It didn’t take long for Bob Nanna to spot a pattern. Touring with his group Hey Mercedes, the singer and guitarist has played to throngs of devoted young emo fans over the past few years, supporting scene favorites like Jimmy Eat World and Dashboard Confessional. Without fail, after each set some of the kids would want to talk to him–not about Hey Mercedes but about his previous band, Braid. They’d say that Braid had been their favorite group, or that records like The Age of Octeen and Frame & Canvas–released in 1996 and ’98, respectively–had changed their lives. “Then I really started talking to them,” says Nanna, “and I realized all these kids, they’d never even seen Braid play.”
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After the breakup, Braid’s rhythm section, bassist Todd Bell and drummer Damon Atkinson, joined Nanna in Hey Mercedes; Broach started his own project, the Firebird Band, which tinkered with synths and dance beats. Broach now admits that the biggest factor in Braid’s split–after six years and three albums, at a time when critical acclaim for the band was mounting–was his own dissatisfaction. “I was just growing apart from them,” he recalls. “I was interested in doing some things that they weren’t. I was a little frustrated with the way things were going. But probably everybody was frustrated.”
“There was no doubt in our minds we had to break up,” adds Nanna. “There was no fight about that at all.”
Broach kept in contact with the rest of Braid after the split, showing up at Hey Mercedes gigs or hanging out with Nanna between tours. “That was great, because we didn’t have to worry about writing music or being in a van,” says Nanna. “We got to be friends outside the band, which is something that had never happened. Because basically the day I met Chris was the day he joined Braid.”
“We don’t have any plans to write new songs or record or do anything like that,” says Nanna. But “if something like that would come about, it would just come about; nothing would be planned. So who knows?”
