“Five Points Diner might’ve been the diner that the owner tried to attack me with a ketchup bottle.”

It’s hard to get your diners straight when you grew up in South Jersey, but Evan Weiss had no problem with it. The Cherry Hill native rattles off a list of his go-to’s: Crystal Lake Diner (destroyed by fire in 2014), Marlton Diner, Phily Diner. Sometimes Five Points.

There was one particular time when he was about 17 that Weiss, dressing his meal with ketchup, noticed a rubber band spill out of the bottle. Grossed out, he was hoping he’d get comped for the meal. He thought wrong.

“The owner thought I had put the rubber band in the ketchup bottle to try to get the free food because we looked like riff raff, we’re like fucking punks,” Weiss says. “And he goes, ‘You shut the fuck up!’ and he grabs the bottle and he’s holding it against the table like he’s going to smash it and he’s got his hand around my throat!”

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Weiss talks swiftly, though he looks tired: a little unshaven and disheveled—he’d soon run his fingers through his hair in front of a mirror—but not totally down and out. It’s the Friday of SXSW and Into It. Over It., the emo-revival band he fronts is about to play a show at House of Vans at The Mohawk. He and his band of Josh Sparks (drums), Josh Parks (guitar) and Rodrigo Palma (bass) are prepping for a busy spring touring North America and Europe.

However, you can take the kid out of New Jersey—in Weiss’ case to Chicago—but you can’t take the New Jersey out of the kid.

“I’m not going to file a lawsuit because some dude attacked me,” Weiss continues, remembering his youth in Jersey. “That’s just the way shit is down there.”

The sky has turned an ominous shade of grey, yet crowds still mill about at the outdoor bars. Inside in the venue’s upper level, Weiss and Sparks sit by a low table. Members of other bands on the bill filter in and out of the space via the floor-to-ceiling glass doors that expose the evening’s worsening weather conditions.

Into It. Over It. just released its third album, Standards, on March 11. Still playing into signature Into It. Over It. lyrical honesty and pop-punk melodies and song structures, the new record has added depth and density: The echoing waves of sound indicative of the song’s creative surroundings and the intrinsic intensity of a chaotic mind. Ricocheting dynamics, instrumental and lyrical sentiments allow the album to unfold like an accordion of dizzying emotions and surprising musical elements like western-y guitar picking and tender strokes of piano. Frenetic drumming from Sparks decorates the album with powerful punctuation that demands as much attention as Weiss and his vocals.

Like most of Into It. Over It.’s catalogue, Standards has an ability to invoke nostalgia, but this time the listener has graduated college and is navigating the world for the first time alone, trying new things, letting old things—and people—go.

Though there are lyrics like “I have the faintest recollection of us” from “Your Lasting Image” and “But you / There's always something to prove / There's always somewhere to be,” off “Bible Black,” it seems like Standards is the unearthing of deep emotional baggage, but the context of Weiss’ life while writing was anything but tumultuous.

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After a show in Burlington, VT, Weiss pondered the idea of utilizing the state’s setting to record the follow up to 2013’s Intersections. A conversation with the show promoter at the Signal Kitchen led Weiss to accept the former’s fortuitous offer to stay in his recently purchased cabin space, designed for bands to come and write records.

Secluded in this Vermont cabin, which ran on a fire-powered generator, Weiss and Sparks existed on a schedule of rise, relax, coffee, music and repeat. It was a routine unlike that of previous records. Part of it had to do with the fact that they had to perform some physical labor, like loading the generator with wood, to stay warm in the middle of the winter or that they had limited access to phone and internet. But there were other aspects, like freedom from deadlines, outside forces and time constraints that helped made the process more fruitful.

“I was wondering the other day, when we say we’re in a cabin, if people think it’s this third world thing,” Weiss wonders.

“Around a fire pit with banjos,” Sparks jokes.

“This place is what you see in the Airbnb commercials like, ‘Who stays there?’” Weiss continues. “There were granite countertops, there was a fully furnished kitchen. It was a comfortable place to be.”

The welcoming surroundings bred the opportunity to spend time on a song—or even one section of a song—for as long as they needed. It was the perfect mix of self-indulgence and mental clarity. What resulted were songs like “Your Lasting Image,” which Weiss wrote prior to Sparks’ arrival and was inspired by the landscape and “Anesthetic,” a leftover from Intersections writing sessions.

“There wasn’t a ton of distraction and wasn’t a million other things that I had to have my mind on,” Weiss begins. “That in and of itself made the process more thoughtful and more gratifying because there wasn’t something there to put doubt in our heads or maybe we weren’t giving it the attention it deserved.”

“There’s so much of life that we spend searching for purpose: How do we feel this time?” Sparks says. “Just having the liberty that we’re here to create, nobody ever gets to fucking do that.”

Immediately following the writing sessions, the band convened on the opposite side of the country in San Francisco at John Vanderslice’s Tiny Telephone Studios to record. For the first time, they recorded without computers—all analog. To Weiss, it’s a gratifying feeling knowing that every sound on the record was produced by human hands or voices.

Mallory Turner/Myspace

By now, it’s about an hour until show time. Weiss lies down on a bench to rest while the rain falls outside. The rest of the band warms up a bit, hangs out. It’s times like these where one realizes the physical and emotional toll touring takes on a person.

“It’s like you’re at the party all the time and then you leave the party and then you’re kind of coming down from that and you’re alone and you don’t know where you are and you’re trying to get your bearings a little bit,” Sparks notes.

Their tour has only just begun, though. But despite doing the song and dance for the better part of a decade, there’s still a thrill to it all. “Now, the excitement of going on tour is about the quality of time I get to spend with the people that mean the most to me,” Weiss divulges.

As the precipitation slows to a steady trickle, a hearty group of show goers gather around the stage to see a band that meant something to them. Whether stories about South Jersey diners or moments of isolation in a cabin in Vermont, Weiss’ words and memories ring true no matter what state in which they’re sung.