 2005, the two friends formed Mayday Parade after combining members of two Tallahassee, Florida, bands: Defining Moment, which Betts, Sanders, and Mayday Parade bassist Jeremy Lenzo and ex-vocalist/guitarist Jason Lancaster were a part of, and Kid Named Chicago, where they picked up drummer Jake Bundrick and guitarist Alex Garcia.

The musicians felt confident about their chemistry and were ready to advance their career as a band. During their time in other groups, they gained experience with strategies to help spread their music like gospel.

Sanders and other members of Defining Moment used to go on small tours and visit the local mall’s Hot Topic the day before a show. They would walk around with a CD player and headphones, trying to get people interested in going to see them live. They’d also sell a few CDs out of a backpack, which later turned into selling them at music festivals.

“The first festival we did, we sold over 100 CDs, and that made us stop and rethink, like, ‘Wait a second, we haven’t sold 100 CDs in a month of touring, but then in one day we sold that walking around this festival,’” he said. “That gave us the idea to follow Warped Tour with an EP, and it was successful.”

In 2006, the band recorded its first EP, “Tales Told By Dead Friends,” and sold it to the crowds of the Vans Warped Tour, where it performed an early set. By the end of the summer, the group had sold more than 10,000 copies, lighting a fuse to the band’s launch. It was also during the internet’s Myspace age where bands could share and upload music directly on a social media platform to share with fans and friends.

“Myspace was the big music social media platform at the time, and you could see on our Myspace page that the buzz was building and we were starting to get more and more plays,” Sanders said. “I remember the first time that we got 1,000 plays in a day, and we all called each other, just so excited.”

As the play numbers piled up, record labels began noticing, too, specifically Fearless Records, which signed the band in August 2006 and where the group would release its debut album, “A Lesson In Romantics,” the following year.

Since then, the band has released eight albums, including their most recent “Sweet,” the first of a three-part album, recorded with longtime collaborators and pop punk production gurus Zack Odom and Kenneth Mount. The first part, “Sweet,” combines melodic keyboards, fast-paced riffs, and lyrics driven by the emotional turmoil experienced through self-reflection.

The album is reminiscent of the band’s early days of emo and pop punk that took off in the mid-aughts, with groups like Fall Out Boy, My Chemical Romance, and Panic! At The Disco finding mainstream success with poetic lyricism and lots of angst. While those groups have remained popular there has also been a nostalgic resurgence of the genres with the help of When We Were Young, Emo Nite, Sad Summer Fest and even the pending revival of Vans Warped Tour.

“Obviously, I am all about it and think it’s so cool,” Sanders said. “It was so important to me because I was in high school from 2000 to 2004, as it was breaking into the mainstream. It did seem like after that, there was uncertainty, as if it was just a flash in the pan moment. Where things stand now is proof that there’s a meaningful cultural movement, and I’m just happy to be a part of it in any way.”

One of the cornerstones of the emo music fanbase is the genre’s name itself: emotion. Of course, every genre of music is emotional in some capacity, but pop punk and emo artists approached their music by leading with vulnerability. Sanders is a champion of that in his lyricism and more recently, in general.

Last year, Sanders co-headlined Sad Summer Fest at the Observatory in Santa Ana with The Maine. On stage, he shared with the audience that for the first time, he found himself crying to one of their songs in the Mayday Parade catalog. He said he was going through a tough period and a four-year divorce and had that moment when a wave of emotion washed over him with the song “The Last Something That Meant Anything.”

“Sometimes we go through these complicated emotions, but I try not to worry, allowing myself to be vulnerable and ask for help,” Sanders said. “Everyone has friends and people who love and care about them and will be there for them when they need them. As far as the music, it’s important to put that in there. It has a lot to do with the strong attachment that a lot of people feel to our band and music. Music itself is incredibly healing and powerful, so to hear someone else sing a song and put it into music is an important part of it. An effort of ours is always to try and be real when we put that emotion in there.”

In addition to the new album, Mayday Parade was featured in a Disney compilation dubbed “A Whole New Sound,” released in September alongside other pop punk acts such as Simple Plan, Yellowcard, We The Kings and others. Sanders said that he had been trying to get the band’s previous label, Fearless Records, to do a Disney compilation for years.

The label had put together other successful compilations, including 19 different “Punk Goes …” compilation albums in which punk bands performed ’80s hits, metal, crunk and other genres. However, its most successful were the seven “Punk Goes Pop” compilations in which bands reimagined pop songs. The idea for a Disney compilation never took off, but then Disney contacted the group about the idea.

“I was so jazzed about it, and spent two weeks listening through all of the Disney catalog and trying to workshop what song we should do because it’s an amazing opportunity,” he said. “But I realized that it is a pretty daunting task and not an easy thing to do. These are beloved songs, and they have to work well through our medium to give a decent representation of our style. There were so many songs that I wanted to do and felt great about, but when I started trying to put them together, it just didn’t work. We ended up landing on Coco’s ‘Remember Me,’ and it all just came together in such a nice way. I’m super happy and proud to be a part of it.”

As for what’s next for the Tallahassee band after its two-decade celebration, Sanders said it’s not something that is at the front of mind with everything going on in the present.

“It’s tough to say because so many things could change, and who knows what’s going to happen, but we’re all super thrilled and grateful to be here doing this, so I think we’ll just try to keep it going for as long as we can.”

Mayday Parade

Where: House of Blues Anaheim, 400 Disney Way #337, Anaheim

When: 7 p.m. Tuesday, May 6.

Tickets: $53.30 at Livenation.com.

Mayday Parade to celebrate 20 years with headlining show at House of Blues Anaheim Orange County Register

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Mayday Parade to celebrate 20 years with headlining show at House of Blues Anaheim

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