Forever Came Calling never went away, but they are definitely back with a new single and a show where it all began

Forever Came Calling is a Twentynine Palms band formed in 2010 and has survived through ad-hoc tours across the United States, member switch-ups and shifting family priorities. The band itself never went away, but they are definitely feeling more “back” than every with a renewed presence in the Southern California pop-punk scene and a return to the Warped Tour this Sunday (7/27) in Long Beach.

Their story starts about 15 years before that, though, when lead Singer Joseph (Joe) Candelaria was in his early 20’s and faced that restless feeling you can get after high school and before adulthood.

Joseph Candelaria: “Summer 2010… I need to figure out what’s next in life. I was like, you know what? Music’s not really working out, I’ve just got to move on.”

Joe was raised on bands like Blink-182, Pennywise, Green Day, and Sum 41. His dad got him a black and white Fender Stratocaster in the 8th grade and he learned how to play it, wrote some songs, and started Forever Came Calling during his senior year in high school.

“We would just do cool shows at like this place called ‘The Sandcastle,’ which was my parents’ converted garage. We didn’t have a venue… that’s how DIY it was out here.”

But by 2010 Joseph said he just needed to get out of the desert, a common reaction to spending your entire childhood in your hometown.

Joe: “And so I got this crazy idea of like, I’m going to make a thousand CDs of our new EP and we’re just going to follow Warped Tour. And we’re going to sell it in the parking lot and we will go as far as those CD’s will take us.”

The band was heavily featured in the 2010 documentary “No Room for Rock Stars.” It was filmed on the Warped Tour which is a national punk and hip-hop festival that’s been running yearly since 1995, with a short pandemic hiatus. Forever Came Calling were shown in the doc slinging CDs for as little as a dollar, scraping up gas money and making fans along the national tour which ended in California with a break for the band.

Joe says that “by the end of summer, we had sold like 5,000 records and traveled the whole country selling. We were going around collecting names of people that were checking our band out. At the end of that summer, we presented that list to (Warped Tour founder) Kevin Lyman. We were like, hey, San Diego’s one of the last dates, if we could play. Kevin’s like ‘yo, we have a spot… opening set. You’re going to be playing before doors, but we were just like ‘yeah! This is crazy, and that’s all I thought it would be.”

The band got signed and released their first album Contender and toured off of it around North America.

They played the Warped Tour again in 2013 and released another full-length album a year later, but then something happened that made him take a step back from the band.

“My mom had an accident in 2015. It just forced me to be like, hey, I love music, but my family’s my family. It didn’t completely stop the band, but it vastly changed how the band operated,” he said. And now, 15 years later, the band’s going to be playing the 30th anniversary of the Warped Tour this Sunday in Long Beach. Joe met current Forever Came Calling guitarist Steve Muskompf 15 years ago on that first tour.

Steve: “So I met Joe. He lived in Twentynine Palms, California. I lived in Queens, New York, and then we just stayed friends and then they started touring, and every time they would get out to New York City or Queens or Brooklyn, I would house them. I would book them shows. I would play with them. We just stayed friends for 15 years, and we have a chance to do it together.”

The band shot a video here in the hi-desert and Las Vegas for their latest single called “And Still the Mick Foley of Pop Punk,” a super-tight three-minute volume raiser with plenty of hooks and an anthemic chorus that rebukes Bukowski, then reckons with Joe’s relationship with his hometown.

“I was like a kid that had never left, right? And I think that there was this thing in me that was like, I gotta get out. I gotta get away. And so there was this disdain from where I was from, but it came more so from only being from one place and knowing there was this loud, like adventurous world out there that I just couldn’t see.

“And I think now that I’m older, I’m able to view this place as what it is, right? It’s not rose-colored glasses that I think everything’s perfect, but this is a special place. And I think that more than anything, it’s where I’m from and I love where I’m from.”

If you don’t catch him in Long Beach on Sunday, don’t worry. There’s going to be more shows and a new album coming.

Joseph says that “right now, the working title is Other Desert Cities. I want to name a record that because you hear about the desert of California, like my whole life, when you get off the 10, you see Coachella… Palm Springs… and ‘Other Desert Cities.’ It’s like the story of FCC more than anything is ‘other desert cities.'”

“Like… we are not L.A. We are not New York. But we are how 85% of the world lives, which is just like, I get up every day at 4:00 a.m. I go to Total Fitness. I work out. I go to work for 10 hours… you know what I mean? And then I come home and try to write some riffs.”

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