You don’t get to the thirty year milestone as a band on accident, and you certainly don’t have the run of success a band like Train has had without a whole of skill, either — even if that includes bumps in the road, along the way.
For Train, that mostly consisted of rotating band members and a brief hiatus — more on that later — but overall when looking back on the last 30 years, vocalist and band leader Pat Monahan is nearly exclusively positive. “When you get to the other side of it and you can look back and look at the trials and successes, and weigh it out and think that maybe you’ve made all the right decisions and have no regrets — I think, the positive side of it,” he shares with me.
“The job is never done, you always want to make Train fans feel like they were right all along to be fans,” he continues. This includes better musical outputs and live performances, and embracing the changes in the music industry. For Train, specifically, this includes improving their social media presence. “It’s not that it’s hard to do, it’s just that young people prioritize it and that’s odd for me. The priority for me should be go make great music, and if you shoot a TikTok once in awhile then good for you. It’s just a different way of doing it, is all.”
Train’s first hit in the music industry was “Meet Virginia,” which came a few years — and a rejection from Columbia Records — into their career. Released in 1998, towards the tail end of the grunge-era and at the height of nu-metal’s mainstream success, here was Train with a self-described “weird” pop/rock hit. The song became a sleeper hit, ultimately peaking on the radio in the year 2000, success than Monahan can pinpoint pretty easily.
“It was a 4 minute song at a time when you needed a 3 minute song. We just got lucky that the sound of Almost Famous brought the whole Elton John thing back,” Monahan reflects. “It just continued. The things that hit for us are the things that are odd. I think “odd” just comes from doing a bunch of work, you know? Sometimes shit gets weird and you think ‘There’s no way people will like it’ and then they do! Then you write a song that is like ‘this is huge’ and no one cares.”
Of course, as the story goes, Train capitalized quick and went to work on what would end up being their second album, Drops of Jupiter. The rest, largely due to the title-track, is history. Where “Meet Virginia” was a nice launching point for the band, “Drops of Jupiter” as a single catapulted them to brand new heights. “Really what happened during the ‘Drops of Jupiter’ part of our career was it took us from North America to the world,” Monahan explains. “That was the first of us seeing the world, and the world meant going to Asia, Australia, Europe, UK. But then “Hey, Soul Sister” took us to Dubai, China, and places we had never been.”
Not content with just reflecting on the past, Monahan looks towards the future. “I think our next goal is to go to India next year. So we’ll just keep trying to make work,” he begins. “I’m also writing our next album, which is more of an Americana album. It’s going to be who I am at my age versus who I was at 25.”
Now, we hit the point of revisiting the aforementioned hiatus/down period in the portion of Train’s history. 2003 brought their third studio album, My Private Nation, which spawned “Calling All Angels” and “When I Look to the Sky” as hit singles, but 2006’s For Me, It’s You failed to reach the same heights as a whole or with any individual singles. Ultimately, the band took a well-deserved hiatus and Monahan went off to make a solo record.
Things then drastically charged for Train with Save Me, San Francisco — which, being released in 2009, of course means it’s celebrating a 15th anniversary this year. “That is the craziest [thing]. That one seems like just a couple years ago,” Monahan reflects. The album title itself is a bit more direct than some may think, as the band coming back from a brief hiatus, were essentially begging to be saved.
“We were basically at a place of desperation, and we needed a manager desperately,” Monahan says. “The guy managing us was not capable of helping us like we needed, then I met Jonathan Daniel [of Crush Music] and was like ‘Hey, one of the things that we’ve done is we’ve lost touch with the fact that we’re a San Francisco band.’” Being from the Bay Area himself, Train felt like he was the best guy for the job and to really understood where the band was coming from. “I was like ‘We need to say thank you, and ask if they’ll have us back.’ So that was the whole idea of, ‘Can you save us San Francisco? Because we really need you right now.’”
“Hey, Soul Sister” and Save Me, San Francisco can be described as many things, but Monahan himself describes it as an “inside the park home-run.” It was, at the time, the best record Train had put out and despite coming from a place of needing saving, they never sacrificed being genuine. “I think the intention behind it was definitely of the right spirit. It wasn’t ‘Let’s go write some hits,’ it was like ‘We need to do the work and write things people care about.’ Including us! And that’s what happened,” he finishes.
Fast forward to the present, and numerous more hits to their name — “Drive By,” “50 Ways to Say Goodbye,” “Angel in Blue Jeans,” and “Play That Song among others — Train is still going and going strong. This is no more evident than with the release of their latest single, “Long Yellow Dress,” which was officially unveiled back in April of this year.
“I sent my guys Jerry and Matt an iPhone voice note,” Monahan recollects on the beginnings of “Long Yellow Dress.” Though he playfully describes that voice note — which was of him mimicking the guitar riff with his voice — as sounding like a Cheech & Chong song, that voice memo ultimately can be heard at the beginning of the song still. Thematically, “Long Yellow Dress” came to him from a dream he had just prior to that voice memo. “I had a dream prior to that of me following a woman in a long yellow dress that I couldn’t find. It felt like a break-up, like obviously she doesn’t want me to find her but that long yellow dress is a place I need to be.”
While Monahan stated earlier the next Train album may be more Americana leaning, “Long Yellow Dress” has the bones of a classic Train song. Musically, at least, while still not being a retread of who Train was 15 years ago, or even 30 years ago. “We wrote it because it’s who we are and we’re always writing. It seemed to be a thing that would be great for the summer, because people seemed to like it a lot. We love to perform it, it’s a lot of fun,” he proclaims.
“I think it’s always a terrible idea to try and repeat history,” Monahan continues. “I think recording Live at Royal Albert Hall was great for us because it was a great place to ‘Here’s where we are today and lets find a new place to be 10 years from now, and we’ll make another live record and see where we’ve come from.”
That, in the year 2024, is the delicate balance a band like Train must strive to find. You’ve got an incredibly established legacy, with an impressive and lengthy discography, but you’ve got a lot left to give to your fans and the world. Towards the end of our time chatting together, Monahan tells me he would love to have the career trajectory of the late, great Tom Petty. “Tom Petty & the heartbreakers went through a period where people stopped caring. Then they just kept working, and the work they did was exceptional. If I can just keep working hard and somehow touch people, I think we’ll be okay,” he says.
Judging based off of “Long Yellow Dress,” their recently released live album, their current massive tour with REO Speedwagon, and his enthusiasm for the future, it’s safe to say that Train is ultimately going to be just fine — and we should all be here for the ride.
