“A series of happy accidents and an incredible amount of hard work, I guess is the best way to describe a brief history of The Wonder Years, if you wanted it summed up in a sentence,” said Dan Campbell at one point during our interview last week.

However, having just listened to he, along with bandmates Nick Steinborn and Matt Brasch, describe the journey of a group of 2004 North Penn graduates from the hallways of C-Pod to the stages of Warped Tour and the covers of Alternative Press and Kerrang! magazines–I don’t think a one sentence summary is going to work.

Campbell, lead vocals; Steinborn, keys, guitar, and vocals; and Brasch, guitar and vocals, took the same classes as you, walked the same halls as you–

“We didn’t have the new pool then,” said Steinborn.

“That was being built. They took my parking spot senior year and put the construction equipment in there which was really disenchanting for me,” added Campbell

–and probably got yelled at for falling asleep in class like you, too–if their stories of late nights at local diners and weekends playing concerts around Lansdale are anything to go by.

“I mainly took music classes my senior year. Chorus, Wind Ensemble, Music Theory, Solo Performance Class, Contemporary Music, Music Tech…. And all of Tumolo’s classes,” said Brasch.

“Matt was in the Marching Band [for a year.] Lab band,” added Campbell, who called Brasch the one most involved in music while at North Penn.

When the three graduated in 2004, they weren’t the only North Penn band looking for places to play, and certainly not the only band forming within a thriving Lansdale music scene.

“[Our class] convinced the school that it was a good idea to have a show in the courtyard,” said Campbell. “They let us set up two stages and eight or nine bands played. […] At that point, there were a ton of bands in the high school.”

“It also helped that a lot of bands were friends with students on the student board. I think they kind of pulled some strings,” explained Steinborn.

But, concerts hosted at North Penn weren’t the only outlets for the musically oriented.

According to Campbell: “We set up our own shows. We would call around. I would call every church basement, hall, anything like that, and try to present myself as older than I was and more responsible than I was–like we’re going to do this Teen Night thing there–so that we could have the bands play somewhere. Give everyone a chance to do something else if you didn’t feel like you fit in going to the football game, if you didn’t feel like you made sense going to the dance. This was another option for you. Outside of the realm of what the school was doing, but it was something we were doing for ourselves and for each other.”

“I had a giant circle of friends that I was going to shows with multiple times a weekend,” added Steinborn.

In an age before Facebook invites and events, fliers were king.

“We used to flier for shows. That was a big thing to get people to come out,” said Brasch.

“I don’t know if it is even that big of a deal now, but there’s a teacher copier room, and I would sneak in there and make a hundred copies of fliers in there and cut them up, and give them out between classes to everyone. It was a serious DIY effort,” added Campbell about the band’s thrifty advertising techniques.

(I wonder if you can still get in trouble eight years after graduating?)

Campbell, Steinborn, and Brasch had to look no further than this Lansdale music scene and the bands they were playing with at these shows on the weekend to find their influence.

“For me, a big influence was the older bands we played with in the area. There were a lot of fantastic bands. Just seeing those bands play and have a crowd reaction and all that–it was like… I want that. I didn’t even have to look further than what was happening here pretty much every weekend,” said Steinborn.

And according to Campbell, that’s what made the idea so plausible: “You know, you’re sixteen and you love Blink-182 and The Ataris, but you look at them and they are on these huge stages and they are on the radio–there’s a misstep–like I play the guitar or I play the drums, but these guys play the drums and they are all the way up here and how do I get to that level. Seeing bands that were a little bit older than us but also came out of this area, this high school, you got to see, like oh, well I can’t play stadiums, but I can go play down the street and people will listen to me play. The first logical step in the progression.”

The most major steps in the band’s progression didn’t occur until about a year or two later–2005 dawned the creation of the band you know as The Wonder Years, made up of Campbell, Steinborn, Brasch, and three others: Josh Martin, Casey Cavaliere, and Mike Kennedy.

“Nick wasn’t in the band yet. Matt and I had just started college and some friends of ours from the neighboring high school had just graduated, and we were bored one day, and decided to write a song and that would be it–we would go away to college. When you play music, you have the need, the drive to play. You just want to play. We started playing and we would do little weekend tours, you know just Pennsylvania or Maryland or New Jersey or Virginia. It started to be more and more fun. Arbitrarily I started sending out our CD to record labels and one from California, No Sleep, picked up the band. At that point, we still weren’t taking it very seriously; it was still about college for us. Then we graduated college and we were like all right, we released a CD, we’re drawing crowds nationwide, we’ve done a couple tours of England–because we would tour every time we were on break. Summer break, winter break from school, we were immediately on tour because we loved to play. So then we graduated and we said let’s just give it one shot. We’ll put one record out that we are really proud of and if it tanks, it tanks–we’ll all use our degrees and get jobs. And if it works, it works. And we ride it out until it stops working. And it worked,” said Campbell.

So now they’re signed to Hopeless Records and playing shows with bands like Yellowcard, Good Charlotte, Saves the Day, and New Found Glory; putting out records that are charting within Billboards Top-200; and within the same week, holding the number one vinyl record spot in the country.

I think Campbell summed it up best: “When you go to shows, you go to Philadelphia. You go to the TLA or The Troc. I remember being 17 and staring at those bands and being like, if I could open one show for one band–no one would have to know who I am–and now we sold out the TLA in April and added a second show, and it looks like that is going to sell out, as well. To be able to come to that is incredible.”

The Wonder Years answered some fan submitted questions! Click here to check it out. 

Video by Maria Poccia.