Date With Destiny

Right now, Josh Franceschi doesn't need to write songs about the dramas between boys and girls. That's a topic the English singer has covered extensively with his bandmates in You Me At Six over the course of their previous three albums, Take Off Your Colours, Hold Me Down and Sinners Never Sleep.

This time, on Cavalier Youth, Franceschi and his band are trying to make sense of the passage of time. “I've done the whole boy-girl thing enough times and for the first time when making a record I'm in a really good place with my partner.” Franceschi says, much to the disappointment of pop-punk loving girls all over the world.

“It would make no sense writing a song about 'I hate my girlfriend'. My goal as a lyricist has always been to write something that's real. When people hear it you want them to go, 'Yeah, that's happened to me'.”

At the tender age of 23, Franceschi has already been a member of You Me At Six for nine years and now that the singer has left his teenage years behind, he's getting contemplative. “I'm not the 17-18-year-old playing in a pop-punk band anymore. I've moved out of home, the volume of friends I've got now has decreased rapidly. The world's gotten smaller.”

It's this idea of growing out of your youth that the band covers on Cavalier Youth. And recording in LA with Neal Avron (Linkin Park, Fall Out Boy), the pressure was on to take a big musical leap forward. “He's a very humble man, very hands on. It's the first time I've seen the benefits of pre-production and having someone come in and say, 'How did you want this record to be? Because some of the songs are great and are there but some of the songs are far off'.

“We tried everything. He was very ambitious from the word go for this band. He kept on referring to this as the biggest album we've made. He said, 'I want to make the record that's going to get you played on the radio all around the world'.”

This wasn't the first time the band has recorded in LA, but now they've left their 17-year-old pop-punk selves behind, Franceschi says he's found a new appreciation for the entertainment town. “I used to really hate it. Sinners Never Sleep we recorded where we lived in the centre of West Hollywood and that was very intense. This time we were up in the hills and we travelled in to LA to the studio which made a huge difference in terms of our sanity. We just spent most of the time at our house. It was a very different experience this time.”